USPS cutting delivery days ‘on the table,’ as agency runs out of cash, postmaster general tells lawmakers
The Postal Service is less than a year away from running out of cash and is calling on Congress to increase its limit to borrow money from the Treasury Department.
Postmaster General David Steiner told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday that USPS is set to run out of cash in less than 12 months and that lawmakers need to act soon to keep the agency running.
“Less than a year from now, the Postal Service will be unable to deliver the mail if we maintain the status quo,” Steiner told the government operations subcommittee.
Congress passed long-awaited reform legislation in April 2022 that saved USPS $107 billion in total costs. USPS warned lawmakers that it was also on the verge of running out of cash at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and received $10 billion in pandemic relief funds.
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Several House Republicans who played a critical role in passing the Postal Service Reform Act said they were skeptical of providing further assistance to USPS.
“Everything that you’re talking about today, we did five years ago,” Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said.
Without help from Congress, Steiner warned USPS may have to consider cutting delivery days or closing post offices — proposals that faced intense public opposition in the past.
“If you want the same number of delivery days and post offices, we can do that. But someone has to pay for it. If you want to have a discussion about reducing services, we can do that. But the one thing we can’t do is the status quo,” he said.
Steiner said USPS is not “going to save our way out of the hole that we’re in.” But Republican lawmakers questioned whether the mail agency has done all it can to cut costs on its own.
“Most agencies today have hiring freezes,” Comer said. “Why would that not be something you would be looking at to reduce cost, instead of asking Congress for a bailout?”
Steiner told Comer that “we’re absolutely looking at that,” but said there are some parts of its workforce where a hiring freeze won’t be possible.
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“There’s folks that actually deliver the mail. You don’t want to do a hiring freeze there, because if we do that, then we won’t deliver mail,” he said.
Steiner said USPS has shrunk its workforce by about 35,000 employees over the last four years, and that the agency is “moving toward more of those employees being pre-career rather than career.”
Last year, more than 10,000 USPS employees accepted the agency’s early retirement offer. Steiner told lawmakers that he hasn’t ruled out nonvoluntary layoffs through a reduction in force.
“When you’re in a crisis, everything has to be on the table,” Steiner said.
Subcommittee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) said that a 10-year reform plan from former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy sought to “revive” USPS, but “those expectations were not reached.”
That reform plan envisioned the agency reaching a “break-even” point by fiscal 2024. But USPS fell well short of those goals. USPS ended fiscal 2025 with a $9.5 billion net loss.
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said lawmakers want to know which elements of a 10-year reform plan remain ongoing, and which have been stopped.
“We were told the Delivering for America plan was a long-term strategy to steady Postal Service finances, improve operations and protect the future of the mail system, but the UPS losses continue. Productivity has declined. Americans get repeated rate increases, slower services,” Foxx said. “Given what’s going on, the very negative things that are happening, what evidence suggests the current plan is working? And why should Congress expect different results if the DFA plan continues?”
Steiner said USPS is facing a long-term financial crisis because of a “drastic reduction in the use of mail.”
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Over the last 20 years, USPS mail volume fell nearly in half — from 213 billion pieces in 2006, to about 109 billion pieces today. If all that lost volume was paid at the current price of a stamp, that’s about $81 billion.
“No company could weather that much revenue loss,” Steiner said.
USPS is asking Congress to increase its maxed-out $15 billion borrowing limit with the Treasury Department. Steiner said USPS needs greater borrowing authority to continue to make long-deferred investments in its delivery network — and that these investments are necessary for USPS to capture a greater share of a competitive package industry.
“The reality is, until the recent changes to the network, we didn’t have a network that could even compete with FedEx and UPS and Amazon. It just couldn’t compete. And so, what we’ve designed now is a network that can compete, but it competes at a lower level,” Steiner said.
UPS and FedEx each deliver nearly 10 billion packages a year. USPS delivered about 6.8 billion packages in fiscal 2025, down from 7.3 billion packages the previous year.
“We deliver 110 billion pieces per year,” Steiner said, accounting for both mail and package volume. “This network is so much more sophisticated than those networks because of mail.”
Sessions said lawmakers will consider the Postal Service’s legislative requests, but said USPS must “prove that they have exhausted their options already.”
“Congress needs to have confidence, not only that they’ll be able to pay it back, but that they’re on the right road to achieve financial security for Congress to consider this request,” he said.
Some lawmakers, however, appeared open to moving forward on legislation to address the Postal Service’s financial challenges.
“Give us some ideas on legislatively how we can fix this, because I’m not interested in beating up the post office. I’m interested in fixing it,” Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) said.
In addition to its congressional wish list, Steiner told lawmakers that “we need higher prices on both our package and our mail products.”
USPS is free to set its own pricing on packages, but its regulatory agency recently capped the frequency of higher mail prices for the next few years.
In January, the Postal Regulatory Commission limited USPS to raising mail prices once per year, through September 2030.
Steiner said the regulator’s ruling will cost USPS up to $1 billion each year.
“We are regulated like a monopoly, though we ceased to be one long ago,” Steiner said. “In fact, we are regulated worse than a monopoly, because even a monopoly is allowed to make money.”
Subcommittee Ranking Member Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) said USPS continues to lose money “at an alarming rate, while performance has continued to suffer.”
“Americans have to pay higher prices for a service that is not as good as it was last year,” Mfume said.
A Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday said the Postal Service’s business model is “unsustainable,” and that “urgent action” is needed to get ahead of a looming cash crisis.
“It’s highly unlikely that USPS will be able to fix its financial condition on its own. Congress will need to act,” David Marroni, GAO’s director of physical infrastructure, told lawmakers.
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