President Trump reportedly threatened to veto Congress’s recent $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package if aid to the United States Postal Service (USPS) — which has been hemorrhaging money due to the pandemic — was included in the final version of the bill, The Washington Post reported.
“We told them very clearly that the president was not going to sign the bill if [money for the Postal Service] was in it,” a Trump administration official told the paper. “I don’t know if we used the v-bomb, but the president was not going to sign it, and we told them that.”
Initially, lawmakers had agreed to include a $13 billion direct grant to the Postal Service that it wouldn’t have to pay back. Instead, the country’s mail service had to settle for a $10 billion loan that made it into the final version of the bill that was signed into law.
Postmaster General Megan Brennan told the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Thursday that the Postal Service would run out of money by the end of the fiscal year (September) unless it received financial assistance from the federal government. The USPS is still waiting on the Treasury Department’s approval for the $10 billion loan, according to the Post.
Additionally, while talking with lawmakers Thursday, Brennan reportedly requested another $50 billion in assistance: $25 billion to offset lost revenue from declining mail volume due to the coronavirus and $25 billion for “modernization.”
She noted that the service expects to lose $13 billion from the COVID-19 outbreak and an another $54.3 billion in additional losses over the next decade.
There are more than 31,600 post offices around the country and more than 650,000 employees. The mailing industry generates almost $2 trillion a year.