America’s Richest Oligarch Wants to Privatize USPS and Amtrak

Elon Musk said Wednesday that he wants to privatize the U.S. Postal Service and Amtrak, according to reports from multiple news outlets. And as the most powerful oligarch in the U.S.—a man who’s been given the chance to unilaterally dismantle whatever he likes under the guise of a pseudo-government agency called DOGE—the billionaire may get his wish soon.

“I think logically we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized,” Musk said, according to Reuters. “I think we should privatize the Post Office and Amtrak, for example… We should privatize everything we possibly can.”

Musk made the remarks Wednesday teleconferencing into the Morgan Stanley TMT conference in San Francisco, which was not open to the press. The billionaire complained about U.S. rail service without actually providing valuable context, like the fact that he’s fought against high-speed rail in California and, as the owner of a car company, has a vested interest in killing mass transit in the United States.

“If you’re coming from another country, please don’t use our national rail. It can leave you with a very bad impression of America,” Musk said, according to NBC News. “So, I just, I think we should prioritize anything that can be privatized.”

Musk pitched an idea called the Hyperloop in 2013 with the purpose of derailing California’s publicly funded high-speed rail project, according to Ashlee Vance’s biography of the billionaire. And President Trump even said last month that he’d investigate the project for being poorly managed. So it makes sense that Musk and Trump would be opposed to anything funded by the government unless they get a cut. That’s how oligarchies work.

Musk spent the rest of Wednesday on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., where he was reportedly chatting with some Republicans who were giving him an earful about how he needed to let Congress handle appropriations. Musk reassured Republicans that he would try to restore any funding for pet projects, according to the Washington Post, but that’s not how any of this is supposed to work. Congress rather famously has the power of the purse, deciding what gets funded and what gets cut, but Musk has made himself the ultimate arbiter of the government’s funding apparatus, despite having no authority to do so.

From the Post:

Musk told a group of Republican senators in a closed-door lunch that he wanted to set up a direct line for them when they have questions, allowing them to get a near-instant response to their concerns, senators said. Some senators were given Musk’s phone number during Wednesday’s meeting, and the entrepreneur said he would “create a system where members of Congress can call some central group” to get problematic cuts reversed quickly, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) said.

Musk doesn’t get to unilaterally cut whatever he wants and then divvy out dispensations for politically connected people who have his number. That’s not legal, and that’s not right. But it is the state of affairs right now as Musk slashes his way through the federal government, destroying anything he doesn’t personally profit from. Musk’s companies, like SpaceX, have lucrative contracts with the Department of Defense, but there’s no reporting that suggests anything that the billionaire controls will see funding disappear. Cancer research and hundreds of thousands of federal employees, on the other hand, are disposable in Musk’s eyes.

The U.S. Postal Service may be on the chopping block, but its existence is literally mandated in the U.S. Constitution. Known as the Postal Clause, it gives Congress the sole authority to “establish post offices and post roads.” If Musk wants to privatize it, they can certainly try, but it wouldn’t be legal by any normal historical interpretation of the Constitution.

Critics of the Postal Service claim the agency “loses” money, but that same logic could be applied to literally any government service, from public schools to roads. The U.S. highway system costs money, but part of living in a modern society is having roads that people can drive on, which itself drives economic activity just as having a functional postal system does.

And while plenty of internet commentators point out that companies like Amazon rely on the postal service for their so-called last mile of deliveries, the privatization of mail would hypothetically allow a company like Amazon to profit even further by gaining government contracts. Much like how SpaceX gets government money to perform services previously done by NASA, delivery companies (including Amazon’s own, which has grown dramatically in recent years) would profit handsomely from privatization.

But Amtrak and the Postal Service are just two parts of a much larger dismantling currently underway. News broke late Wednesday that Trump was planning to sign an executive order soon that would abolish the Department of Education, according to the Wall Street Journal, yet another thing that can’t be legally accomplished without a vote in Congress. But there’s no sign that Trump or Musk plan to respect the rule of law anytime soon.