File today’s dispatch under the category of “things that will not happen.”
You may have read gloom and doom news recently about the U.S. Postal Service, my favorite federal agency. Postmaster General David Steiner told a congressional panel that USPS would run out of money and halt mail delivery within 12 months given its current financial picture.
That is simply untrue. Your mail delivery is going to be fine.
To explain why, I need to tell you about me and the mail, and how I became the postal guy to begin with.
When the covid-19 pandemic hit, I was a sports reporter, and the sporting world ground to a halt. I got shipped off to the Business section at The Washington Post for what was supposed to be a temporary assignment. About a month, in an editor called me and said the following:
“The Postal Service is running out of money. We need you to write a story. No one will read it and it will be super boring, but you’ll never have to do it again.”
Instead, my reporting led me to a career-defining scoop: President Donald Trump was blocking emergency funds for the Postal Service to prevent it from delivering and collecting mail-in ballots. I became our lead mail-in voting reporter during the 2020 election cycle, and quickly, in the newsroom, I became “the mail guy.”
That required a deep dive into postal finances (exciting, right?), a hardcore understanding of mail processing, postal law, postal politics (yes, it’s a real thing), congressional budgeting, logistics and climatology, and so much more.
I now wear the badge of “mail guy” with pride. And I’m grateful to be generally accepted as the top postal reporter in the country.
Postmaster General Steiner is right about one thing: The Postal Service is in a world of hurt. It sells a product (mail) that people mostly do not want.
And I scooped in December that things are about to get worse: Amazon, USPS’s top customer, is breaking up with the mail agency. It’s going to cost about $4.5 billion in lost postal revenue each year. For context, that’s out of a USPS budget of $80-some billion. Ouch.
But Steiner’s doomsday scenario is a bit of yarn. His forecast depends on USPS paying a ton of bills this year that it’s been ignoring for more than a decade — and has no intention of paying.
To fix the balance sheet, Steiner wants Congress to toss the Postal Service another financial lifeline — it already got a $107 billion bailout in 2022 — and wants to talk about cutting days of delivery while raising prices. Read his written testimony before the House Oversight Committee here.
He also revealed himself to be a bit of a novice when it comes to USPS’s heritage and purpose.
In the second paragraph of his testimony, he states: “I am not sure that the American public is aware that the Postal Service is at a critical juncture. I know that I wasn’t aware of the extent of it before I took on this role.”
I find that rather shocking, considering the Postal Service’s struggles are incredibly well documented — from his predecessor, from the postal board of governors, in the press, in GAO reports, in Donald Trump’s social media posts, on Saturday Night Live.
The Postal Service’s problems are tricky to solve, but not that hard to grasp.
In his spoken testimony, Steiner talked to lawmakers about his desire to substantially raise postage rates. It’s not a wild idea. The current stamp price is 78 cents, a tremendous consumer bargain. Switzerland, widely considered to have the world’s best post, charges $1.03 to send a letter. Japan charges $1.16. France charges $2.72.
Steiner told lawmakers: “I am a firm believer that the market should set the rate, and the market is not setting the rate right now.”
But that misunderstands the role of postal rates. The price of postage is part of the agency’s “universal service obligation”; in other words, the Postal Service must set rates such that ordinary and low-income consumers can participate in the mails. In fact, that is why the Postal Regulatory Commission exists, to ensure USPS rates are set for public utility and not by market forces.
Steiner at once talks about maintaining universal access to the post while at the same time asking for permission to close rural post offices simply because they lose money. He lauded hitting new on-time delivery metrics, without mentioning that those standards are now slower than they’ve been in generations.
Steiner posed the core question — one I’ve spent a lot of my break in between jobs thinking about — to lawmakers: “Congress and the American public must decide what aspects of the Postal Service are most important to them, and what they are willing to change or pay for – whether it is the services we provide or our current prices.”
There’s no indication Congress is thinking about it. And in the absence of action from lawmakers, Steiner is making it plain what he plans to do: Take matters into his own hands.
I know our little subscriber community has a lot of postal fans. What do you think of all this? Email me at [email protected] and contact me securely on Signal at jacobbogage.87. And follow me on Bluesky: @jacobbogage.bsky.social.
