As Trump Pushes Privatization of USPS, Amazon May Be Preparing to Take Over

It would have been easy to miss. Buried deep within Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s annual letter to company shareholders — a glowing, energetic 5,000-word essay released in April — was a foreshadowing of the company’s keen interest in capitalizing on the privatization of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).

Postal service workers and those who value public mail delivery ought to take this threat seriously: The company, which started out 30 years ago selling books online, has an insatiable appetite for capturing and squeezing profits out of any part of economic life that it can monetize. Today, with Donald Trump angling to dismantle and privatize USPS, Amazon executives have their privatization dance partner, and they are salivating at this potential prize. As Jassy’s letter suggests, the company is taking steps to put itself first in line when Trump puts our U.S. Postal Service on the auction block.

Jassy’s letter spotlights the continued meteoric rise of Amazon — 11 percent revenue growth in just the last year to $638 billion, itself a 75-fold increase over two decades ago; staggering 2024 profits of $69 billion, an increase of 86 percent over 2023’s record take. Jassy, of course, fails to mention that this corporate largesse comes at the expense of the more than 2 million warehouse workers and the drivers responsible for moving Amazon’s 6 billion packages annually, who endure low pay and job precarity while experiencing staggering injury rates. As Amazon air cargo worker Josh Crowell told Truthout, “Amazon made $20 billion in profits last peak season while we get nothing but mandatory overtime and a Panera dinner box.”

But buried in Jassy’s letter below the astonishing profit data, and also following his declaration about the company’s enormous investment in AI, is this:

As some other companies are abandoning small-town customers due to cost to serve, we’re going the other way — we’re investing to serve our rural customers even better. We’ve already expanded Same-Day and Overnight Delivery to dozens of smaller cities and towns across the U.S., with more coming. This expansion will provide even faster Amazon delivery speeds for many millions of customers, particularly in less densely populated areas, enabling us to deliver over a billion packages each year to customers living in 13,000 zip codes spanning 1.2 million square miles.

In Amazon’s world, this is a surprising development. The company reaps its billions by delivering packages to lots of people with as little cost as possible. Density of distribution network and customer base matter. It is much more profitable, for example, to set up a delivery network to serve Baltimore, with a population just under 600,000, than it is to do the same for the state of Wyoming, which has about the same number of people.

Today, about half of Amazon’s rural deliveries are done not through the company’s extensive delivery service provider system, but rather through USPS.

USPS works under what is called a “universal service obligation” to provide postal service to all Americans, regardless of location, at affordable prices. It is the only carrier that works under this obligation, and Amazon has traditionally taken advantage of this by turning its higher-cost rural deliveries over to the post office.

In 2024, USPS reported a loss of $9.5 billion — one of the reasons Trump has called it a “tremendous loser.” But given its obligations as a universal provider of a public service, it simply can’t be judged according to typical private-sector business metrics. Actually, making USPS a “winner” in these terms would inevitably mean reneging on its universal service obligation, both in terms of geography and affordability. Indeed, in an effort to cut costs, USPS has already proposed reductions to rural service.

A mere decade and a half ago, Amazon would have been in no position to be in this conversation, having no last-mile delivery network. At that time, it was entirely reliant on the postal service, FedEx, UPS, and other competitors to deliver its ecommerce goods to customers. Today, Amazon’s U.S. network has roughly 600 delivery stations, the vast majority of which are located in or very close to major metropolitan areas. As one of us noted elsewhere, delivery stations employ a few hundred people directly, on average. Roughly the same number of drivers — working for subcontracted firms, but directed and controlled by Amazon’s algorithmic management system — also work out of each station.

This economy of scale works at the urban level, but it makes much less sense when it comes to rural parts of the country. Hence, the company has relied heavily on USPS for last-mile rural delivery. But since 2020, Amazon has been building out its “rural wagon wheel” network of delivery stations in more remote areas. Roughly 100 of their delivery stations are wagon wheels, and this is the fastest growing category of delivery station, with 17 added in 2024 alone. That number is going to continue to go up, if Jassy’s words carry any weight.

It’s worth noting, however, that Amazon’s potential ability to provide country-wide postal coverage still lags behind that of UPS and FedEx, both of which will also be angling to take advantage of post office privatization. FedEx has about the same number of last-mile stations as Amazon, but they are more evenly spread out through the country, rather than being clustered around population centers. FedEx also has a more efficient and capable air network. UPS has more last-mile stations than either Amazon or FedEx, even taking into account its recently announced network reductions, and it has about twice the air capacity as Amazon. Even with the buildout of its rural last-mile network, Amazon’s case for coming close to being able to meet USPS’s universal service obligation currently lags behind that of either of the two major private parcel giants. But Jassy appears to be preparing to make up ground here, and Amazon has a well-earned reputation for making bold entries into new market sectors.

In addition to infrastructure build-out, Amazon is also moving quickly to assemble political support for acquiring the postal service. Things weren’t always smooth between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump. In Trump’s first term, Amazon sued the government after losing a $10 billion cloud computing contract, and Bezos at one point called Trump a “threat to democracy.” Trump, for his part, mocked the executive, calling him “Jeff Bozo.”

But on Inauguration Day 2025, Bezos was there, in the billionaires’ section, honoring Trump’s return to the White House. He had spent months beforehand cozying up to Trump — notably spiking an endorsement of Kamala Harris in The Washington Post, which he owns. Bezos’s pandering appears to be paying off. “He’s 100 percent. He’s been great,” Trump said of Bezos in an April interview.

Unions and other postal service advocates have been sounding the alarm on postal service privatization for some time. “It’s a terrible idea for everyone that we serve,” National Association of Letter Carriers President Brian L. Renfroe said earlier this year. With privatization, “Delivery would be driven by profit margins, and private companies will only go to where they can make a profit. Sections of our population could lose mail service entirely. Prices would rise according to whatever the company demands for their own profit,” the American Postal Workers Union has noted.

Certainly, Bezos and Jassy understand that too, which is why they are angling, both politically and through infrastructure build-out, to benefit from the privatization of what should remain a universal public service.