President Donald Trump: Post Office needs to raise prices for Amazon

President Trump speaks to reporters outside the White House about mail-in voting concerns and fears the post office is being slowed down. For access to live and exclusive video from CNBC subscribe to CNBC PRO: https://cnb.cx/2NGeIvi

President Donald Trump on Monday repeated his belief that Amazon is to blame for the U.S. Postal Service’s demise.

“Amazon and other companies like it, they come and they drop all of their mail into a post office,” Trump said in 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.”

Trump’s comments echoed similar remarks by him in April and launched a series of attacks in 2018, when he claimed Amazon was costing the post office “billions.”

Trump is right that the Postal Service is losing money, but Amazon and other internet e-commerce companies aren’t necessarily to blame for that. Previous analysis conducted by CNBC found Amazon may be saving the post office from financial demise, due to growth in package shipping from online retailers like Amazon. Amazon also relies on a range of carriers to deliver packages, such as UPS and FedEx, and is increasingly building its own network of contracted delivery partners, which now total 1,300 firms.

A major factor behind the post office’s continuing shortfall is a requirement that the USPS fund health benefits for its workers, which costs more than $5 billion annually. Other worker-related expenses, such as workers’ compensation, fluctuate from year to year based on “changes in actuarial assumptions, such as interest and inflation rates, and employee and retiree demographics,” as the USPS said in its 2019 annual report.

The Postal Service has benefited from a surge in package deliveries to Americans who remain indoors because of the pandemic, but it has experienced continued declines in first-class and business mail, according to its latest financial results.

The president was asked on Fox News about concerns that the Trump administration is interfering with the post office in order to impact voting in the November presidential election. The Postal Service has removed hundreds of mail-processing machines across the country and warned dozens of states that it may not be able to process mail-in ballots in time to be counted in the Nov. 3 presidential election. At the same time, it faces widespread mail delays and has seen its financial woes increase as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is calling the House back into session, cutting lawmakers’ summer recess short as concerns grow among Democrats over whether the Trump White House is trying to undermine the Postal Service ahead of the election.

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