Elon Musk Eyes Amtrak And USPS For His Next Big Disruption

While Elon Musk’s pet project, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, continues its purported mission to slash federal spending, the billionaire White House insider has suggested the government “privatize everything we possibly can.”

Musk named both Amtrak and the U.S. Postal Service while likening the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts to a “corporate takeover” during a virtual appearance at a Morgan Stanley technology conference on Wednesday.

CNN’s Hadas Gold reported that Musk said the government is “in much worse shape than any commercial company could ever be,” adding, “I think logically we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized.”

Musk argued that publicly backed services had no incentive to get better, saying, “Something’s got to have some chance of going bankrupt, or there’s not a good feedback loop for improvement,” according to NBC News.

USPS’s “universal service obligation” means it must deliver Americans’ mail needs regardless of the distance or possibility of profit, a mandate that allows it to serve some of the nation’s most remote and hard-to-access areas.

But the parcel service, which is an independent agency under the executive branch, has been in dire financial straits for years.

Last fiscal year, the Postal Service reported a $9.5 billion loss. The year before that, it ended up $6.5 billion in the red.

Those struggles prompted President Donald Trump to recommend privatizing USPS, telling the press it was “not the worst idea I’ve ever heard” last December.

During the tech conference, Musk also criticized the state of Amtrak, calling it “a sad situation.”

“If you’re coming from another country, please don’t use our national rail,” he said. “It can leave you with a very bad impression of America.”

Last Friday, Musk endorsed the idea of privatizing another government-backed system, telling podcaster Joe Rogan that Social Security was “the biggest Ponzi Scheme of all time.”