Postmaster General David Steiner has told members of Congress that the U.S. Postal Service could be forced to cut a day of mail delivery due to budget woes.
In written testimony to the House subcommittee on Government Operations, Mr. Steiner said that “from the historic peak volume of 213 billion pieces per year in 2006 to 109 billion pieces today, we have lost over 104 billion pieces per year … if all of that lost volume was paid at the current price of a stamp, which is 78 cents, that’s about 81 billion dollars.”
Mr. Steiner said the agency’s financial shortfall is exacerbated by anti-monopoly regulations, retirement and workers’ compensation benefits, restrictions on where U.S. Postal Service retirement funds can be invested, a hard $15 billion borrowing limit and the need to deliver to every address six days a week.
Currently, Mr. Steiner said, 71% of U.S. Postal Service delivery routes are “financially underwater” and 58% of post offices do not make enough money to cover their operating costs. He expects the U.S. Postal Service to run out of money within a year; the agency had net losses of $9 billion in fiscal year 2025.
Cutting the number of delivery days from six to five, Mr. Steiner said, would save between $2.9 billion and $3.5 billion each year.
how about charging rural customers 20 dollars a month for delivery?
and when monday rolls around can you imagine the volune then?
rca’s are scarce now, basiclly getting rid of them except for regulars days off, that should be interesting! I know many who would quit! then what?
How about running it like a business?
Get rid of 80% of the managers. The company is ridiculously top heavy and highly inefficient. 30 yrs ago there was 1 Mgr for every 30 employees. Today there is 1 mgr for every 7 employees. For some reason , there is a major push to hire 10,000 more managers. The company is highly mismanaged already and adding more cooks to the stew is only going to make the situation worse. The managers make the highest salaries. Got management by 80% and not only will the company not miss a Beat, the post office will save billions every year
Buy back the contract of those with higher pay and force them to retire
I worked at ups for about a decade (went from grunt to corporate in that time) and I’m over as usps now(due to the mass layoffs, as have been reported on), the mismanagement at usps is disgraceful, ups basically makes most management part timers except for the postmaster and mpu roles (depending on the amount of employees) and ups pays their management team less comparatively for the responsibility they require from them. Secondly the lack of technology used at usps despite having monopoly on some of the coolest tech I’ve seen for delivering is so wasteful, make full use of it or sell the rights to use it. Thirdly, the way mail is sorted and organized could be automated and instead requires tons of labor, the forwarding and holds are done mostly manually by the delivery person and clerks, when theres really no reason the driver should ever need to see those pieces, to name a couple of many tasks that need automation. Lastly you could theoretically go to delivering mail on alternating days for nonbusiness customers and package delivery 7 days a week and save a significant amount of labor while increasing the amount of higher value deliverables, along with selling rights for other companies to make use of cbus as drop locations for packages, is just a missed opportunity.