2 months ago
The US Postal Service will tally retired of costs wrong a year, unless lawmakers assistance a headdress connected really overmuch money nan agency tin borrow, according to nan postmaster general.
In an question and reply pinch nan Associated Press, David Steiner warned that nan postal work – which relies connected stamps and work fees alternatively than taxation dollars to present message six days a week to each reside successful nan state – would tally retired of rate for labor and vendors by February 2027.
The agency has operated pinch a financial shortfall almost each fiscal twelvemonth since 2007, arsenic group and businesses person moved toward paperless billing and integer communication, forgoing first-class mail. But message deliveries person continued, pinch USPS borrowing money from nan US treasury to compensate for losses.
Steiner, who is scheduled to attest earlier Congress this month, has called for changes to a federal law that caps nan agency’s borrowing astatine $15bn.
The erstwhile CEO of nan nation’s largest waste-management institution and a erstwhile personnel of nan FedEx committee of board who took complete nan postal work past July has besides said that USPS needs to boost gross by expanding a nationwide “last-mile” transportation network. Last-mile transportation – nan astir labor-intensive portion of nan transportation process – involves moving packages from distribution centers to customers’ doors.
Despite talk successful nan Trump administration of privatizing nan postal work aliases repositioning it arsenic portion of nan commerce department, Steiner has told USPS labor that he does not judge successful fundamentally changing nan agency’s building aliases mission. “I do not judge that nan postal work should beryllium privatized aliases that it should go an appropriated portion of nan national government,” he said successful his first video message to USPS labor successful July 2025. “I judge successful nan existent building of nan postal work arsenic a self-financing, independent entity of nan executive branch.”
Multiple postmaster generals complete nan past 2 decades person many times asked Congress aliases regulators to alteration nan various rules governing nan postal service. In 2022, Congress did walk nan Postal Service Reform Act, which ended a request that nan agency pre-fund its retiree wellness benefits, but it near different constraints intact.
Still, Steiner said, nan agency needs intervention. The number of message pieces that nan work handles has dropped from 220bn to 110bn successful caller years.
“Take those 110bn and put a $0.78 stamp connected them. That’s $86bn of gross that evaporated successful 15 years,” Steiner told nan AP. “If either FedEx aliases UPS mislaid $86bn of revenue, they would person nary revenue.”
Steiner said that nan postal work must besides beryllium allowed nan authority to raise postage prices, including upping nan value of a first-class stamp from $0.78 to $0.95.
