The leader of the U.S. Postal Service said in a letter to lawmakers on Thursday that he had reached an agreement with Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team allowing it to help in “identifying and achieving further efficiencies.”
The Postal Service has long struggled with its finances, and Mr. Musk and President Trump have both suggested it should be privatized. But Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting group, the Department of Government Efficiency, has not targeted the Postal Service’s roughly 635,000 workers.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who took his position during the first Trump presidency and moved to shrink the agency’s ranks during the Biden administration, said he had signed an agreement with Mr. Musk’s group on Wednesday.
Mr. DeJoy, a Republican megadonor, wrote in the letter that Mr. Musk’s initiative was “an effort aligned” with his efforts.
He said that the Postal Service’s work force had shrunk by 30,000 since the 2021 fiscal year, and that the agency planned to complete a “further reduction of another 10,000 people in the next 30 days” through a previously established voluntary-retirement program.
Last week, Mr. Musk said at a tech conference organized by the bank Morgan Stanley that the Postal Service should be privatized, declaring, “We should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized.”
Mr. Trump has by turns suggested privatizing the independent agency and merging it with the Commerce Department. Union officials and Democratic lawmakers have been alarmed by the talk of privatization, and have argued that such a move would hurt workers, drive prices higher and disproportionately damage service in rural areas.
The agreement described by Mr. DeJoy on Thursday was comparatively less disruptive, but it drew a stern rebuke from Representative Gerald E. Connolly of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which oversees the Postal Service.
Mr. Connolly said in a statement that the deal would bring “catastrophic consequences for all Americans — especially those in rural and hard-to-reach areas — who rely on the Postal Service every day.”
The “only thing worse for the Postal Service,” Mr. Connolly said in the statement, would be if the agency were turned over to Mr. Musk so that he could “undermine it, privatize it, and then profit off Americans’ loss.”
In his letter, the postmaster general argued that the service had transformed in recent years from a “battered government bureaucracy” on the verge of financial collapse into an agency “experiencing an unprecedented period of growth and innovation.”
“Our strategies have focused on maintaining a modified, but sustainable, universal service mission that was noble when constructed, still meritorious today, and that can be financially self-sufficient with the changes we are pursuing,” Mr. DeJoy wrote.
The Postal Service was once a Cabinet-level department of the government, but was turned into an independent agency under President Richard Nixon. In 2021, the agency reported it had lost $87 billion in the previous 14 years.
Brian L. Renfroe, the president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, said in an interview on Thursday that he was “skeptical of DOGE.”
But Mr. Renfroe said Mr. Musk’s team had not yet done “anything that raises big alarms.”
“We will be in wait-and-see mode,” he said, adding that any new cuts at the Postal Service would “almost directly result in challenges providing the service that we provide every single day.”
