“We told them very clearly that the president was not going to sign the bill if [funding for the Postal Service] was in it,” an official from President Trump’s administration told the Washington Post when discussing the $2 trillion Coronavirus Relief Aid that passed weeks ago.
Trump made it clear that he would veto the bill if it included any emergency funding for the agency that is already on unsteady ground, a situation that has been worsened by the coronavirus pandemic. The Post’s source added, “I don’t know if we used the v-bomb, but the president was not going to sign it, and we told them that.”
According to the report, the president is using a false claim that higher internet shipping rates imposed on companies like Amazon, FedEx and UPS would increase the USPS’s budget and help its 600,000 plus workers.
But the director of physical infrastructure at the Government Accountability Office told the Post that rate hikes would likely lead to shipping businesses looking elsewhere or even creating their own delivery methods, thus offsetting USPS revenue gains created by a rate increase.
RELATED
‘Absolute Clusterf–k’: Inside the Denial and Dysfunction of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force
Andrew Cuomo Takes Charge
With the service itself projecting losses of $2 billion a month during the COVID-19 crisis, Congress was able to squeeze into the bill a last-second $10 billion loan from the Treasury Department to get the agency through the spring.
