Trump Reportedly Asked The Postal Service To Charge Amazon Double

Donald Trump has made no bones about his disregard for Amazon and its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, frequently decrying the company’s use of the US Postal Service for deliveries. That’s despite the tech giant being one of the few upsides in USPS’s perennial loss-making.

During months of tweets calling for USPS to ramp up its charges on the firm, Trump has also privately pushed postmaster general Megan Brennan to double its rates for Amazon and other firms, according to the Washington Post (paywall), which is also owned by Bezos.

Following through on the demands could ultimately prove disastrous for USPS, which has lost money every year for the past decade, with its package service—of which Amazon is a major customer—one of the only growing areas of business.

In a call last month, former postmaster general Patrick Donahoe said that upping prices would boost the chances of Amazon creating its own infrastructure, or turning to the likes of Fedex, instead of the Postal Service. Currently, Amazon does most of the delivery process itself, sending around 75 percent of packages to a local post office, which will then take them the “last mile” to the customers.