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Ex Manibus Populi

Deliver America

One Nation. One Network.

A proposal for the public acquisition of Amazon's Delivery Network at fair market value, merged with the United States Postal Service under a new federally chartered public authority.

Save the Post Office, transform one million workers into federal employees overnight, and establish a democratic model for the age of automation.

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$9.5B USPS annual loss
1M+ Workers get benefits on Day One
~$200B Estimated going-concern value
688% Distribution Network volume growth since 2018
The Case For Action

Two Networks.
One Solution.

The United States Postal Service is losing $9.5 billion a year. Amazon has spent $194 billion building a parallel national delivery network in under a decade. Meanwhile, more than one million warehouse workers and delivery drivers lack the basic protections that postal workers have carried for generations.

Deliver America addresses all three problems at once. A negotiated acquisition at fair market value, financed through publicly offered American Commerce Bonds and repaid by the network's own operating revenue, would create a single national delivery system worthy of the 21st century. Without costing taxpayers a dollar.

01

The Postal Crisis

USPS has lost $109 billion since 2007, keeps failing rural communities, and could exhaust its cash reserves by 2031. The revenue model is broken and cannot be unbroken from within.

02

The Labor Opportunity

One million workers: warehouse staff, delivery drivers, contractors would become federal employees on Day One. Health insurance, pension, OSHA protection, wage floors. The largest single workforce transformation in American history.

03

The Automation Dividend

As Amazon's 1 million+ robots displace human labor, those savings, the Automation Dividend, would belong to the American people, not shareholders. A democratic model for the age of AI.

The Constitutional Foundation

The Founders Built This.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to establish post offices and post roads. It is one of only 18 enumerated powers, listed alongside declaring war and coining money. The Founders considered delivery infrastructure so essential to democratic self-government that they named it explicitly before most other federal institutions existed.

Deliver America is the 21st century expression of that founding mandate. When the primary infrastructure of American commerce shifts from post roads to fulfillment networks, the constitutional obligation to maintain that infrastructure does not expire. It adapts.

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If you are Jeff Bezos: Hello. We Should Talk.

Plain Language Answers To

Frequently Asked Questions

Deliver America is a proposal for the United States government to purchase Amazon's delivery network (the warehouses, trucks, planes, and robots) and merge it with the U.S. Postal Service under a new kind of public authority. Think of it less like a government takeover and more like what happened with the interstate highway system: private infrastructure that serves everyone becomes public infrastructure owned by everyone. The price would be negotiated at fair market value. Amazon's shareholders get paid. The American people get the network.
The short answer: Congress broke it. In 2006, lawmakers passed a requirement that forced the Postal Service to pre-fund retiree health benefits 75 years into the future, meaning it had to set aside money today for employees who haven't been born yet. No other government agency and no private company in America faces this requirement. That single mandate is responsible for 84 percent of USPS's total reported losses since 2007. The Post Office's actual delivery operations are a separate problem, but a manageable one. The financial crisis is largely artificial, and it was made in Washington.
Amazon's logistics operation specifically: the fulfillment centers, sortation centers, delivery stations, trucks, vans, aircraft, robots, and the software that runs all of it. As of 2024, that's roughly 1,363 facilities, 435 million square feet of operational space, 40,000 semi-trucks, 30,000 delivery vans, 110 aircraft, and more than 1 million robots. Also the approximately 1 million people who work in that network, who would become federal employees on Day One.
Nothing. They stay exactly as they are. Deliver America acquires the delivery infrastructure. The roads, if you will. Amazon keeps the stores along the road. Amazon.com, Prime Video, Amazon Web Services, Alexa, Whole Foods, Ring: none of that is part of this proposal. If you order something on Amazon tomorrow, you are still ordering from Amazon. It might just arrive in a different truck.
Through publicly offered infrastructure bonds: American Commerce Bonds. This is how America has financed big public investments before, from World War II war bonds to the interstate highway system. Ordinary Americans can buy them. The bonds would be repaid over time through the revenue the network generates. The Distribution Network already bills more than $31 billion a year in external shipping revenue — and under public ownership, billing its full throughput at regulated market rates, that base would expand substantially. The network would pay for itself. This is an investment, not an expenditure.
The proposal is specifically designed not to. The acquisition would be financed by bonds, not appropriations. The bonds would be repaid by operating revenue from the network itself. There would be no line item in the federal budget appropriating funds for the purchase. What there would be instead is a self-financing infrastructure investment, the same basic model as a toll road or a port authority: assets that generate enough revenue to cover their own costs.
On the day the acquisition closes, every worker in the Amazon logistics network would become a federal employee. That means health insurance, a pension, civil service protections, OSHA enforcement, a grievance process, and wage floors. For many of these workers, who currently have none of those things, it would be a significant and immediate improvement in their lives. It would also be, by a wide margin, the largest single workforce reclassification in American history.
Most of Amazon's delivery drivers don't actually work for Amazon. They work for roughly 4,400 small businesses called Delivery Service Partners, which contract with Amazon to handle last-mile delivery. These drivers are classified as independent contractors, which means they generally don't have benefits, job security, or labor protections. Deliver America would address this directly: reclassifying these workers as part of the federal workforce is a core commitment of the proposal, not an afterthought.
That depends on your definition, but by most reasonable ones: no. The government would not be seizing anything. Amazon's shareholders would be paid fair market value, negotiated through normal commercial means. The financing would be through bonds purchased by private investors, not tax revenue. And the end result would be a public utility: infrastructure owned collectively and operated in the public interest. That is a category America has always been comfortable with. The interstate highway system is public infrastructure. The power grid is largely public infrastructure. So is the water system, and the air traffic control network. Deliver America would put package delivery in the same category.
The government wouldn't run it the way it runs the DMV. Deliver America would be governed by a federally chartered public authority. Think the Tennessee Valley Authority or the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey: a professional board, a CEO with commercial logistics experience, and operational independence from congressional micromanagement. During the first 2 years, Amazon's existing management team would stay in place. Nothing would change operationally. The federal employment status and benefits would transfer immediately; the integration would happen gradually over years, not overnight.
Amazon's network is already heavily automated: more than 1 million robots and counting, with more deployed every year. As automation replaces human labor, the cost of running the network goes down. Under private ownership, those savings flow to shareholders. Under public ownership, Deliver America proposes that a defined percentage of those savings be redirected to: repaying the acquisition bonds faster, funding retraining and income support for workers whose jobs are automated, expanding rural delivery service, and reducing shipping costs for American businesses and households. The Automation Dividend is the mechanism that makes automation work for everyone, not just the people who own it.
In the short term: nothing visible. The network would operate under existing management as a subsidiary. Your packages would still arrive, likely on the same schedule, possibly in the same trucks. Over several years, the Postal Service and the Deliver America network would integrate their infrastructure, particularly in rural areas where USPS already goes everywhere and Amazon's technology could make those routes faster and cheaper.
Two reasons. First, "fixing" the Post Office in isolation means finding a way to reverse two decades of mail volume decline, which is not coming back. Email exists. The underlying revenue model is broken and cannot be unbroken by management changes or efficiency drives. Second, Amazon has already built a national delivery network that does what a 21st century postal service should do. Acquiring it would be faster, cheaper, and more effective than trying to build the equivalent from scratch inside a struggling federal agency.
Because the window is closing. In 2025, Amazon became the largest parcel carrier in the United States by volume for the first time, surpassing USPS. Amazon is now actively opening its network to outside shippers, building a customer base that will make the network more expensive to acquire with every passing year. The more customers Amazon has, the more complex the acquisition becomes, and the less leverage the public has in the negotiation. The moment to act is before that network fully matures into an independent logistics giant with no incentive to sell.
Read the full proposal at DeliverAmerica.org. Share it with people who make decisions: your representatives, your local officials, journalists, policy researchers. If you work in logistics, technology, labor, or rural communities and have expertise or a story relevant to this proposal, we want to hear from you. This is a public idea. The more people who engage with it seriously, the better it gets.

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The Proposal

Read the White Paper

A detailed policy proposal for the public acquisition of Amazon's Delivery Network. Rigorous, sourced, and written for policymakers, researchers, journalists, and anyone who believes the Post Office is worth saving.

Deliver America

Version 1.0  ·  July 4, 2026  ·  Katharine Lee Nelson

A Proposal for the Public Acquisition of Amazon's Delivery Network and the Transformation of the United States Postal Service. Covers the constitutional foundation, asset valuation, labor transformation, the Automation Dividend, acquisition structure, transition plan, the fiscal case, and our unique political moment.

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The Automation Dividend

Preview  ·  July 2026

A teaser for the companion paper: a democratic framework for the age of intelligent machines. When automation replaces human labor, who should own the savings?

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Forthcoming: Summer 2026

The Automation Dividend

A Democratic Framework for the Age of Intelligent Machines

When machines replace human labor, who captures the value? Under private ownership, the answer has always been shareholders. The Automation Dividend paper proposes a different answer and a governing framework that extends beyond any single acquisition to manufacturing, trucking, agriculture, and beyond.

About

Our Team

The people behind Deliver America

Katharine Lee Nelson
Founder

Katharine Lee Nelson is an engineer and entrepreneur based in the Pacific Northwest. Her background spans civic technology, artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering, and manufacturing. She has delivered infrastructure upgrades from Los Angeles, California to Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Katharine is the founder and first author of Deliver America.

Deliver America was written with a team of lawyers, technologists, and advisors, and with research and editorial assistance from Claude, Anthropic's AI. We disclose that because transparency about how we work matters as much as the work itself.

If you are a policymaker, a journalist, a potential ally, or simply someone who believes the Post Office is worth saving and Amazon's workers deserve better, this proposal is for you.

For press inquiries, partnership conversations, or to share expertise relevant to this proposal:

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An Open Letter

To Jeffrey Preston Bezos

July 5, 2026

Dear Mr. Bezos,

You built something extraordinary. Starting from a single warehouse in Bellevue, Amazon has defined the way the modern world works, plays and communicates. It's hard t imagine the 21st century without your influence.

So much of what you built is, at this point, national infrastructure. Amazon delivery moves the commerce of American life. It goes where people are, or increasingly, where they will be. The best measure of your success is that the country now wants a stake in it.

Deliver America proposes that the United States government acquire Amazon's delivery network, now essential for American prosperity and stability, and operate it under public authority inside the United States Postal Service. We will pay fair market value, financed through publicly offered American Commerce Bonds.

Deliver America is a proposal, but it is also an invitation:

As the leader of a technology company, you have relentlessly advocated for your customers and our priorities. This approach has been so effective that today, almost everyone in the United States is your customer. In light of this success, Deliver America invites you to reframe those priorities: from the needs of your customers, to the needs of your fellow citizens.

The decision to sell this network into public hands would shape American commerce for another century by making vital infrastructure answerable to the people it serves.

The white paper at this address makes the full case: the constitutional foundation of our proposal, the transition plan, and our financial assumptions.

We hope you will give it serious consideration and would welcome a conversation at your convenience.

Sincerely,

Katharine Lee Nelson
Founder, Deliver America
DeliverAmerica.org
July 5, 2026