USPS signs agreement with DOGE, agrees to cut 10,000 workers: ‘Broken business model'
U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy informed members of Congress on Thursday he has signed an agreement with the General Services Administration and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to cut 10,000 workers and billions of dollars from the U.S. Postal Service budget.
In a letter to Congress, DeJoy lamented that the Postal Service has a "broken business model that was not financially sustainable without critically necessary and core change."
"Fixing a broken organization that had experienced close to $100 billion in losses and was projected to lose another $200 billion, without a bankruptcy proceeding, is a daunting task," DeJoy wrote. "Fixing a heavily legislated and overly regulated organization as massive, important, cherished, misunderstood and debated as the United States Postal Service, with such a broken business model, is even more difficult."
DOGE will assist USPS with addressing "big problems" at the $78 billion-a-year agency, which has sometimes struggled in recent years to stay afloat. The agreement aims to help the Postal Service identify and achieve "further efficiencies."
USPS listed such issues as mismanagement of the agency's retirement assets and Workers' Compensation Program, as well as an array of regulatory requirements that the letter described as "restricting normal business practice."
"This is an effort aligned with our efforts, as while we have accomplished a great deal, there is much more to be done," DeJoy wrote.
Critics of the agreement fear negative effects of the cuts will be felt across America. Democratic U.S. Rep. Gerald Connolly, of Virginia, who was sent the letter, said turning over the Postal Service to DOGE would result in it being undermined and privatized.
"The only thing worse for the Postal Service than DeJoy's 'Delivering for America' plan is turning the service over to Elon Musk and DOGE so they can undermine it, privatize it, and then profit off Americans' loss," Connolly said in a statement.
He added: "This capitulation will have catastrophic consequences for all Americans – especially those in rural and hard to reach areas – who rely on the Postal Service every day to deliver mail, medications, ballots, and more. Reliable mail delivery can't just be reserved for MAGA supporters and Tesla owners."
The National Association of Letter Carriers President Brian L. Renfroe said in a statement in response to Thursday's letter that they welcome anyone's help with addressing some of the agency's biggest problems but stood firmly against any move to privatize the Postal Service.
"Common sense solutions are what the Postal Service needs, not privatization efforts that will threaten 640,000 postal employees' jobs, 7.9 million jobs tied to our work, and the universal service every American relies on daily," he said.
USPS currently employs about 640,000 workers tasked with making deliveries from inner cities to rural areas and even far-flung islands.
The service plans to cut 10,000 employees in the next 30 days through a voluntary early retirement program, according to the letter.
The agency previously announced plans to cut its operating costs by more than $3.5 billion annually. And this isn't the first time thousands of employees have been cut. In 2021, the agency cut 30,000 workers.
As the service that has operated as an independent entity since 1970 has struggled to balance the books with the decline of first-class mail, it has fought calls from President Donald Trump and others that it be privatized.
Last month, Trump said he may put USPS under the control of the Commerce Department in what would be an executive branch takeover.
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CNN
35 minutes ago
- CNN
GOP senators' top concerns with Trump's big agenda bill, in their own words
Republicans have set an ambitious deadline of trying to pass President Donald Trump's sweeping agenda through Congress by the fourth of July, kickstarting an intensive negotiation in the US Senate where Republican lawmakers are all over the map when it comes to the specific changes they want to see made to the House-passed bill. The challenge ahead for Senate Majority Leader John Thune is he can only afford to lose three votes, but he must find consensus between conservatives in his conference who are pushing for more spending cuts and others who already fear that some of the cuts to Medicaid and rollbacks to clean energy tax credits that were a cornerstone of the House bill went too far. It's a herculean task and one made more complicated by Elon Musk publicly blasting the House bill. Adding to the challenge is the fact that whatever the Senate settles on will need to go back to the House and win approval there before the President can sign it and pass it into law. Here are senators describing in their own words their concerns and what they want to see changed in the weeks ahead. The interviews were conducted in the first week in June after lawmakers returned from recess. The transcripts below have been lightly edited for clarity. Why it matters: New work requirements for Medicaid and changes to how states can levy provider taxes made up a significant amount of the ways to save money in the House bill. Speeding up how quickly those work requirements were implemented also went a long way to secure support from the conservative House Freedom Caucus. Yet a handful of GOP senators say they need to look closely at how the changes could affect their states and their constituents. And some Republicans in the Senate are warning that the changes may need to be scaled back, a potential problem for House conservatives. 'I'm concerned about people who are here legally, residents of my state, citizens of my state who are working and would lose health care coverage. I am not going to vote for that … There are a host of concerns but Medicaid is the big kahuna and that is where I am training my focus and my fire. I've got 1.3 million Missourians on Medicaid, or CHIP, so that's the hill to fight on.' CNN: 'Do you have concerns about the changes to the provider tax on the Medicaid side?' Justice: 'The provider tax is really important. I mean, you know, to to a lot of states, you know that we, we, we can't let that just get undermined, because you get that undermined and everything you can hurt a lot of our nursing homes a lot.' Reporter: 'My follow up question is does the House bill cut Medicaid to the bone? When you say that, are you worried that they're gonna have bigger cuts are you fine with the House as it is?' Justice: 'I do not think it cuts it to the bone, or any of the bone, but but there's, you know, you get you gotta get through all the fine print and everything, because there could be things that absolutely hurt people and everything.' 'I'm still going through the issues that I see as problematic. I'm looking at the changes in education programs like Pell grants. I've told you many times that I'm looking at the impact on rural hospitals. I support the work requirements that are in the bill. I think that makes sense.' 'There is a lot of concern. I did a couple roundtables at home, and so, you know, we talked about it, where I can look and see more deeply. There were some nuances to it that I hadn't actually understood before that are in the House bill. We haven't had a chance to digest how it's going to impact our hospitals.' 'I've said before that I want to see very – I want to make sure that we're not harming hospitals that we just spent COVID money to save. So, that's part of it, but I also care a lot about, with disabilities and so, Medicaid is an important issue. So, we'll see how, what the Senate does and I'll be lobbying to try to get something that's acceptable to me.' 'We have to take a look at states that have expanded Medicaid, to make sure that we're making a smart decision for millions of people who are under expansion – North Carolina, 620,000 Medicaid recipients alone. So, we've got to work on getting that right, giving the state legislatures and others a chance to react to it, make a recommendation, or make a change. And that's all the implementation stuff that we're beginning to talk about now that we're in possession of the bill.' Why it matters: In the Senate, a handful of lawmakers have made clear they don't think the House bill does enough to curb the country's spending problems. The argument was bolstered this week by two things. First, Musk attacked members for backing the bill he argued didn't go far enough. Then, the Congressional Budget Office released a report that they anticipated the bill in its totality would increase the country's deficit by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years. The challenge here is that finding additional cuts that 51 senators can support and 218 House Republicans can sign off on is tough to do. Some of the largest savings that could have been made to programs like Medicaid were rejected in the House already by swing district Republicans who argued that the cuts could harm their constituents. Johnson: 'I talked to the President today… he's encouraged me to support the bill and I said – listen, we all want him to succeed but my bottom line is we need to seriously address the debt and deficit issue.' CNN: 'Would you be open to passing something close to the House bill now with a promise of changes in the future?' Johnson: 'Listen, I want to help the president succeed in this thing so I've got a pretty open mind. My requirement has always been a commitment to a reasonable pre-pandemic level of spending and a process to achieve and maintain it.' 'Come the end of September, when our fiscal year ends, the deficit's going to be $2.2 trillion. That's just not conservative. They're borrowing $5 trillion, that means they're anticipating the following year being over $2 trillion as well, so it's just not a conservative thing to do, and I've told them I can't support the bill if they're together. If they were to separate out and take the debt ceiling off that, I very much could consider the rest of the bill.' Curtis: 'If you look at the House bill, just to simplify it a little bit, we're going to spend in the next 10 years about $20 trillion more than the revenue we bring in, and they're cutting $1.5 trillion out of $20 trillion. Most of us wouldn't do that in our businesses, in our homes, and certainly don't do it in the state of Utah. And so that's a big concern to me.' CNN: 'So any substantial changes to get your support?' Curtis: 'I'm not drawing red lines, right, like I'm being careful. But I think we have to do our best work to get my support.' Why it matters: At the end of the House's precarious negotiations, members of the House Freedom caucus got assurances that many of the clean energy tax credits that were part of former President Joe Biden's legacy would be rolled back and that the process for ending them would begin sooner than the original legislative text had laid out. It was a huge victory for conservatives. But, in the Senate, a handful of lawmakers are worried that the rollbacks could affect projects in their states that create jobs and income for their constituents. 'On the energy tax credits – as you know, obviously a great deal of focus on oil and natural gas in the state, but also on the clean energy side as well.' 'I've made clear that I think these investments that we have made as a country in some of these clean energy technologies, we're seeing that play forward in a lot of states, and so let's be smart about these, let's make sure if you're going to do phase-outs of this, that they're reasonable phase-outs. So I'm going to be advocating for that.' 'We're going to pay attention to how it affects Kansas. One of the issues is I think there is a lot of Senate sentiment that it's too rapid.' 'Look, the key there is to go at it through the lens of a businessperson. It's easy, you know, from a political standpoint, to cancel programs that are out there. We need to be smart about where capital has been deployed to minimize the impact on the message we're sending –that we'd send businesses, that every two or four years we have massive changes in our priorities for energy transition. We just got to get it right. It doesn't mean that I think we have to extend every program, necessarily, but I do think we have to hold businesses harmless for the programs that are there, and then calculate what the economic effect is going to be. If we don't – this is not all their spending, there's economic growth behind a lot of these as well, as we've seen in North Carolina.' Why it matters: A group of New York and California Republicans fought hard in the House to increase how much in state and local taxes constituents can deduct on their federal returns. The deduction cap went from $10,000 to $40,000 for people who fall below a certain income threshold, but the benefit really helps voters in high-tax states. In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson's majority is built on winning some of these high-tax districts. And several members in his conference made it clear they'd vote against the bill without a boost to SALT. In the Senate, the politics are very different. The provision is costly and there aren't any Republican senators representing high-tax states like New York, California, New Jersey or Illinois. Therefore, there is a lot of grumbling from GOP senators who would rather spend the billions it costs to raise the threshold on another area of the tax code. 'There's not a single senator from New York or New Jersey or California and so there's not a strong mood in the Senate Republican caucus right now to do $353 billion for states that basically the other states subsidize. But that being said, you know, like I say on every issue, nothing is resolved until it's resolved and we are working things out.' CNN: 'Is there any way the $40,000 cap survives?' Tillis: 'I hope not. But, you know, I'll have to that is one where I don't. I believe when I draw a red line, I stick to it. I'm not willing to draw a red line there, but I would be a lot happier, in total, I'd be a lot happier seeing that number come down. I've said it before. It's because it's personal to me. I took all the criticism for making North Carolina not a SALT state, and now you're telling me I've got to subsidize the bad decisions made in Albany and Sacramento. So it's at the end of the day, if they do their work in their state, they should be talking to state senators, not US senators, to fix that problem.'
Yahoo
35 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Here's How 12 Trump-Supporting Celebrities Reacted To Trump And Elon's Breakup
Schneider He wrote what appears to be a little poem for Elon telling him he is loved: "Dear @elonmusk The Sun will still rise tomorrow. The moon will not be moved by anything that anyone says. Breath. You are loved." Paul He criticized alpha male egos and the maturity of 50+ year-olds: "One of the problems with the Republican Party is on display today (As a current Republican) We unfortunately have these Alpha male egos and leaders who aren't mature enough sometimes. They're 50+ years old and diss tweeting each other Elon and Trump are great but they need to work together and not make America look bad." Roseanne responded to Elon's (now deleted) Epstein tweet: "MAGA went down faster than AOC at a Hamas blow bang. We had a good run at least." Pump He said, "We got trump & elon beefing before gta 6." Related: People Are Talking About The Most Shocking Celebrity Deaths That Don't Get Enough Attention Sorbo He asked, "So will the Dems go back to buying Teslas now?" West He sent his love, "Broooos please nooooo. We love you both so much." Davi Related: Celebrities Who Were Allegedly Horrible To Wait On At Restaurants, And Others Who Were Amazing He retweeted this message about having Trump's back: "Pay close attention to all the people who don't have President Trump's back right now." Paul He suggested the two wrestle it out: Sabato Jr He said he was staying out of the political drama, "Seeing people lose it over political drama is wild—like they can change a system that owns them. The truth? You can only change yourself. Invest your energy in what truly improves your life. I find peace by not giving my time to this chaos. Focus on you!" Kelly She retweeted a bunch of the popular memes of the moment: And then asked, "Remember this morning when the big story was Dems piling on Karine Jean-Pierre*?" *Jean-Pierre released a book saying she's an independent. Quaid He said we welcomed Elon and Trump's transparency and then went on to explain that he doesn't have a relationship with his brother, Dennis Quaid: "I welcome @realDonaldTrump & @elonmusk transparency it's very cool. Nothing worse than public people faking a relationship because they're 2 afraid of public opinion. Allow me to use this opening to once again state Dennis and I have no relationship and Evi & I have not spoken to him for close to 30 years and will never again speak to him. My bio is not his bio. He is a very bad person and a liar. So when you see him faking a relationship with me or Evi know he's a fraud! He's a pedestrian actor who is good at playing word games on Google [Yawn]. I for one appreciate Trump & Elon's transparency to express their destain for each other and why. Keeping it real." lastly, Ryan Garcia He tweeted "Elon crashed out." He went on to say, "If it's true what Elon said then this is extremely disturbing and needs to be exposed out to the world The truth needs to come out but needs to come out with integrity not some drama shit." Also in Celebrity: 14 Celebrities Who Have So Many Kids, They're Basically Running Their Own Daycare, And 11 Who Said "Hmm, Hard Pass" Also in Celebrity: 21 Times Celebrities Revealed Wildly Juicy, Shady, Or Even Disturbing Things In Interviews Also in Celebrity: Kylie Jenner's First Met Gala Dress Made Her Bleed, And 20 Other Red Carpet Looks That Took "Beauty Is Pain" Wayyyy Too Far
San Francisco Chronicle
35 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Asian American income inequality: Here are the highest and lowest earners in the Bay Area
When Jagtar Singh Kang immigrated with his family to the U.S. from the Indian region of Punjab in 1997, he was paid $8.50 an hour at his first job: working on an assembly line making catheters. It was just a few dollars above minimum wage at the time. 'When I came here, my financial situation was not very good. It was very hard to survive,' said Singh Kang, who lives in Fremont. Today, as an insurance and financial services agent, he makes about $300,000 annually. 'I'm a lucky man.' Singh Kang has experienced the kind of explosive income growth that has led Asian Americans to have the highest median income of all racial groups in the U.S. But he's also encountered many barriers that have kept wages largely stagnant for the lowest-paid among Asian Americans, who experience the highest income inequality of all U.S. racial groups, a 2018 report from Pew Research Center found. He's part of the Asian American ethnic subgroup — Punjabi Americans — that has the highest income inequality of all Asian ethnicities in the Bay Area, a new Chronicle analysis of 2023 U.S. census data found. The region more broadly has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the U.S. The diversity of the Bay Area's two million Asian Americans, who number among their ranks refugees and truck drivers, healthcare workers and software engineers, shows how the 'model minority' stereotype of Asian success doesn't capture the full experience of that racial group. It also offers insight into what helps and hinders upward economic mobility in the country's most expensive region. U.S.-born Asian Americans tend to do better economically than immigrants, research shows, while those who migrate with higher education, access to wealth and resources, English language abilities, family networks and social connections have greater odds of economic success. Nationwide, the income gap among Asian Americans has almost doubled from 1970 to 2016, the Pew report found, with the top 10% of Asian American earners making almost 11 times that of the bottom 10%. In the nine-county Bay Area, that disparity was even more pronounced as of 2023, with the highest-earners making almost 12 times that of the lowest-earners, a Chronicle analysis of U.S. census data found. 'It's not that those who make less are making much less than before,' said Ziyao Tian, a Pew Research Center sociologist. 'It's about the rich people getting a lot richer,' pointing to the Pew study that showed while the incomes of the top 90 th percentile of Asian Americans earners have more than doubled since 1970, those of the lowest-earning 10th percentile grew by only 11%. In the Bay Area, it's a similar story, with top earners' incomes supercharged by the tech industry boom. Income disparity among Asian groups often splits down ethnic lines in the Bay Area, the Chronicle found, with Indian and Taiwanese Americans seeing the highest median household incomes and Afghan, Tongan, Laotian, Hawaiian and Vietnamese Americans seeing the lowest. That economic diversity is reflective of the wide variety of immigration experiences. For instance, Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian refugees and their children who fled war and genocide in the 1970s and '80s started on a financial backfoot compared to immigrants who came with college degrees post-1990, when the H-1B visa for high-skill workers was created. ' When you think about the Laotian community, you have to think about the fact that it left during the aftermath of war,' said Somdeng Danny Thongsy, who came to the U.S. as an infant with his family in 1981. 'When we did resettle in the U.S., we're forced to live in an area that's historically stricken with redlining, with poverty.' His parents, who were rice farmers in Laos, found work on a farm, sewing clothing and working in a grocery store in Stockton, where they settled. 'Because of their limited English, they weren't able to get a full 9 to 5 job,' he said. Thongsy became influenced by those around him and dropped out of school at 16. After his brother, who'd been a mentor, was killed, he fell into depression, committed a crime and was incarcerated. In prison, he found Christianity through a chaplain and began a journey of healing that led him to get his GED. After being released, he enrolled in UC Berkeley in 2021, becoming the first and only person in his family to graduate from college. 'When people say, 'You got to bootstrap,' I mean yeah, you do the work, but it's also people that support you along the way,' Thongsy, who now lives in Alameda, said. He credited some of his success to the help he received from free mental health treatment at the Oakland nonprofit Center For Empowering Refugees and Immigrants. Within ethnic subgroups, there are also varying levels of inequality. Punjabi Americans in the Bay Area have the highest income inequality, with the top 10 th percentile of earners making almost 22 times that of bottom earners, followed by Chinese Americans, the Chronicle analysis found. Meanwhile, Indian and Filipino Americans see far less income inequality than average. University of Kansas sociologist ChangHwan Kim, who studies Asian American economic stratification, said a possible explanation is that Chinese and Punjabis have a much longer immigration history in the U.S. than their other Asian counterparts. Chinese migration to the Bay Area dates to the 19 th century Gold Rush while Punjabis fleeing British colonialism in the late 1890s settled to work in California farms and on railroads. 'With that kind of pattern of migration, the population could be more diverse,' he said, as many migrate not for job opportunities or higher education but to reunite with family. In the Bay Area, low-income Chinese immigrants have strong cultural, social and familial reasons to stay here, even when their job prospects aren't good. Nu Huynh, a Cantonese-speaking refugee from Vietnam, arrived in Oakland in 1986 with her family. She eventually enrolled in training to become a childcare worker but took two years instead of the normal one to graduate because she struggled with the English-language instruction. She worked for 12 years at a daycare in Oakland, earning $8.50 an hour, before retiring. She now lives in affordable housing managed by East Bay Local Development Corp. She said she doesn't know how she'd afford rent otherwise. 'The cost of living has gone up, but wages have not,' Huynh said in Cantonese. The 'model minority' stereotype is 'harmful' for advocacy efforts, said Joyce Lam, political director of the San Francisco-based organization Chinese Progressive Association, which advocates for low-income workers. 'You think the Chinese community doesn't need as much help as other communities because of those stereotypes,' she said. The most highly paid Asian Americans tend to also have the highest levels of educational attainment. In the Bay Area, 89% of Indian Americans have a bachelor's degree or higher. 'Asian Americans become successful through education,' said Kim, the sociologist. 'Contrary to this, the lowest-earning Asian Americans are those who came without much education.' But even for highly educated immigrants, not speaking English can place a ceiling on their upward mobility. Khatima Tamiz worked a well-paying job as a field data collector for a USAID contractor when the Taliban seized control of Kabul in 2021. She fled with her family, arriving in the U.S. in 2023 on a Special Immigrant Visa for Afghans who'd helped the U.S. in its war. Employers did not recognize her bachelor's degree in biology, she said. Juggling childcare and learning English, she also enrolled in a medical assistant licensing course. Her husband — who had a master's in human resources — started working as a security guard. He got laid off three months ago and has been driving Uber overnight since, making about $3,000 a month, while studying to be a nurse. 'We're in a bad situation,' she said. As a career coach for business executives, San Francisco resident Joyce Guan West spends a lot of time thinking about how to help people maximize their income. West immigrated as a baby with her parents from Shanghai in the 1980s. Her parents didn't speak English. Her dad's first job, in a factory, paid $3.33 an hour. 'I was literally thinking about it because I charge between $400 to $650 an hour for my coaching,' said West, who now makes about $400,000 a year. 'It's over 100 times more.' Although her parents were working class, her maternal grandparents had immigrated in the 1940s, attended UC Berkeley, had master's degrees, and owned rental properties and 'a nice house' in the El Cerrito hills, she said. 'Even though my immediate family was more of an immigrant experience, seeing the wealth my grandparents had raised my own level of what I expected out of life,' she said. She started her first business in college and sold her most recent one, a snack and beverage distributor called Buyer's Best Friend, in 2017 for several million dollars. When she married her now-ex-husband, a new world opened for her, she said. He grew up in Westchester County, a wealthy New York City suburb close to hedge funds and family offices, she said. 'I feel like that was just a training in how to develop executive presence, being around people who were used to a certain amount of wealth,' she said West acknowledged that her success is hard to replicate because of the advantages she had through her grandparents' privilege. But she said, 'My wish for more Asian Americans is that people get off the treadmill and tap into 'who am I?' when I'm not cranking it out.'
