The U.S. Postal Service will be tapped to conduct the next Census, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced at a Breitbart News policy event — a move he says eliminates the need to hire, train, and equip hundreds of thousands of temporary workers from scratch.
The logic is disarmingly simple. The Census Bureau has traditionally hired roughly 500,000 temporary workers every decade, rented them cars, fueled them up, and sent them door to door to count 340 million Americans. The Post Office already employs 500,000 people who go to every house in America every single day.
Lutnick laid out the case himself:
"The job of the census is to go to everybody's house, and count everybody, 340,000,000 people. So, the census, we'd hire 500,000 people, we'd train them, rent them cars, give them gas, and they'd go out and try to find people. Which department of the United States of America already has 500,000 people, already has cars, and goes to everybody's house every day? Oh, the Post Office!"
A test run covering 500,000 people is planned for April 1, and Lutnick confirmed his department has the money to pay for it.
This is the sort of obvious efficiency that the federal bureaucracy is structurally incapable of producing on its own. For decades, the Census has operated as a massive, decennial hiring spree — a temporary army assembled from nothing, trained at enormous cost, and dissolved the moment the count is done. The institutional knowledge walks out the door. The rented cars go back. The cycle resets.
Meanwhile, letter carriers have been walking the same routes for years. They know which houses are occupied. They know the neighborhoods. They know, as Lutnick put it, who lives where:
"But, when the postman comes up, you're like, I get it, you know, he wants to know how many people live here — and he knows, he's just, I'm just confirming, you, your wife and your four kids still live here."
Breitbart News economics editor John Carney underscored the point — everybody knows their local postman, so they're far more likely to answer the door. That matters. Census completion rates depend on trust and access, and a familiar face on the porch solves both problems at once.
The real question isn't whether this is a good idea. It's why no one in Washington executed it sooner.
The answer is the same one it always is: bureaucratic inertia and the quiet incentive structures that keep government bloated. A Census that hires 500,000 temporary workers is a Census that feeds an enormous contracting and staffing apparatus. Consultants get paid. Logistics firms get contracts. Training programs get funded. Entire support ecosystems exist to manage a workforce that doesn't need to exist if you use the one already on the payroll.
There is no constituency in Washington for making government smaller by making it smarter — except, apparently, in this administration.
Lutnick framed the idea with the kind of plain-spoken confidence that tends to unnerve the permanent bureaucracy:
"So, here's the genius move. We are hiring the Post Office to do the census. I don't have to hire 500,000 people, I don't have to teach them where everybody lives. And, they know where everybody lives."
The April 1 pilot will be the proof of concept. Five hundred thousand people isn't a small sample — it's large enough to surface real operational challenges and large enough to demonstrate real savings if the model works.
If it does, the implications extend well beyond the Census. The underlying principle — use existing federal infrastructure instead of building parallel temporary systems — is the kind of thinking that could reshape how dozens of government programs operate. It's not revolutionary theory. It's basic management. The fact that it qualifies as a breakthrough says more about the baseline of federal governance than it does about the idea itself.
Washington spent decades building a government that solves problems by adding layers. This administration keeps asking a different question: what layers already exist that nobody thought to use?
The mailman already knows the answer.
