Trump adviser and tech mogul Elon Musk suggested Wednesday that the U.S. government should privatize “as much as possible” and named Amtrak and the U.S. Postal Service as two services ripe for privatization, according to a source in the room.
During a virtual appearance at a Morgan Stanley technology conference, Musk told attendees about his experiences riding bullet trains abroad and said, “And we come back to America, like, Amtrak is a sad situation.”
“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 added. “So, I just, I think we should prioritize anything that can be privatized.”
Ownership structures of high-speed railways abroad vary widely. Some are fully state owned, as in China. Others, like Japan’s railways, have been largely privatized. The European system is mixed.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, whom President Donald Trump on Tuesday credited with running the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, said privatization would ensure “a feedback loop for improvement.”
“Basically, something’s got to have some chance of going bankrupt, or there’s not a good feedback loop for improvement,” Musk added.
“We should try to privatize everything we possibly can, and that would be my recommendation,” Musk said later.
In December, before he was sworn in to a second term, Trump floated the idea of privatizing the USPS, telling reporters at a press conference that privatization was “not the worst idea I’ve ever heard” and that “we’re looking” at it.
Trump also told reporters last month that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick would “look into” folding the USPS into the Commerce Department.
“He’s going to look at it. He’s got a great business instinct, which is what we need, and he’ll be looking at it. And we think we can turn it around, but it’s — it’s the Postal Service,” the president said at the time.
“We’re losing so much money with the Postal Service, and we don’t want to lose that kind of money. So the secretary and some others that have talent, that kind of talent, we’ll be looking at it,” Trump added.
The Postal Service routinely posts annual losses, often driven by costs associated with retiree pensions. For its most recent fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, USPS reported an annual increase in operating revenue to $79.54 billion due to price increases, as mail volume declined.
Critics privatizing the postal service often point out that it is a critical resource, particularly for people living in rural or hard-to-access areas where other shipping companies, like UPS and FedEx, don’t deliver.
The USPS has a “universal service obligation,” meaning that it has to deliver mail and parcels without regard to concerns about distance or profitability.
Jessica Xing and Mike Calia contributed.