USPS Asks for a Taxpayer Handout

When Postmaster General (PMG) David Steiner began his tenure at the United States Postal Service (USPS) in July 2025, 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 (GAO) has long called “the unsustainable business model” of the USPS. 

But he quickly embraced the Delivering for America (DFA) plan, which instead of breaking even in 2023 as projected has resulted in ongoing losses to date of $25 billion and chronic service performance failures.  Rather than stopping the wasteful spending and costly and inefficient insourcing and taking other steps to reduce costs to match shrinking revenue, PMG Steiner is instead asking for Congress to provide USPS with open-ended relief without any meaningful reform or accountability. 

In his June 24, 2026, testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), PMG Steiner requested that the postal service’s $15 billion borrowing authority be doubled to $30 billion but failed to provide any commitment to reduce expenses.  The comments were among several reasons that Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) named the USPS the June Porker of the Month.  And USPS officials have been suggesting that the agency could request as much as $30 billion as well in past “public service reimbursements,” which the agency has not requested since 1982.

PMG Steiner frequently compares USPS to a private business, but private businesses confronting billion-dollar losses reduce spending or eliminate underperforming areas to stay afloat and hopefully thrive.  USPS management and labor interests have refused to make these hard choices, insisting USPS must perform the same functions and processes that were being done when it had twice the volume. 

With 77 percent of its costs coming from labor, the USPS cannot mitigate its losses without reducing personnel.  Under PMG Steiner, USPS now has more career employees than it had 20 years ago to process half of the mail volume.  For example, total headquarters employees grew from 10,318 in FY 2020 to 14,801 in FY 2025, an increase of 43 percent.  Supervisors and managers increased during that time by 22 percent. 

At the June 24, 2026, HSGAC hearing, PMG Steiner was pressed by Chairman Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to implement a hiring freeze. Disappointingly, recent guidance issued by PMG Steiner is a hiring freeze in name only because it only prohibits hiring for newly created positions (without authority) but allows backfilling 100 percent of existing jobs at a time when USPS admits it has excess labor capacity.   

To reduce labor costs, the USPS should immediately freeze hiring for all non-delivery positions.  However, letter carriers should be exempt since addresses continue to expand nationwide and delivery to every address is the core of the USPS’s mission.

The USPS should also stop spending money on things it does not need and cannot afford, like new processing facilities that duplicate existing efficient private sector operations and in-house technology and payment solutions that the USPS Inspector General recently warned are contributing to $2 billion in annual fraud losses on an on-going basis.  Given USPS’s financial crisis, all non-essential capital spending should be frozen, and future investments should be strictly limited to only those assets necessary for final mile delivery of mail and packages six days a week.

But instead of providing more transparency for its finances and outlook, the USPS decided in its updated strategic plan in 2024 not to provide financial projections for how the revisions would cut costs or increase revenue.  As the GAO noted in its December 2025 report, “USPS does not have targets to show progress or to effectively communicate how its actions   will restore USPS’s financial sustainability.”  But PMG Steiner continues to keep everyone in the dark.

To enable the USPS 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 USPS should take greater advantage of pricing incentives that will allow these tasks to be performed more efficiently.

Like many other federal agencies, there is no mystery to what needs to be done to move the USPS in the right direction.  Open-ended financial relief without reform and accountability is never the right answer, especially for an agency with a broken business model that already received $107 billion from Congress only three years ago.  Congress should condition any financial relief on binding requirements for USPS to reduce costs, improve service and efficiency, and take greater advantage of private sector expertise instead of wasting money on duplicative and wasteful non-core assets.