I don’t that USPS is a government “agency” as much as it is a government “corporation”. Officially, it is an “independent establishment of the Executive Branch.”
Some receive taxpayer funding, some don’t. The Postal Service manages to run itself well enough that it doesn’t need any special bailouts. (Unlike, a similarly setup government entity, Amtrak.)
As for the Army, the President is the Commander-in-Chief so I assume he could fire just about anyone he wanted to.
Well, I used the Army as an off-the-cuff example of a professional government service. I don’t know exactly how its members can be discharged. I could have used the Civil Service, but that wouldn’t have been quite the right comparison since it’s a “row” instead of a “column”, i.e., it’s a set of grades for various bureaus instead of a single bureau.
The point is, the President can’t fire more than a tiny fraction of Federal employees, but they’re still Federal employees, whether they are Postal workers, Fed governors, or the Director of the FBI.
The president has the power, except to the extent limited by creating legislation, to fire any federal executive branch employee. Ask the air traffic controllers for an example of the power in action.
One would have to look at the current legislation enabling the Postal Service to see if the President keeps any power over the organization. My thought is that he doesn’t, which is why it is not considered a federal agency. Of course, there are shades of grey… 
As for the USPS’s monopoly, that is not guaranteed in the Constitution. Congress was not required to set up a postal service, it was simply empowered to do so. Congress can’t do anything the Constitution doesn’t empower it to do. But once empowered, it can set that agency up in any way it chooses, subject to any other restrictions contained in the Constitution.
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Originally posted by Drum God:
**Congress does not have the authority (by itself) to lift the USPS monopoly. It is guarranteed by the US Constitution. An amendment to said document would be required (congress plus state ratification).
(I’m not a lawyer, this is a serious question)
A possibly odd question: Congress has to make a post office. Do they really have to keep the same one? What if they decided that, say, UPS was now the official US Post Office? They have been maintaining the USPS monopoly for years - what if they decided that someone else was to have that monopoly? Does it have to be the same company, or can they ‘re-establish’ it elsewhere?
-Elthia
I would assume that the Congress could disestablish USPS or open up mail delivery to open competition with appropriate legislation. I certainly hope there would be some sort of transitional period as the changeover would likely be a mess.