Ayanna Pressley stood in Allston on Tuesday and told the crowd the postal service is being sold out from under them. A branch that has been dark since 2019 may stay dark. A Dorchester office loses its lease on October 26. She called it a coordinated campaign, the work of a playbook, the Republican plan to privatize the mail. The books say something duller. The service lost $9 billion last year, has defaulted on nearly $31 billion, and is closing counters it cannot afford to keep open. Those are not the same story. Only one of them is underway.
Officials, including Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, are calling for the USPS to reopen the Allston post office location that was closed in 2019 ‘temporarily,’ but now appears to be permanent.
https://t.co/QNIv8fTygJ— WBZ NewsRadio (@wbznewsradio) October 6, 2026
What she said, and what is actually closing
The Allston branch shut in 2019 because the building was unsound. In June 2025 the service told the mayor it would reopen. In September the residents got letters saying it may close for good. No final decision has been made. That is the service’s own line. Fields Corner, on Adams Street, closes October 26 because the lease runs out. The service calls that one temporary and has given no date for a return. About 87,000 people in Allston and Brighton would be left with a single branch in Brighton. Newton, roughly the same size, has ten.
Pressley, with the two senators and two of her colleagues, wrote the postmaster on October 5. The letter describes a pattern. Fail to make a lease, call it an emergency, suspend the office, then turn the suspension into a permanent closing. At the rally she went further. The closings are a coordinated campaign. They want to privatize the service. She said she would not stop until Allston has a window again.
A lease that expires is not a stock offering. A building condemned in 2019 is not a sale. The pattern she describes is real as a habit of a landlord that is broke. It is not, on the paper, a transfer of title.
Boston ffficials fight USPS closures
The USPS is looking to permanently close the Allston post office and shut down Dorchester’s Fields Corner branch. Mayor Wu is threatening legal action and Rep. Pressley is calling it a privatization scheme. #MApoli https://t.co/aC5NcKIiEx
— Mike Deehan (@deehan) October 6, 2026
What privatization would look like, and who has asked for it
Privatizing the mail means taking the public service, chartered as an independent establishment in 1970 and pulled out of the Cabinet on purpose, and selling it, or folding it into a department a president can run, or carving off the profitable routes and leaving the rural ones to the taxpayer. Britain did the first version. The sale began in 2013 and was finished in 2015. The government there has said it has no plan to buy it back. That is a privatization. It has a date and a statute.
Nothing like it has passed here. No shares have been offered. No bill to sell the routes is on the floor. What the president has done is talk. In February 2025 he said he was considering “a form of a merger” of the service into the Commerce Department, and there were reports he wanted the board fired as a first step. Lawyers pointed at the 1970 statute. An executive order does not repeal it. He has spoken of privatization before and since. Speaking is not a conveyance.
The man now in the job, David Steiner, came out of a waste company and sat on the board of a private parcel carrier. He took office in July 2025. He has said in public that he does not believe in privatizing the service. His program is the one his predecessor started in 2021: cut what can be cut, raise the price of a stamp, ask Congress to change the rules before the cash runs out. A first-class forever stamp costs nearly 50 percent more than it did in 2020. He has warned the service hits the wall unless Congress lifts a $15 billion borrowing cap. In June he told the Senate the business model is broken, that the service is expected to finance itself while carrying obligations no private firm would accept, and that if Congress will not take his path it had better pick another before the money is gone.
A leaked note from a bank, circulated among investors, drooled over the real estate and the delivery network. Investors drool. That is not a postal plan. It is a reason to watch who gets appointed, not proof that Allston was shuttered to dress the balance sheet for a buyer.
The part that is true, and the part that is not
Pressley is right that the windows are closing, and that a neighborhood of 87,000 people with one counter is a worse service than the one it had. She is right that the president has said he wants the service in a different form, and that the man he installed used to help run a competitor. She is wrong that the closings are the sale.
A service $9 billion in the hole does not keep a condemned building on the books to make a congresswoman feel better. It also does not need a conspiracy to let a lease lapse. The July briefing to lawmakers was about multimillion-dollar decisions and a balance sheet, not about a buyer. The regional office has said Allston is not decided. Fields Corner is a calendar. If the point were to privatize, the instrument would be a bill, a board purge that stuck, or a contract handing the routes to a carrier. None of those has happened. The stamp went up. The counter went dark. Those are the acts of a public service that cannot pay its way, which is the argument for a harder look at the model, and also the argument against pretending the model has already been sold.
The mayor says the city may sue to force the windows back open. That is a local fight about a lease and a promise made in June 2025. It will be won or lost on the building, not on a playbook. The service is not being privatized this month. It is being allowed to shrink, by a Congress that will not fund it and a postmaster who says he will not sell it, while the president talks about a merger the statute does not permit. Pressley heard a sale. The ledger shows a loss. The neighborhood gets neither a buyer nor a counter.
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