People of Agency Podcast on Postal Service Issues

What would happen if the United States Postal Service was no longer the United States Postal Service?

Well, according to Aileen Day and Maia Warner-Langenbahn, a lot.

Since at least 2018, the Trump administration, along with a handful of banks and right-wing policy writers, have suggested that the country’s network of mail carriers would be better off—and make more money—as a privately-operated enterprise, such as FedEx and UPS.

To Day and Warner-Langenbahn, that’s just a bunch of bullshit. It’s why they started People of Agency last November, a long-form narrative podcast that demonstrates why USPS should remain an entity under the Feds using 250 years of historical anecdotes, from its first postmaster general (Ben Franklin!) to union riots, tiffs with Amazon, wartime surveillance and Trump’s repeated insistance that USPS should be run privately.

The assorted facts and stories are meant to warn listeners what might happen if USPS is actually restructured during Trump’s second term.

“The U.S. Postal Service is the quiet workhorse behind billion dollar giants,” Day, a political strategist who works often in Cleveland, says in a trailer. “FedEx, UPS, Amazon—they all depend on it to do the hardest, least profitable part of their business: delivering to every remote cabin, dirt road and mailbox they won’t touch themselves.”

The reason is a simple funding principle. USPS works under a creed—“universal service with uniform rates”—that just about forces carries to deliver mail and packages to the remotest of remote locales.

There are roughly 20,000 USPS workers across Ohio, Day estimates, with some 6,000 serving Northeast Ohio. Taking away that beloved universal service would mean, she said, dismantling the employee base that allows universal service to carry out smoothly.

Threats exacerbates early last year by the massive federal layoffs led by the Department of Government Efficiency.

“That was fear especially” during DOGE, Day told Scene. “Just seeing how vulnerable [USPS carries] are that if we don’t really understand them and their impact.”

But “I then had a really hard time describing the impact” on the podcast, she added, “because they go to your door every day. They’re so hyper local they almost doesn’t feel local.”

As of mid-February, there are no actual plans to privatize USPS, nor has Trump issued any executive orders. Trump signaled last year that he could explore options to lodge USPS under the Department of Commerce, a ploy Day and others suggested would lead to a form of privatization.

“It’ll be a form of a merger. But it will remain the Postal Service,” Trump told reporters then. “I think it will operate a lot better than it has over the years.”

Though the USPS has lost more than $9 billion in 2024 and 2025, it is not taxpayer funded—it’s run like a self-sustaining business, with funds from stamps, packages and fees propping up its tens of billions a year in revenue.

There are two bills shuffling through both the House and Senate meant to formalize USPS as a public entity, “independent of the Federal Government.”

“I would really love for people to understand the Postal Service more, interact with our workers more, use the institution more honestly by sending mail, receiving mail, all of the above,” she told Scene, “but also understand how fragile it is.”

“The biggest point we make is that institutions serve who fight for them to serve.”

Subscribe to Cleveland Scene newsletters.