SEATTLE/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump called on the U.S. Postal Service on Friday to charge “much more” to ship packages for Amazon (AMZN.O), picking another fight with an online retail giant he has criticized in the past. 
 
 “Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer? Should be charging MUCH MORE!” Trump wrote on Twitter. 
 
 The president’s tweet drew fresh attention to the fragile finances of the Postal Service at a time when tens of millions of parcels have just been shipped all over the country for the holiday season. 
 
 The U.S. Postal Service, which runs at a big loss, is an independent agency within the federal government and does not receive tax dollars for operating expenses, according to its website. 
 
 Package delivery has become an increasingly important part of its business as the Internet has led to a sharp decline in the amount of first-class letters. 
 
 The president does not determine postal rates. They are set by the Postal Regulatory Commission, an independent government agency with commissioners selected by the president from both political parties. That panel raised prices on packages by almost 2 percent in November. 
 
 Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos, who remains the chief executive officer of the retail company and is the richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg News. Bezos also owns The Washington Post, a newspaper Trump has repeatedly railed against in his criticisms of the news media. 
 
 In tweets over the past year, Trump has said the “Amazon Washington Post” fabricated stories. He has said Amazon does not pay sales tax, which is not true, and so hurts other retailers, part of a pattern by the former businessman and reality television host of periodically turning his ire on big American companies since he took office in January. 
 
 Daniel Ives, a research analyst at GBH Insights, said Trump’s comment could be taken as a warning to the retail giant. However, he said he was not concerned for Amazon. 
 
 “We do not see any price hikes in the future. However, that is a risk that Amazon is clearly aware of and (it) is building out its distribution (system) aggressively,” he said. 
 
 Amazon has shown interest in the past in shifting into its own delivery service, including testing drones for deliveries. In 2015, the company spent $11.5 billion on shipping, 46 percent of its total operating expenses that year. 
 
 Amazon shares were down 0.86 percent to $1,175.90 by early afternoon. Overall, U.S. stock prices were down slightly on Friday. 
 
 MILLIONS OF PARCELS 
 
 Satish Jindel, president of ShipMatrix Inc, which analyzes shipping data, disputed the idea that the Postal Service charges less than United Parcel Service Inc (UPS.N) and FedEx Corp (FDX.N), the other biggest players in the parcel delivery business in the United States. 
 
 Many customers get lower rates from UPS and FedEx than they would get from the post office for comparable services, he said. 
 
 The Postal Service delivers about 62 percent of Amazon packages, for about 3.5 to 4 million a day during the current peak year-end holiday shipping season, Jindel said. The Seattle-based company and the post office have an agreement in which mail carriers take Amazon packages on the last leg of their journeys, from post offices to customers’ doorsteps. 
 
 Amazon’s No. 2 carrier is UPS, at 21 percent, and FedEx is third, with 8 percent or so, according to Jindel. 
 
 Trump’s comment tapped into a debate over whether Postal Service pricing has kept pace with the rise of e-commerce, which has flooded the mail with small packages.Private companies like UPS have long claimed the current system unfairly undercuts their business. 
 
 Steve Gaut, a spokesman for UPS, noted that the company values its “productive relationship” with the postal service, but that it has filed with the Postal Regulatory Commission its concerns about the postal service’s methods for covering costs. 
 
 Representatives for Amazon, the White House, the U.S. Postal Service and FedEx declined comment or were not immediately available for comment on Trump’s tweet. 
 
 According to its annual report, the Postal Service lost $2.74 billion this year, and its deficit has ballooned to $61.86 billion. 
 
 While the Postal Service’s revenue for first class mail, marketing mail and periodicals is flat or declining, revenue from package delivery is up 44 percent since 2014 to $19.5 billion in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2017. 
 
 FILE PHOTO: A combination photo shows Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (L) in New York and U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, DC, U.S. on December 14, 2016 and on December 20, 2017 respectively. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton (L) Jonathan Ernst (R)/Files 
 
 But it also lost about $2 billion in revenue when a temporary surcharge expired in April 2016. 
 
 According to a Government Accountability Office report in February, the service is facing growing personnel expenses, particularly $73.4 billion in unfunded pension and benefits liabilities. The Postal Service has not announced any plans to cut costs. 
 
 By law, the Postal Service has to set prices for package delivery to cover the costs attributable to that service. But the postal service allocates only 5.5 percent of its total costs to its business of shipping packages even though that line of business is 28 percent of its total revenue. ||||| LISTEN TO ARTICLE 4:26 SHARE THIS ARTICLE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email 
 
 President Donald Trump ordered the creation of a task force to review business practices at the United States Postal Service, a move that could affect one of the president’s favorite corporate targets: Amazon.com Inc. 
 
 “The USPS is on an unsustainable financial path and must be restructured to prevent a taxpayer-funded bailout,” the president said in an order that was released Thursday night. The order calls for an examination of the Postal Service’s pricing, policies and workforce costs. 
 
 The Postal Service has lost more than $65 billion over the past decade as Americans increasingly transmit messages online, according to the executive order. The task force will be led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin or his designee, according to the order. 
 
 Amazon.com packages at a USPS sorting center. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg 
 
 In a series of Twitter messages, Trump has accused Amazon of draining the Postal Service of money it can’t afford to lose. Trump’s sustained attacks on one of the world’s largest companies have hurt Amazon’s stock price and raised questions about government interference in the private sector. 
 
 A White House official said the presidential order was intended to come up with solutions to the problems at the Postal Service. The official didn’t deny that the task force’s recommendations could affect Amazon. A second White House official disputed the notion that the order was directed at Amazon, and also said that the task force was charged with improving the mail service. 
 
 Both officials were granted anonymity, to discuss administration deliberations. 
 
 Read more: How the Post Office Makes Amazon a Federal Issue 
 
 Amazon declined to comment. 
 
 Trump has claimed that Amazon was “costing the United States Post Office massive amounts of money for being their Delivery Boy,” a situation that puts “many thousands of retailers out of business.” He repeated a claim that the postal service loses “$1.50 on average for each package it delivers for Amazon” and said “only fools, or worse” believe the Postal Service makes money from doing business with Amazon. 
 
 Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, also owns the Washington Post, which has aggressively covered the Trump administration. 
 
 Since signing a landmark five-year contract in 2013 to deliver packages on Sundays, Amazon and the Postal Service have declared their business relationship a success, although the terms of the contract are confidential. 
 
 ‘Last Mile’ 
 
 The Postal Service says it makes money on the Amazon deal, and it’s legally prohibited from charging shippers less than its delivery costs. E-commerce revenue provides “essential support to pay for the network and infrastructure that enables us to fulfill our universal service obligation,” David Partenheimer, a spokesman for the Postal Service, wrote in a January op-ed. “All users of the mail benefit.” 
 
 Amazon regularly uses the Postal Service to complete what’s called the “last mile” of delivery, with letter carriers dropping off packages at some 150 million residences and businesses daily. The company has a network of 35 “sort center” where customer packages are sorted by ZIP code, stacked on pallets and delivered to post offices for the final leg of delivery. 
 
 “Amazon has the money to pay the fair rate at the Post Office, which would be much more than they’re paying now,” Trump said to reporters at the White House earlier this month. “Amazon is going to have to pay much more money to the Post Office, there’s no doubt about that.” 
 
 The executive order requires the commission to examine “the expansion and pricing of the package delivery market and the USPS’s role in competitive markets.” 
 
 Previous Studies 
 
 It’s not clear what effect the task force would ultimately have, since most changes to the Postal Service’s business structure would require new legislation. The Postal Service is an independent organization and its mail rates are set by a commission. 
 
 The task force will be looking at issues that have been studied for years by multiple government bodies that have already issued recommendations and reports focusing on the financial stability of the Postal Service. 
 
 For example, Trump’s executive order requires the task force to review the definition of the “universal service obligation,” which is a loosely defined mandate for the Postal Service to provide affordable service to all customers. 
 
 The Post Service’s Office of Inspector General issued a report in 2014 with recommendations for redefining the obligation in the digital age. In 2016, the same office released a report with recommendations for financing the mandate. 
 
 The task force will be required to submit a report to the president within 120 days with recommendations for “administrative and legislative reforms,” according to the order. 
 
 — With assistance by Jennifer Jacobs, Ben Brody, and Olivia Zaleski ||||| President Trump has personally pushed U.S. Postmaster General Megan Brennan to double the rate the Postal Service charges Amazon.com and other firms to ship packages, according to three people familiar with their conversations, a dramatic move that probably would cost these companies billions of dollars. 
 
 Brennan has so far resisted Trump’s demand, explaining in multiple conversations occurring this year and last that these arrangements are bound by contracts and must be reviewed by a regulatory commission, the three people said. She has told the president that the Amazon relationship is beneficial for the Postal Service and gave him a set of slides that showed the variety of companies, in addition to Amazon, that also partner for deliveries. 
 
 Despite these presentations, Trump has continued to level criticism at Amazon. And last month, his critiques culminated in the signing of an executive order mandating a government review of the financially strapped Postal Service that could lead to major changes in the way it charges Amazon and others for package delivery. 
 
 Few U.S. companies have drawn Trump’s ire as much as Amazon, which has rapidly grown to be the second-largest U.S. company in terms of market capitalization. For more than three years, Trump has fumed publicly and privately about the giant commerce and services company and its founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, who is also the owner of The Washington Post. 
 
 [Paul Carlin, postmaster general who fought his dismisal, dies at 86] 
 
 Trump alleges that Amazon is being subsidized by the Postal Service. He has also accused The Post of being Amazon’s “chief lobbyist” as well as a tax shelter — false charges. He says Amazon uses these advantages to push bricks-and-mortar companies out of business. Some administration officials say several of Trump’s attacks aimed at Amazon have come in response to articles in The Post that he didn’t like. 
 
 The three people familiar with these exchanges spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the White House’s internal deliberations. 
 
 Brennan and Trump have met at the White House about the matter several times, beginning in 2017, and most recently four months ago, the three people said. The meetings have never appeared on Trump’s public schedule. Brennan has spent her career at the Postal Service, starting 32 years ago as a letter carrier. In 2014, the Postal Service’s Board of Governors voted to appoint her as postmaster general. 
 
 Clouding the matter even further, Trump’s aides have also disagreed internally about whether Amazon is paying enough to the Postal Service, with some believing the giant commerce company should be paying more, while others believe that if it weren’t for Amazon, the Postal Service might be out of business, according to the three people. 
 
 Trump has met with at least three groups of senior advisers to discuss Amazon’s business practices, probing issues such as whether they pay the appropriate amount of taxes or underpay the Postal Service, according to the three people. 
 
 These groups include Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, then-National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and Domestic Policy Council Director Andrew Bremberg. Bremberg has served as a key liaison with Brennan. 
 
 One of Amazon’s biggest defenders within the White House was Cohn, who had told Trump that the Postal Service actually made money on the payments Amazon made for package delivery. Cohn announced his departure from the White House in March. 
 
 The White House, the Postal Service and Amazon — as well as Bezos, via an Amazon spokesman — declined to comment for this report. 
 
 While Trump has leveled a variety of criticisms at Amazon, his efforts to increase the company’s shipping and delivery costs stand as the only known official action he’s taken to go after the company. 
 
 [Is the post office making or losing money delivering Amazon packages?] 
 
 The company, meanwhile, has tread carefully around Trump. It has dramatically expanded its spending on lobbying in the past few years, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, but Amazon officials have not been directly engaged with White House officials about the review, according to the three people familiar with the White House deliberations as well as others familiar with Amazon’s approach. 
 
 The company has, however, hosted more than a dozen lawmakers and governors at numerous Amazon facilities across the country to impress upon them the company’s economic footprint and job creation potential. 
 
 On March 7, when the company announced that it would be building a new fulfillment center in Missouri and hiring 1,500 employees, it alerted the state’s two U.S. senators on Twitter, Democrat Claire McCaskill and Republican Roy Blunt. 
 
 Trump has berated Amazon and The Post on social media, briefly driving down Amazon’s stock price. And he has said publicly that he doesn’t believe the information he has been presented by some of his advisers and Brennan herself regarding the Postal Service’s contract with Amazon. 
 
 “I am right about Amazon costing the United States Post Office massive amounts of money for being their Delivery Boy,” he tweeted on April 3. “Amazon should pay these costs (plus) and not have them bourne by the American Taxpayer. Many billions of dollars. P.O. leaders don’t have a clue (or do they?)!” 
 
 Details of Amazon’s contract with the Postal Service are secret, making it difficult for financial experts to assess claims about the relationship. Amazon has said that publicly releasing the contract, which contains detailed information on the company’s delivery systems, would give competitors an unfair advantage. 
 
 Amazon primarily uses the Postal Service for the “last mile” of its deliveries. It brings the packages to the post office closest to the final destination, and then the Postal Service takes it from there. The Postal Service says other companies also have “last-mile” agreements with it but declined to name them. 
 
 Amazon is the leading player in e-commerce but competes with other retail giants such as Walmart, Macy’s and Costco to offer fast and inexpensive delivery of products. The Postal Service competes with UPS, FedEx and others for delivery. 
 
 Amazon said it spent $21.7 billion on shipping costs in 2017, a figure that includes sorting, delivery center and transportation costs. Roughly 40 percent of its packages are delivered by the Postal Service, according to some analysts, a figure neither Amazon nor the Postal Service have confirmed. It is not known how much Amazon pays the Postal Service each year and what percentage of its items are shipped via the Postal Service. 
 
 The Postal Service, meanwhile, reported shipping and package income of $19.5 billion last year, an 11.8 percent increase from one year before. This increase wasn’t enough to stop the Postal Service from losing money for the eleventh straight year. That’s largely because of the continued decline in first-class mail, and high health benefit costs that the Postal Service must set aside for future retirees, according to data released by the agency. 
 
 Delivering packages has been a financial boon to the Postal Service in an otherwise tumultuous time, but experts say it is an open question whether Amazon’s arrangement fully compensates the Postal Service for its range of expenses. While the Postal Service is legally prohibited from charging a shipper less than it costs to deliver a package, the Postal Service is not required to include in its costs things such as retiree benefits. 
 
 David Vernon, an analyst at Bernstein Research, estimates that Amazon pays the Postal Service roughly $2 per package for each delivery, about half of what Amazon would pay United Parcel Service or FedEx. He based this estimate on broader data released by the Postal Service. 
 
 The Postal Service has tried to rapidly adjust its business model to take on more package delivery, but he said it would be better suited if it delivered fewer packages at a higher rate. 
 
 “In my business judgment, there’s too much ‘package’ in the postal network,” he said in an interview. “If you doubled the price, you would have fewer of them, but you would make money off what is left.” 
 
 Still, Postal Service officials, both in meetings with Trump and publicly, have insisted that they are making money off their arrangement with Amazon. 
 
 [It’s not just Amazon: Apple quietly explores Northern Virginia for 20,000 workers] 
 
 In January, Postal Service spokesman David Partenheimer wrote an op-ed in the Hill newspaper pushing back against calls for it to raise package rates. 
 
 “Some of our competitors in the package delivery space would dearly love for the Postal Service to aggressively raise our rates higher than the marketplace can bear — so they could either charge more themselves or siphon away postal customers,” he wrote. “. . . The Postal Service is a self-funding public institution that generates its revenue from the sale of postal products and service, we compete for every customer across all of our product categories, and we exist for the benefit of American businesses and consumers.” 
 
 Because the Postal Service has lost money for 11 straight years, it has had to repeatedly borrow funds from the Treasury Department’s Federal Financing Bank, totaling $15 billion. Its reliance on Federal Financing Bank funds has allowed Mnuchin — one of Trump’s closest advisers — to gain a foothold in its future. 
 
 One of Mnuchin’s counselors, Craig Phillips, is leading Trump’s review of the Postal Service, along with Kathy Kraninger, associate director for general government at the Office of Management and Budget. It is due in August. 
 
 The review group is tasked with reviewing the package delivery market, the Postal Service’s role in that market and the decline in first-class mail volume, among other things. It is required to recommend changes to the White House and Congress. 
 
 [After Amazon opposition, Seattle passes compromise tax to fund homeless services] 
 
 The Postal Service is overseen by a board of nine governors, which pick the postmaster general and the deputy postmaster general. Currently, there are no governors serving on the board, though Trump has nominated three individuals who are awaiting Senate confirmation. The Postal Service, led by the postmaster, works out contracts with private companies that are approved by an independent federal agency, the Postal Regulatory Commission, which also assesses each year whether the contracts are in compliance with the law. Amazon has a multiyear contract with the Postal Service, and it is not clear how quickly it could be changed. 
 
 Trump’s attacks on Amazon date to 2015, when he accused Bezos of using The Post as a tax shelter to allow Amazon to avoid paying taxes, a false accusation. (Amazon is a publicly traded company, and The Post, wholly owned by Bezos, is private. The companies’ finances are not intermingled. The Post’s editors and Bezos also have declared that he is not involved in any journalistic decisions.) 
 
 Bezos responded to Trump’s 2015 attack with a tweet. 
 
 “Finally trashed by @realDonaldTrump. Will still reserve him a seat on the Blue Origin rocket. #sendDonaldtospace,” Bezos, who owns a space company, tweeted in December 2015. 
 
 This angered Trump, who at the time was fighting for credibility during the GOP primary. 
 
 “Trump takes everything personally,” said Steve Moore, a former economic adviser to Trump during the 2016 campaign. 
 
 Moore says he has told White House officials that Amazon is paying the Postal Service plenty for its services and in fact helping the agency survive. 
 
 But others say Trump sees one company exploiting the government for a competitive edge. Amazon’s stock price has risen close to 70 percent in the past year, and a growing list of competitors have complained that they have a hard time competing with the giant company on delivery, its cloud-computing business and more. 
 
 “I think this particular issue is one that he comes at from his business background and understanding the dynamics of cost and delivery and overhead,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) said of Trump’s approach to the postal issue with Amazon. “And so . . . when you put all those components in there, it allows him to probably have a position on this that is deeper rooted in an understanding of a business model than perhaps some other presidents.” 
 
 Erica Werner contributed to this report.
– President Trump trotted out a familiar whipping boy on Saturday, tweeting that Amazon was screwing over none other than the United States Postal Service. "The U.S. Post Office will lose $1.50 on average for each package it delivers for Amazon," he tweeted, adding that "That amounts to Billions of Dollars." Trump says the USPS should jack its parcel rates, hitting Amazon with a $2.6 billion hike. "This Post Office scam must stop. Amazon must pay real costs (and taxes) now!" he tweeted. Trump's criticism has hit Amazon in the wallet, notes CNBC, with its stock taking a 6% slide in the last five trading days. Trump also took a swipe at another favorite Jeff Bezos-owned punching bag: The Washington Post, which he says "is used as a 'lobbyist' and should so REGISTER." The AP fact-checks Trump's claims and finds that "Trump is misrepresenting Amazon's record on taxes, the U.S. Postal Service's financial situation and the contract that has the post office deliver some Amazon orders. Federal regulators have found that contract to be profitable for the Postal Service." Though it acknowledges that a 2017 study found that USPS parcel rates were below market rates.