President demands postage hike

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Friday he would not approve an emergency loan for the U.S. Postal Service if it did not immediately raise its prices for package delivery.

“The Postal Service is a joke,” Trump told reporters, responding to a Washington Post report on the Treasury Department’s plans to extract concessions from USPS in exchange for a line of credit Congress approved to aide the agency during the coronavirus pandemic.

“The post office should raise the price [of package delivery] four times,” he said.

Trump recently signed a law that allowed the cashstrapped agency to borrow $10 billion from the Treasury Department. The Post has reported that the White House wants to force changes at the Postal Service as part of the terms of the loan.

Trump confirmed Friday that rate increases would be among those conditions, and that he would not allow Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to approve the loan without them.

Trump has railed for years against what he sees as mismanagement at the Postal Service, which has been battered by a decline in firstclass mail in the internet age but has found profitability with package delivery.

Packages ordinarily make up just 5% of the Postal Service’s volume but account for 30% of its revenue. Competitors such as UPS and FedEx contract with the Postal Service as a cheaper option for “last mile” deliveries to rural areas too costly for privatesector service.

Trump and his allies have frequently claimed that higher package rates on internet shipping companies — Amazon in particular — could ease the Postal Service’s financial troubles. But the move could hurt the agency by artificially raising its prices above those of UPS and FedEx, analysts say.