When the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee considers four nominees to the United States Postal Service (USPS) Board of Governors, there should be a clear message performance and results must improve.  At the hearing that will be held on Thursday, November 14, 2024, senators must demand commitments from all nominees that if confirmed they will pause the Delivering for America (DFA) plan pending their own reexamination and follow Postal Review Committee recommendations based on its review of the Delivering for America Plan.

Prior to the hearing, USPS reported a $9.5 billion loss for fiscal year (FY) 2024, which is 46 percent greater than the FY 2023 loss. 

The USPS is not only losing money, but also failing to meet any of its mail service standards anywhere in the country, even after it had previously lowered them to make them easier to meet.  There are reports of disastrous service in certain areas, especially where the Postal Service has re-routed mail and rolled out big new centralized processing facilities.

Quite simply, implementation of the Delivering for America plan has made matters worse. The USPS is making misguided choices that have deteriorated its finances and services. Mailers are paying 39 percent more for postage they did four years ago and getting less for their money.

The disruptions and costs of the Delivering for American plan caught the attention of a bipartisan group of 26 senators, who wrote to Postmaster General (PMG) Louis DeJoy and the USPS Board of Governors on May 8, 2024 and told them that the Postal Service should “pause planned changes to the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) processing and delivery network under the “Delivering for America” plan, until you request and receive a comprehensive Advisory Opinion from the Postal Regulatory Commission to fully study the potential impacts of these changes.”  They noted that the consolidation and alteration of facilities was “moving forward swiftly” and has caused “critical delays for mail that requires overnight delivery.” 

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) responded to PMG DeJoy’s push for these changes, which were reiterated in his July 8, 2024, op-ed in The Washington Post that claimed the Delivering for America plan was the only way to save the USPS by suggesting that there are better and more effective ways to ensure its future success.  No one wants the USPS to fail but flexibility is always a better approach when a plan is not working as intended.

The objections to the network changes being promulgated under the Delivering for American plan finally convinced the Postal Service to request an Advisory Opinion from the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), which needs to dig in and conduct a thorough review.  The regulator should ask tough questions and demand substantiation of claimed cost savings from the implementation of the Postal Service’s proposals.  The PRC should also require the Postal Service to be clear about who will suffer reduced service from their proposed changes to mail flows and reduction in trips to post offices more than 50 miles from a processing center.

The USPS Board of Governors “directs the exercise of the powers of the Postal Service, directs and controls its expenditures, reviews its practices, conducts long-range planning, approves officer compensation and sets policies on all postal matters.”  As part of the board’s exercise of such authority, senators should ask the four nominees to require the USPS to take the following steps to improve its performance:

• Stop spending billions to build an unneeded middle mile network (duplicative of private facilities) that the Postal Service is requiring mailers and shippers to use and which will result in slower service and higher prices
• Stop in-sourcing functions, which have been and can be more affordably performed by the private sector like transportation, clearly a non-governmental function that should be outsourced unless the Postal Service can provide evidence that it can do that job more effectively and less expensively
• Stop adding permanent career employees to the payroll, which the Postal Service cannot afford, and which forces them to try to keep those workers busy in the face of declining volumes.  Instead, it should use attrition to reduce the workforce.  The Postal Service inexplicably converted 190,000 part time flex employees to permanent career positions, whose total compensation is roughly double, and they cannot be terminated as easily as part-time workers.

Fundamentally, the Postal Service needs to focus on improving final mile delivery to Americans across the country, which is its core competence and unique role.  Congress codified this mission in the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 by requiring the delivery of mail and packages together in an integrated delivery network to everyone everywhere six days a week.  The proposed changes threaten to further degrade service, and the Postal Service now seems to claim it has a mandate to build and require everyone to use its own integrated processing and transportation network.  The Senate hearing is an opportunity for the four Board of Governors nominees to agree that such action will cause even greater losses and disruption and could lead to a taxpayer bailout, something that no one wants to deliver.