Elon Musk is finding more ways to try and shrink the federal government.
Earlier this week, the billionaire suggested that the U.S. Postal Service and passenger railroad Amtrak should be privatized. Trump already pondered the idea of merging the Postal Service with the U.S. Commerce Department.
"I think logically we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized," Musk said recently at a Morgan Stanley conference. "I think we should privatize the Post Office and Amtrak for example... We should privatize everything we possibly can."
The Postal Service continues to lose money. Since 2007, it has lost more than $100 billion, however, earlier this month it did report a fourth-quarter profit of $144 million.
Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation Rachel Grezler said it's definitely worth looking into privatizing the postal service, but that may take some time.
"A more realistic thing to happen in the short term is to have some reforms of the postal service," she said.
Such actions would require congressional approval.
It's also a monopoly. One step to reforming the postal service could be no longer having a USPS monopoly on first-class mail in America.
"That might reduce the need for the postal service to be as big as it is," said Grezler. "But, it also needs to be able to operate like FedEx or UPS where they can charge different rates based on the actual cost of delivering to those places."
Right now, the USPS charges a flat rate. That's not how private sector companies work though.
On the other side, Amtrak reported an adjusted operating loss of $705 million for the 12 months ended September 30, down 9% compared to 2023. The ride operator did see ridership reach pre-COVID-19 levels for the first time in 2024 when it increased 15% over 2023.
During his first term, President Trump wanted to cut funding to Amtrak, which received about $2.4 billion in annual federal support last year. Musk said Amtrak "will leave a very bad impression of America."
"It has been a losing operation, it had $22 billion of taxpayer money in the Infrastructure Investment Act of 2021 so this is something that is consistently coming up as an added cost to taxpayers," said Grezler.
Like USPS, Amtrak wouldn't be something that could be privatized overnight, but is still something worth looking into.
"You don't want the government in this business especially when we have other options out there," Grezler added.
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