As published in The Hill on March 5, 2026: https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5768230-postal-service-losses-steiner/
When Postmaster General David Steiner began his tenure at the U.S. Postal Service last July, there was hope that he would steer the beleaguered organization in the right direction after constant annual losses since 2007. As the former CEO of Waste Management and lead independent director of FedEx, it was believed that he could turn around what the Government Accountability Office has long called the service’s “unsustainable business model.”
Instead, after a reported $1.3 billion loss in the first quarter of fiscal 2026 and a net loss of $9 billion in fiscal 2025, Steiner is turning the Postal Service further down the road to perpetual losses and a taxpayer bailout. By his own admission, it could run out of money in 2027. Yet at the most recent U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors meeting, Steiner admitted he isn’t focused on cutting costs and instead is prioritizing only revenue and customer service.
Instead of releasing a plan to strengthen finances and raise performance standards while continuing to deliver mail and packages together, six days a week, to every address in America, Steiner quickly embraced the Delivering for America plan set in motion by his predecessor Louis DeJoy in 2021. The plan was supposed to lead to a break-even year in 2023, but instead it resulted in mounting losses and chronic service performance failures.
Following a 42 percent increase in the price of a first-class stamp between 2020 and 2025 to its current $.78 as on time delivery decreased and volume tanked, the Postal Service petitioned the Postal Regulatory Commission in December 2025 to remove the price cap on stamps or give the it immediate authority to raise prices on its own by another 23 percent. In their first meeting following the fiscal 2026 first quarter report, Steiner and the Board of Governors suggested that the Postal Service’s statutory debt limit be raised from its current $15 billion, giving it a blank check without any commitment to reduce expenses.
The private sector does not have the ability to constantly raise prices or borrow unlimited amounts of money at the taxpayers’ expense. Instead, companies reduce spending or eliminate underperforming areas of their business to stay afloat and hopefully thrive.
With 77 percent of its costs coming from labor, the Postal Service cannot mitigate its losses without reducing personnel. In 2025, Steiner inherited a workforce twice as large as that of 20 years earlier, to process just half of the mail volume. DeJoy had exacerbated this problem when he converted 195,000 positions from part-time to full-time. Total headquarters employees grew from 10,318 in fiscal 2020 to 14,801 in fiscal 2025 — an increase of 43 percent. The number of supervisors and managers increased during that time by 22 percent, from 22,663 to 27,720. That means none of the 3 percent reduction in total employees between fiscal 2020 and 2025 — to 624,492 from 644,033 — came from the upper levels of management.
To reduce labor costs, the Postal Service should immediately freeze hiring for all non-delivery positions. Letter carriers should be exempt, since addresses continue to expand nationwide and delivery to every address is the core mission.
The Postal Service should also stop spending money on things it does not need and cannot afford, such as new processing facilities that duplicate existing efficient private sector operations. The construction was part of DeJoy’s attempt to turn the Postal Service into an end-to-end operation. There should also be an analysis of the service’s entire real estate portfolio, to determine what is needed solely for final-mile delivery of mail and packages six days a week.
Instead of providing more transparency for its finances and outlook, the Postal Service decided in its 2024 updated strategic plan not to provide financial projections for how the revisions would cut costs or increase revenue. As the Government Accountability Office noted in its December 2025 report, the Postal Service “does not have targets to show progress or to effectively communicate how its actions will restore … financial sustainability.”
But Steiner continues to keep everyone in the dark.
To enable the Postal Service to become more compliant with President Trump’s executive orders to make the federal government more efficient, there should be an increase in the work done with the private sector on processing, logistics, and transportation of mail and packages close to their final destinations. The private sector has performed these tasks for decades, and the Postal Service should take greater advantage of pricing incentives that will allow these tasks to be performed more efficiently.
There is no mystery to what needs to be done to move in the right direction. While he may not have gotten off to a great start, Steiner can still display the leadership needed to turn the Postal Service around.
Tom Schatz is president of Citizens Against Government Waste.