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Trump administration adviser and Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk wants government-run entities like the U.S. Postal Service and Amtrak to be taken private.
“Basically, something’s got to have some chance of going bankrupt, or there’s not a good feedback loop for improvement,” Musk told the Morgan Stanley Technology Media & Telecom conference on Wednesday.
“We should try to privatize everything we possibly can, and that would be my recommendation,” he added.
The DOGE billionaire reserved special ire for Amtrak, saying the rail provider “can leave you with a very bad impression of America,” compared with comparable services in other countries.
Musk, the head of both a major auto company and a firm working on a competitor to conventional rail schemes, has a vested interested in the direction of mass transit projects.
His Boring Company has spent over a decade working to build a high-speed, pod-based, electric transit system called Hyperloop to compete with traditional trains.
A 2013 Musk biography reported that the billionaire launched the project in part out of “hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system,” which he thought would “be the slowest” option for a Golden State bullet train but built “at the highest cost per mile.”
The Trump White House appears to share his skepticism.
Last month, it announced it was investigating and potentially withdrawing $4 billion in federal funding meant for a San Francisco-Los Angeles rail project that’s been decades in the making.
DOGE has also scrutinized the project.
Trump told reporters last month that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick “will be looking” at the future of the Postal Service, part of a reported idea to potentially fold the agency into the Department of Commerce.
The White House is reportedly mulling an executive order terminating the independent mail agency’s governing board members, though the White House has denied Trump wants to take control of the mail service.
Privatizing the Postal Service is “not the worst idea I’ve ever heard” Trump told reporters in December.
“It’s a lot different today, between Amazon and UPS and FedEx and all the things that you didn’t have,” he added. “But there is talk about that. It’s an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time.”
During his first term in office, the Postal Service was a frequent target of Trump’s attention.
The Republican frequently alleged that Amazon was ripping off the Postal Service, and proposed charging the e-commerce giant extra to work with USPS.
While Trump alleged that Amazon work was behind the Postal Service’s history of posting losses, the criticisms may have been rooted in Trump’s animosity towards Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, whose coverage Trump frequently took issue with.
Cuts to the Postal Service at the end of Trump’s first term prompted protests and concerns that Trump was attempting to diminish the influence of mail-in ballots, which tend to lean Democratic.
During the previous election, Trump frequently and falsely alleged mail-in ballots at the Post Office were not safe and contributing to the supposed election fraud that tipped the 2020 race to Joe Biden.
Earlier this week, Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy sent a letter announced his plans to step down.
The agency reported a net loss of nearly $10 billion in fiscal year 2024.
