Trump Continues to Blame Amazon For Postal Service's Problems

Amid sharp and sustained criticism that his administration is gutting the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to target mail-in voting, President Trump argued again Monday that Amazon is to blame for the agency’s struggles

Trump has pushed this point in the past even though research suggests that Amazon’s business is one of the few things helping the USPS.

“Amazon and other companies like it, they come and they drop all of their mail into a post office,” Trump said during an interview with “Fox & Friends.” “They drop packages into the post office by the thousands and then they say, ‘Here, you deliver them.’ We lose $3 and $4 a package on average. We lose massive amounts of money.”

The USPS also recently began removing hundreds of mail-sorting machines from facilities all over the country, the same machines expected to be used to sort mail-in ballots during the general election.

Louis DeJoy, the current postmaster general, has said that he intends to cut operational costs at the agency to stop is losing money, but many have criticized the move as an attempt to limit its ability to meet the needs of mail-in voting. DeJoy was appointed by Trump.

Trump made similar accusations about Amazon and the USPS in 2018, but analyses of the agency’s business indicate that the e-commerce giant has been a boon to the postal service because of the surging demand for package shipments. The primary deficit afflicting the USPS has been the drop in first-class and business mail.

In response to the President’s seeming attack on the Postal Service, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called back the House of Representatives from congressional recess. The House is expected to vote on legislation to prevent changes to the agency sometime after the upcoming Democratic National Convention.