Originally published at: US Postal Service on brink of financial collapse, chief tells Congress - FreightWaves
The U.S. Postal Service needs relief from unfunded mandates and operating restrictions that have created a cash crisis for the nation’s mail service, Postmaster General David Steiner warned Congress.
As we’ve no doubt seen in the famous Miracle on 34th Street scene, “The first national postal agency in the US, known as the United States Post Office was founded by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 26, 1775, at the beginning of the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster general; he also served a similar position for the American colonies. The Postal Clause was then included in the United States Constitution when it was ratified in 1788, authorizing the U.S. Congress to “establish post offices and post roads”; the original intent of the clause was to facilitate interstate communication as well as to create a source of revenue for the early United States.” My, how the place has deteriorated … intentionally.
At a time when most Americans didn’t have personal couriers transiting messages under wax seal, the USPS was established to democratize communication. American conservatives have been trying to kill the Post Office ever since in an effort to cash in on Americans’ need to communicate.
That effort has rarely been overt. Instead, it has taken the form of policy “reforms” that sound technocratic but function as financial choke points. The most consequential example remains the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, signed under President George W. Bush, which imposed a unique burden on the Postal Service: the requirement to prefund decades of retiree health benefits on an accelerated schedule. No private logistics company in America operates under anything remotely comparable. The result was predictable—billions in annual paper losses that masked an otherwise operationally viable network.
Earlier and later efforts followed the same pattern. Pension obligations were shifted onto USPS balance sheets. Pricing flexibility was constrained. Commercial expansion into adjacent services was restricted. And under President Donald Trump, formal proposals emerged to privatize or partially dismantle the system altogether. Each move, taken alone, could be defended as reform. Taken together, they form a consistent strategy: weaken the public network until its failure appears inevitable.
It was also under a Trump appointee, Louis DeJoy, tasked with running the Postal Service “more like a private business,” that a deeper operational risk emerged—one that logistics professionals immediately recognize. In the push toward outsourcing and cost reduction, USPS increasingly relied on contracted transportation capacity. In industry circles, this has raised persistent concerns that the network has become exposed to the same FMCSA enforcement gaps plaguing the broader trucking sector: foreign-owned or poorly vetted motor carriers, questionable driver qualification practices, and the potential use of unauthorized labor moving U.S. Mail. Whether fully proven or not, the perception alone signals a breakdown in the chain-of-custody discipline historically associated with federal mail.
But here’s the deeper truth: the Postal Service is not collapsing because it is inefficient. It is struggling because it is being forced to operate as both a public utility and a self-funding business in a world where its original product—first-class mail—has been technologically displaced. Mail volume has fallen by half since 2007, while delivery points continue to rise. That is a density collapse, not a management failure.
Yet even in this environment, USPS remains one of the most extraordinary logistics systems ever built. It binds together 170 million addresses, from Manhattan to rural Alaska, at a uniform price. It delivers not just packages, but ballots, prescriptions, and the connective tissue of civic life.
The real debate, then, is not whether the Postal Service can survive as currently structured. It cannot. The question is whether the United States still believes in the principle that created it: that communication—like roads, like water, like national defense—is a public good worth sustaining.
If the answer is yes, then the path forward is clear. Stop pretending USPS is a failing business and recognize it for what it is: a national infrastructure asset. Fund it accordingly, modernize it intelligently, and allow it to compete where it can.
Because the alternative is not efficiency. It is fragmentation—where communication, like everything else, belongs only to those who can afford it.
Solution: Charge a per diem for postal delivery services., tiered based upon commercial or residential services. Remove redundancy, consolidate resources, streamline processes - Thank you, for all that you do!