The head of the US Postal Service has warned lawmakers that the storied 250-year-old company is at a “critical juncture” and will run out of cash in lower than a year except Congress permits it to borrow more cash and cost extra for postage.
“At our current rate, we’ll be out of cash in less than 12 months. So in about a year from now, the postal service would be unable to deliver the mail,” Postmaster General David Steiner mentioned at a Tuesday listening to earlier than the House Oversight Subcommittee on Government Operations.
Steiner, a former FedEx board member who became postmaster last year, pointed to the yearslong decline within the use of conventional mail and rules weighing down the Postal Service’s funds, resembling authorized obligations for common service and a restrict on how a lot the company can borrow.
The Postal Service has traditionally relied on income from its gross sales to remain afloat and doesn’t obtain tax {dollars} for working bills, although it has acquired some federal reduction. A 10-year plan put in place in 2021 by Steiner’s predecessor to handle its monetary struggles has failed to this point to reverse its losses.
USPS mentioned it incurred web losses of $9 billion final fiscal year and $9.5 billion in 2024. It additionally misplaced $1.3 billion within the first quarter of 2026, it said in February.
The postmaster urged Congress Tuesday to extend USPS’s borrowing authority, which might purchase time “that we can use to best determine what the Postal Service should do to best serve the American public” and whether or not all of the company’s companies ought to be maintained.
He emphasised the price of its common service obligation, which legally requires it present mail companies to all Americans and ship mail all throughout the United States on the identical worth. That consists of rural, far-flung or hard-to-reach locations, costly locations for mail carriers to get to.
“I’m here to tell America that we can do anything you want … If you want the same number of delivery days and post offices, we can do that. But someone has to pay for it,” Steiner mentioned.
Steiner famous the price of USPS postage is considerably lower than different industrialized nations and mentioned elevating the value of a first-class stamp from the present 75 cents to about 95 cents “would largely solve our controllable loss.”
Despite being one of the most well-liked components of the federal authorities, in line with 2024 information from the Pew Research Center, the company has struggled with shedding cash for years alongside the decline in quantity of mail – as emails, texts and different digital communications exchange letters, and on-line funds exchange the sending of checks to pay payments.
Citing its monetary challenges, President Donald Trump has beforehand prompt disbanding the US Postal Service’s Board of Governors and putting the company under direct control of the Commerce Department – a transfer critics say could possibly be a first step in direction of privatization and upend how Americans get essential deliveries like pharmaceuticals, checks and vote-by-mail ballots.
While lawmakers on each side of the aisle agreed Tuesday it’s in the most effective curiosity of Americans to handle the company’s funding woes, they disagreed on how a lot Congress ought to play a position.
“It does us no good in my opinion to go to a dollar stamp,” the subcommittee’s chairman, Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas mentioned, pushing again on Steiner’s proposals. “It does us no good to find that in one year from now, the postal service failed,” he later added.
Rep. Kweisi Mfume of Maryland, the subcommittee’s rating Democrat, agreed, saying: “One thing that is clear about all of this is we cannot let the United States Postal Service die.” He mentioned addressing the company’s debt restrict appears inevitable, however particulars nonetheless must be labored out.
The two lawmakers “have great confidence in the workers, the supervisors, the post masters, the management of the organization,” Sessions mentioned. “But we’re going to have to make tough decisions.”