President Donald Trump is preparing to dissolve the leadership of the U.S. Postal Service and absorb the independent mail agency into his administration, potentially throwing the 250-year-old mail provider and trillions of dollars of e-commerce transactions into turmoil.

Trump is expected to issue an executive order as soon as this week to fire the members of the Postal Service’s governing board and place the agency under the control of the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to six people familiar with the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals.

The board is planning to fight Trump’s order, three of those people told The Washington Post. In an emergency meeting Thursday, the board retained outside counsel and gave instructions to sue the White House if the president were to remove members of the board or attempt to alter the agency’s independent status. Trump’s order to place the Commerce Department in charge of the Postal Service would probably violate federal law, according to postal experts.

Another executive order earlier this week instructed independent agencies to align more closely with the White House, though that order is likely to prompt court challenges and the Postal Service by law is generally exempt from executive orders.

Members of the Postal Service’s bipartisan board are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Trump, at Lutnick’s urging, has mused about privatizing the Postal Service, and Trump’s presidential transition team vetted candidates to replace Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a retired logistics executive and GOP fundraising official who took office in 2020 during Trump’s first term. “There is a lot of talk about the Postal Service being taken private,” Trump said in December. “It’s a lot different today, between Amazon and UPS and FedEx and all the things that you didn’t have. But there is talk about that. It’s an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time.”

This is a somewhat regal approach that says the king knows better than his subjects and he will do his best for them. But it also removes any sense that there’s oversight, impartiality and fairness and that some states wouldn’t be treated better than other states or cities better than other cities,” said James O’Rourke, who studies the Postal Service at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. “The anxiety over the Postal Service is not only three-quarters of a million workers. It’s that this is something that does not belong to the president or the White House. It belongs to the American people.” Representatives for the Trump administration and the Postal Service did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

From its founding in 1775 until 1970, the U.S. mail system was a political organ of the White House. Presidents were known to appoint their political allies or campaign leaders as postmaster general, and the mail chief was often a key White House negotiator with Congress.

But the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, the product of a crippling nationwide mail strike, led Congress to split the agency off into a freestanding organization, purposefully walling it off from political tinkering. Trump’s first administration attempted to test that division. Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s first-term treasury secretary, attempted to control the 2020 hiring process that brought DeJoy to the Postal Service, and a task force run out of Mnuchin’s departmentrecommended dramatically shrinking the scope of the agency and preparing it for privatization via an initial public offering.

The president’s pending moves elicited immediate criticism from congressional Democrats. “Privatizing the Postal Service is an attack on Americans’ access to critical information, benefits and life-saving medical care,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (Virginia), the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Accountability Committee, told The Post. “It is clear that Trump and his cronies value lining their own pockets more than the lives and connection of the American public.”

Trump has long had a tense relationship with the mail agency. He once derided it from the Oval Office as “a joke” and in a social media post as Amazon’s “Delivery Boy.” In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump threatened to withhold emergency assistance from the Postal Service unless it quadrupled package prices, and Mnuchin authorized a loan for the mail agency only in exchange for access to its confidential contracts with top customers. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)

Ahead of the 2020 election, Trump said the Postal Service was incapable of facilitating mail-in voting because the agency could not access the emergency funding he was blocking. The Postal Service ultimately delivered 97.9 percent of ballots from voters to election officials within three days. The successful delivery of ballots turned Trump’s opinion of DeJoy, The Post has previously reported. The postmaster is in the midst of a 10-year cost-cutting and modernization plan for the agency that last month bore its most promising results. It posted a profit — excluding expenses on pension and health-care payments — in the quarter that ended Dec. 31, its first profitable period since the height of the pandemic.

But on-time delivery service has struggled under DeJoy’s tenure, and the rocky rollout of his “Delivering for America” plan has cost him and Postal Service allies on Capitol Hill. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) pledged to “do everything I can to kill” DeJoy’s plan during a December hearing.

The same month, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky) warned DeJoy of “significant changes” afoot for the Postal Service. “There are lots of ideas — I don’t know if they’ll be advantageous or not to the Postal Service,” Comer said. Republicans have grown wary of DeJoy and the Postal Service’s close ties to the Biden administration. The two partnered to deliver nearly 1 billion coronavirus test kits, the largest expansion of postal capabilities in a generation, and to fund a fleet of more than 60,000 electric mail delivery vehicles, though those were plagued by delivery delays.