type: timeline_event
On March 12, 2026, U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy signed a formal agreement with the General Services Administration and representatives of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut 10,000 postal workers and billions of dollars from the U.S. Postal Service budget within 30 days through a voluntary early retirement program.
DeJoy framed the cuts as necessary because the Postal Service had a "broken business model" that had accumulated close to $100 billion in losses and was projected to lose another $200 billion. The agreement formalized DOGE's incursion into the USPS, which is an independent agency not ordinarily subject to executive branch management directives.
The 10,000-worker cut came on top of 30,000 positions already eliminated since fiscal year 2021. Democratic critics warned that folding the independent Postal Service into the DOGE framework was a step toward privatization. Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-VA) said it would result in the Postal Service being "undermined and privatized." Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) called on USPS leadership to halt the plan entirely.
The same day, news emerged that NOAA was planning to eliminate approximately 1,000 additional employees under DOGE's direction — adding to the agency's mounting losses of meteorologists, weather forecasters, and climate scientists that critics warned would degrade the nation's weather prediction and early warning capabilities.
The USPS-DOGE agreement represented a significant expansion of DOGE's reach beyond conventional executive branch agencies into independent federal institutions — a structural shift that critics characterized as the systematic subjugation of every arm of the federal government to the executive's preferences, mediated through an entity that held no statutory authority of its own.