RAPID CITY, S.D. – South Dakota is among a select group of rural states where the country’s postal workers are on the offensive.
The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) launched a television advertising blitz in South Dakota this past summer as part of a national pushback against renewed efforts in Washington, D.C., to privatize the United States Postal Service (USPS).
Airing on national networks and in select local markets in nine states, the union’s ad spot targeted ongoing changes to the USPS under President Donald Trump, whose administration has voiced support for sweeping cost-saving reforms within the federal agency. Opponents like APWU, however, say that will create hardships for Americans who use the mail, with sparsely populated regions most severely affected.
“Those who live in rural areas would be especially hard hit. It also would be devastating to many small businesses, the trillion-dollar e-commerce industry and threaten the ability to vote by mail,” APWU President Mark Dimondstein said in a statement provided to The Dakota Scout.
While President Trump has broadly been a supporter of USPS reform efforts — calling its existing financial structure “a joke” while proposing privatizing the service during his first term at the White House — more recently there have been discussions on Capitol Hill about both the privatization and even transferring of the federal agency to the Department of Commerce. Right now, USPS operates independently of any other federal department.
APWU’s ad campaign highlights a document sent by Wells Fargo Equity Research earlier this year to the bank’s investors detailing proposed plans by the White House to privatize postal services, which could lead to the closing of local post offices, increasing postage prices and the potential end to the “Universal Service Obligation” — where mail is delivered six and sometimes seven times a week to American residences and businesses, according to the union.
Mail service changes aimed at cost savings for the federal government are already being implemented as well — and even prior to President Trump’s return to the White House.
Last year, the USPS under former President Joe Biden’s administration, outsourced the bulk of eastern South Dakota’s outgoing mail distribution operations to Fargo and Omaha.
“The business case supports transferring mail processing outgoing operations to the Omaha Processing and Distribution Center,” a USPS spokesperson said in May 2024. “Currently, a majority of mail and packages are destined outside the Sioux Falls area to the rest of the world.”
That came as part of the USPS’s “Delivering for America” initiative that promised to spend $40 billion nationally to modernize services.
The Scout reported that USPS is shuttering its satellite retail locations. In Sioux Falls, that will leave two locations to purchase USPS postage and ship postal-carried packages.
Beginning on Sept. 30, retailers like Lewis Drug and Hy-Vee will no longer be offering mailing services. Both companies and the USPS have confirmed the end of Contract Postal Unit (CPU) agreements that had provided for USPS counters within private retail locations that have been operated by employees of the retailer.
“We’ve exercised our right (to close CPU locations) where nearby post offices that are operated by the Postal Service are capable of serving the community directly,” a USPS spokesperson told The Scout, adding that the move “better enables us to fulfill our commitment to serve our communities with efficient and reliable access to retail services.”
With the closures, the two USPS-operated retail locations that will remain in Sioux Falls will be downtown at 320 S. Second Ave. and in the southwest part of the city at 2501 S. Louise Ave. The Postal Service has not indicated whether it would increase staffing at those locations to accommodate shifts in service demand.
Along with South Dakota, the APWU ad campaign aired in Alaska, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana and North Carolina. National placements were also scheduled to run on CNN, MSNBC and FOX News.