On February 5, 2025 — two weeks into the second Trump administration, with Elon Musk's DOGE operation moving through federal agencies and firing people — Robert Aderholt posted this on X:

"I know @elonmusk you've got a lot on your plate right now, but would love your help to get the @USPS back on track. It's currently a disaster and an embarrassment. It's by far the biggest source of complaint we receive about the federal government."

Read that as what it is: a sitting member of Congress asking an unelected billionaire to come take on a federal institution.

Aderholt is not a bystander in Washington. He has served since 1997. He sits on the House Appropriations Committee, and he chairs its subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. Appropriators are the people who hold the purse. When something in the federal government is broken, they are the specific individuals the Constitution assigns to do something about it.

He had a real complaint — his constituents were unhappy with their mail. He has the standing to hold hearings, write law, and condition money. What he did instead was tag a private citizen on social media and ask him for help.

Who Musk was, at that moment

This wasn't a request made in a vacuum. In early February 2025, DOGE was moving through the federal government — USAID was being dismantled and folded into the State Department, with mass layoffs across the agency.

Musk held no Senate-confirmed office. He ran companies with billions of dollars in federal contracts and open federal investigations. He had not been elected by anyone.

Aderholt's post did not ask for oversight of DOGE. It asked DOGE for a favor.

What the Postal Service is, in north Alabama

Alabama's 4th District is rural and poor. 36,500 households there — about 13% of every household in the district — are on SNAP, including 12,922 with a senior over 60. Those are households for whom the mail is not one delivery option among several.

Aderholt knows this. He has sponsored the Deliver for Democracy Act, aimed at helping local newspapers hurt by postal delays and rate increases.

Which makes the ask stranger, not better. He understands exactly how much rural Alabama depends on the mail — and in the same breath, invited the man then running the government's demolition crew to take a look at it.

The Postal Service is also, by law, an independent establishment of the executive branch. It is not a line item Musk or anyone else could simply reorganize by decree. "Help from Elon" is not a mechanism. It's a wish, posted publicly, by one of the few hundred people in America who has actual mechanisms available.

It fits everything else

The pattern runs through his whole record: hand the power away, then complain about the outcome. He voted to reject two states' electoral votes and then voted against both investigations into the attack on the Capitol — twice declining the oversight that was his to conduct. As chairman of the Labor-HHS subcommittee, he wrote a bill that eliminates federal adult and youth job training entirely and cuts the Department of Labor by 27 percent, then held a press conference about the $22 million it sends to hospitals in his district.

Congress spent decades accumulating power over the executive branch. Aderholt has spent 29 years there. In February 2025 he used a piece of that inheritance to ask a private billionaire for a favor.

Nobody in the district gets to ask him about it

North Alabama has not had a chance to raise this with him in public. Aderholt has not held a public in-person town hall in years. When constituents in Northport organized their own in March 2025 and left an empty chair for him, he did not show up. He says he prefers "one-on-one" meetings at his district offices — private conversations, where nobody else hears the question or the answer.

So the man whose mail is "a disaster and an embarrassment" tells that to Elon Musk on X, and not to a room full of the people waiting on it.

Aderholt is on the ballot again in November.

We deserve better.

Source

Rep. Aderholt requests Elon Musk's assistance in getting USPS 'back on track' — Austen Shipley, Yellowhammer News, February 6, 2025.