A little over 20 U.S. Postal Service workers from Wyoming, Colorado and Arizona gathered on a street corner near the University of Wyoming this week to tell the Trump administration: Hands off the USPS.
“We wanted to get the word out in Laramie that we need help protecting the Postal Service,” said Renee Eberhardt, state president of the Wyoming State Association of Letter Carriers. The union represents city delivery letter carriers employed by the USPS.
Demonstrations like these in the past have been aimed at preventing the privatization of USPS. That concern’s changed, according to Ebherhardt.
“The Postal Service has been talking quite a while about privatizing. For a while, that's calmed down. Now they’ve talking about moving us under the Department of Commerce. To put us under the Department of Commerce is to move us back 30 years or more than that, because in the 1970s when they reorganized, they took us out of the Department of Commerce, took this off of the taxpayers’ burden. We are now funded by sales of our stamps and services,” Eberhardt said.
Megan Garretson, secretary and treasurer for the state union, said privatize or Department of Commerce, it’s ultimately Americans that will foot the bill.
“Think of all the little small towns that won't get service because it's not profitable. Think about all the people who won't get the service because they live too far out of the major metropolitan areas to make it worth the money … The shippers will have to pay more to ship, and you know they're not gonna eat that cost. They're gonna pass it on to the customer, and that's not fair to you,” Garretson said.
In 2021, former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy implemented a 10 year reorganization plan seeking to cut costs and modernize aspects of USPS. In Wyoming, that plan would have moved a Cheyenne and Casper postal distribution centers center to Denver and Billings. Now, David Steiner, former board member of FedEX, has been tapped to take over the USPS and reorganization efforts.
Some, like Tonja Koch, vice president and director of education for the union, are skeptical.
“The post office really does need organization. Not everybody agrees with the plans that DeJoy had, especially the sorting and delivery centers. But everybody agrees that something needs to be done and right now we're in a little bit of limbo, because we don't know if the new guy that just got put in will do the same plan,” Koch said.
Dan Versluis, national business agent for the National Association of Letter Carriers for the region that covers Wyoming, said the Postal Service can certainly use improvements, but cost cutting isn't the answer.
“The one thing that the public, absolutely everyone in the public, needs to know: We are not funded by tax dollars. We are funded by the services that we get. So if you put a stamp on the letter and asked me to mail it to Maine or Florida or whatever … that's what is paying up our operation,” he said.
Eberhardt says U.S Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) has been an ally by introducing a federal bill that would keep a mail processing plant in Wyoming. But Eberhardt said she believes more needs to be done on the state and federal level to protect the institution of the USPS.
