America’s mail carrier is in dire fiscal straits and has lost nearly $20 billion over the past two years. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has repeatedly claimed it does not receive tax dollars to fund its operations. Never mind that the USPS received $10 billion from Congress to offset pandemic-related losses. Or, the $3 billion given to the USPS by Congress to purchase electric trucks. Or, the more than $3 billion per year in subsidies the agency rakes in through tax gimmicks and preferential loans.

Then, there are the indirect costs foisted on taxpayers. USPS “middle mile” transportation—the long-distance movement of mail between processing centers and network hubs—is handled primarily by large commercial tractor-trailers. As a recent coalition letter consisting of 27 groups led by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance and the National Consumers League made clear, large trucks inflict significant wear-and-tear on America’s roads and cost taxpayers a pretty penny. As lawmakers prepare to mark up the surface transportation reauthorization bill, they should keep these costs in mind and steer clear of proposals allowing heavier trucks on the road.

For decades, Congress has wisely opted to maintain the maximum cap of 80,000 pounds in Gross Vehicle Weight (GVW) on federal interstates. Despite real risks to infrastructure integrity and driver safety, some groups and lawmakers have proposed allowing even heavier trucks on the road.

This would not end well for taxpayers or drivers. Purdue engineering scholar Maria Alicia Chung Li concludes, “Overweight truck operations cause significant damage to highway infrastructure that consequently reduces the service life of pavement and bridges. Overweight trucks cause much greater damage to pavement surfaces than the damage expected from legal weight trucks.” Among the more striking studies surveyed by Li was a Texas analysis estimating “that the damage caused by overweight truck traffic ... is approximately 20.6 percent greater than the damage caused by the design traffic.” The same study found that “the additional damage caused by overweight trucks reduces pavement service life by 50 percent.”

These results are not surprising: putting too much pressure on even the most durable materials can wear the materials out in short order. A 2009 analysis by researchers at the University of Waterloo “showed that concrete bridge damage is exacerbated when they experience sustained OW [overweight] truck operations because such vehicle loads accelerate the incidence and severity of fatigue cracking, leading to exposure of reinforcements to moisture and subsequent corrosion and cover concrete spalling.”

It isn’t even clear that allowing heavier trucks with more cargo on the road would benefit large movers of products such as the USPS. As a December report from AMB Logistics notes, one of the agency’s “largest highway contractors, 10 Roads Express, is shutting down after nearly 50 years on the road. With more than 2,400 trucks and over 2,600 drivers being phased out by early 2026, this is the biggest trucking shutdown since Yellow and a loud warning about concentration risk, postal network redesign, and the fragility of U.S. mail logistics.” If the USPS’ large highway contractors’ business models are faltering—and a major source of USPS cost growth—perhaps it’s time to reassess the agency’s insistence on shifting away from air cargo and toward ground transportation.

Clearly, something isn’t working, and taxpayers and consumers are paying the price. The answer is not for policymakers to double down on heavy trucks and unsustainable infrastructure policies. Congress must hold the line on the 80,000-pound GVW limit and keep the USPS accountable.

Three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and the United States Postal Service (USPS) raising first-class postage. On April 9, the USPS filed notice with the Postal Regulatory Commission of price hikes that will take effect July 12. According to America’s mail carrier, “the new rates include a 4-cent increase in the price of a First-Class Mail Forever stamp from 78 cents to 82 cents.” Metered mail rates and postcard prices are also increasing; in all, mailing service prices will rise by approximately 4.8 percent.

While the USPS claims that these hikes are necessary because of the “severe financial crisis facing the Postal Service and continued rising operational costs,” the truth is that the agency has plenty of tools at its disposal to correct course without making the mail more expensive. Taxpayers and consumers deserve a USPS that can deliver at an affordable price.

If the USPS is going to get serious about reducing annual net losses—which totaled $9 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2025 and $9.5 billion in FY 2024—it needs to start by reducing labor costs. Compensation and benefits alone cost the agency more than $55 billion per year, or about 60 percent of total operating expenses. This figure is up sharply from $44 billion ten years ago, largely because the USPS added (on net) 40,000 career employees since 2015 and compensates them at higher rates.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The USPS could save significant sums of money by focusing on non-career (or what it calls “pre-career”) hires. A 2021 analysis by the Government Accountability Office estimates that the compensation gap between career and pre-career employees is around $25 per hour, though this total shrinks to $8 per hour when comparing similar types of workers with similar experience. Even after controlling for these factors, the USPS saves nearly $2 billion per year by retaining 115,000 non-career workers.

Doubling the proportion of pre-career workers would likely double these annual savings. This formula would follow the success of private-sector delivery companies, which have a tried-and-true approach of maintaining a stable base of career employees and bringing on tens of thousands of seasonal and part-time workers to respond to sudden upticks in demand. The USPS has actually been moving away from that strategy, hiring fewer seasonal workers than it used to. Reversing this trend would yield significant savings for taxpayers and consumers.

One thing that will not succeed in shoring up finances is repeatedly raising stamp prices. According to a 2024 analysis conducted by the economic consultancy NDP Analytics, “Under the current process, the USPS proposes new rate increases before the impact of prior increases can be fully realized. USPS demand models, which are used to justify rate increases, have never been tested in this way. USPS stands to lose considerably from miscalculating its customers’ sensitivity to price.”

They estimate that these flawed revenue projections cost the USPS $1.8 billion annually, or one-fifth of 2025 losses. The report also notes that the USPS has been making large-scale changes to its demand model — “in FY2024 there were 63 items in its change log” — without showing sensitivity analyses indicating how changes in forecast design can lead to different results.

Instead of repeatedly raising stamp prices, the USPS needs to focus on changing its hiring practices and enacting other commonsense reforms. It’s long past time for America’s mail carrier to take responsibility for its failures and turn things around.

Despite its many price hikes and taxpayer subsidies, the United States Postal Service (USPS) is constantly on the verge of running out of money. And now, postal leadership is headed to Capitol Hill to demand even more of Americans’ hard-earned dollars. USA Today’s Trevor Hughes reports, “Congress is holding a March 17 oversight hearing on the Postal Service, and postal officials are expected to ask officials to let them borrow billions of dollars to keep operating in 2027, along with protecting their power to raise rates.” The truth is that giving America’s mail carrier a blank check simply sets the stage for more reckless spending. Lawmakers, who will surely be wearing green in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, need to hold the USPS accountable, not rubber-stamp reckless agency policies that give away taxpayers’ green.

Taxpayers have been down this road before. In 2022, Congress passed the Postal Service Reform Act (PSRA), which gave—directly and indirectly—the USPS more than $100 billion in taxpayer money. The Government Accountability Office notes that PSRA “significantly reduced USPS’s unfunded liability for retiree health benefits by integrating these benefits with Medicare, thereby transferring some retiree health costs to Medicare.” Of course, switching liabilities doesn’t eliminate those liabilities, it just moves them—the ultimate shell game, with taxpayer money. Additionally, the legislation “repealed a requirement for USPS to prepay future retiree health benefits and canceled past due prefunding payments for those benefits.” One might assume that this gargantuan bailout would have put the USPS on a firmer fiscal path. While the USPS posted a net gain in 2022, the agency has lost an astounding $25 billion since then. The problem is that PSRA did nothing to address the reasons why America’s mail carrier burns through so much cash.

It certainly doesn’t help that the USPS is spending around $80,000 for new mail trucks. Reason assistant editor Jack Nicastro recently noted, “The Postal Service agreed to pay Oshkosh $77,692 per [electric truck] and $54,584 per [truck] in March 2023. To put these numbers in context, FedEx’s fleet of Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans is considerably cheaper, costing $50,830 for the baseline 2026 Sprinter and $61,180 for the 2026 eSprinter.” The USPS—and taxpayers by extension—pay this enormous tab despite knowing “cheaper alternatives exist. 21,000 of the Postal Service’s new fleet are commercial off-the-shelf vans like the Ford E-Transit (whose 2026 model starts at $54,855).”

However, the largest contributor to soaring USPS expenses is labor costs. For example, the USPS spends about $1.5 billion annually in workers’ compensation costs, including cash payments to injured workers and administrative fees. From 2022 to 2024, workers’ compensation costs per workhour increased by 26 percent, even as private sector costs for comparable industries declined by 7 percent. According to a 2023 Office of Inspector General (OIG) analysis, “workers’ compensation cost per workhour was between 31 percent and 41 percent higher than private industry.”

Lawmakers can use the March 17 oversight hearing to examine ways to reduce this gap. They can start by reexamining the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA), which makes it difficult for the agency to copy its private-sector counterparts in reducing workers’ compensation spending. For example, companies and even state governments limit maximum weekly payouts, settle claims through lump-sum payments, and require use of in-network physicians. However, the USPS is bound by the system established by FECA and cannot implement any of these changes to limit costs.

The USPS does have some ability to limit compensation costs on its own. For example, it can hire more “pre-career” workers—who do not receive the same level of benefits as career employees—and rely more on temporary hires for the holidays. But it cannot keep implementing the same policies and expect taxpayers to repeatedly come to the rescue. It’s time to deliver real reforms to America’s mail carrier.

Millions of consumers are understandably frustrated with the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) taking forever to deliver their mail and losing $9 billion per year. From settling petty scores with property managers to spying on law-abiding Americans, USPS actions are often chillingly intentional. In a massive blow to rule of law and accountability, the Supreme Court recently held in the USPS v. Konan case that the agency is legally off the hook for misdeeds against Americans. Grounded in a fatally flawed reading of the law, this Court ruling is an affront to accountability and a large leap in the wrong direction.

At stake was whether the USPS can be held accountable for refusing to deliver the mail. Under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), the USPS cannot be hauled into court for “[a]ny claim arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter.”

The original case was brought by Texas landlord Lebene Konan—who is black and rents to white tenants. Konan was allegedly the victim of a years’ long harassment campaign by two local postal employees who weren’t fond of interracial renting. As her legal team noted, “[t]he harassment campaign started when Rojas, the local mail carrier, changed the designated owner of one of Ms. Konan’s properties to one of her white tenants. ... When Ms. Konan complained to the local post office, the USPS Inspector General ‘confirmed that [she] owned the property’ and ordered ‘that mail be delivered.’” But the local postmaster overrode that directive, and things only escalated from there. The local post office marked her mail “undeliverable,” refused to deliver to her, and gave her a hard time when she came in to pick up her mail. This despicable course of conduct not only cost Ms. Konan rental income but also prevented her from accessing critical mail such as medications and doctor’s bills.

Konan reasonably thought she could hold the USPS legally accountable because acts of sabotage by the USPS are more than just “loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission” of mail. However, the government begged to differ, reading these words implausibly broadly to include intentionally holding up the mail. And, according to the Department of Justice, holding postal predators accountable under the FTCA would create a litigation free-for-all in which “any person whose mail is lost or misdelivered could bring a federal tort suit—and potentially proceed to burdensome discovery” on the theory of intentional tampering.

This is a silly argument designed to let the USPS off the hook for anything it does wrong. The reality is there’s a world of difference between (rightly) claiming that the mail is way too slow and alleging a series of intentional and coordinated efforts to sabotage communications. As Konan’s legal team rightly pointed out, only a small proportion of complaints against America’s mail carrier are remotely sinister enough to compare to Konan’s plight and probably wouldn’t be worth the plaintiff’s while to pursue in court.

In its amicus brief filed at the Supreme Court, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) argued that longstanding legal precedent and even old language found in eighty-year-old Post Office Department manuals make the government’s interpretation of FTCA untenable. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court disagreed and bizarrely held that the ordinary meanings of the terms “loss” and “miscarriage” encompass intentional acts. But as TPA noted in its brief, contemporary sources such as Webster’s Second New International Dictionary and The American College Encyclopedia Dictionary support more narrow commonsense definitions.

This decision is a significant setback for postal accountability, and millions of Americans are now at the mercy of a reckless federal agency that is above the law. Lebene Konan and millions of other postal consumers deserve better.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) may have a “.com” web address, but don’t be fooled—it is no business. If America’s mail carrier didn’t have the perpetual support of U.S. taxpayers, it would have been out of business a long time ago. The USPS has lost about $100 billion over the past fifteen years, including $9 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2025 and $9.5 billion in FY 2024.

Thus far in 2026, the USPS has failed to turn the page on these significant net losses. On February 5, the agency reporteda $1.3 billion loss for the first quarter of FY 2026, compared to a modest net gain of $144 million in the same quarter last year. This is a particularly bad sign because Q1 is supposed to be the “good quarter” because of holiday deliveries.

As Postmaster General David Steiner rolls out ambitious initiatives such as last-mile bidding, it’s time for USPS leadership (with the help of Congress) to reevaluate its priorities and get costs under control. Taxpayers and consumers deserve a leaner and more accountable USPS.

There is no sugarcoating Q1 2026 for the USPS: costs went up and revenue went down. The agency reports that the $1.3 billion loss is “attributed to an increase in workers’ compensation expense of $634 million, operating revenue decrease of $264 million, an increase in retiree health benefits expense of $175 million, higher other operating expenses of $169 million, and higher transportation expenses of $43 million.” It certainly doesn’t help that the USPS is spending around $80,000 for new mail trucks. Reason assistant editor Jack Nicastro recently noted, “The Postal Service agreed to pay Oshkosh $77,692 per [electric truck] and $54,584 per [truck] in March 2023. To put these numbers in context, FedEx’s fleet of Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans is considerably cheaper, costing $50,830 for the baseline 2026 Sprinter and $61,180 for the 2026 eSprinter.” The USPS—and taxpayers by extension—pay this enormous tab despite knowing “cheaper alternatives exist. 21,000 of the Postal Service’s new fleet are commercial off-the-shelf vans like the Ford E-Transit (whose 2026 model starts at $54,855).”

However, the largest contributor to soaring USPS expenses is labor costs. For example, the USPS spends about $1.5 billion annually in workers’ compensation costs, including cash payments to injured workers and administrative fees. From 2022 to 2024, workers’ compensation cost per workhour increased by 26 percent, even as private sector costs for comparable industries declined by 7 percent. According to a 2023 Office of Inspector General (OIG) analysis, “workers’ compensation cost per workhour was between 31 percent and 41 percent higher than private industry.”

One key reason why this gap exists is the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA), which makes it difficult for the agency to copy its private-sector counterparts in reducing workers’ compensation spending. For example, companies and even state governments limit maximum weekly payouts, settle claims through lump-sum payments, and require use of in-network physicians. However, the USPS is bound by the system established by FECA and cannot implement any of these changes to limit costs.

That’s not to say the USPS is powerless to lower workers’ compensation costs. As Dennus Bishop, Special Agent in Charge of the Central Area Field Office of the USPS OIG, noted during a recent fraud case, “the majority of postal employees who collect compensation benefits have legitimate claims due to on-the-job injuries. However, a certain percentage abuse the system and cost the Postal Service millions of dollars in fraudulent claims and enforcement costs.” Especially in the wake of the massive Minnesota fraud scandal, it’s up to the USPS and OIG to closely monitor this fraud and keep taxpayer funds away from criminals.

Getting the USPS back on firmer fiscal footing is an all-hands-on-deck job. The USPS needs to stop buying $80,000 trucks. The IG needs to do a better job monitoring for waste and fraud. Congress needs to reform rigid laws like FECA that make it difficult for the agency to lower costs. Until these things (and plenty more) happen, the Postal Service and taxpayers will be stuck with billion-dollar quarterly losses.

As the year draws to a close, it’s natural to reflect on the highs and lows of the past twelve months and think about ways to improve in the coming year. The United States Postal Service (USPS) could certainly stand to partake in this practice. America’s mail carrier lost an astounding $9 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2025, and $9.5 billion in FY 2024. It’s been an eventful year for the USPS, from (seemingly baseless) talk of postal privatization to Postmaster General (PMG) Louis DeJoy stepping down.

As current PMG David Steiner reflects on these goings on and tries to better the beleaguered agency, here are three New Year’s resolutions the USPS should aspire to in 2026:

1. Rein in Fraud and Theft

Recent revelations of widespread fraud in Minnesota has watchdog groups searching for other hotspots of malfeasance across all levels of government. Unfortunately, the USPS enables fraud and theft through poor controls on spending and constant mission creep. In its Fall 2025 Semiannual Report to Congress, the USPS’ Office of the Inspector General reported that physicians were prescribing medically unnecessary compound creams to postal workers, and pharmacies billed taxpayers more than $145 million over three years while engaging in shady deals with prescribing doctors. The illicit gains were then laundered and hidden from the Internal Revenue Service, resulting in a further loss to taxpayers of $24 million.

This.is just the tip of the fiscal iceberg. From defrauding Medicare to credit card theft rings to stealing checks, postal workers are often directly involved in crime. Of course, these are only the cases we know about; undetected postal crime is rampant. The USPS would have a far easier time catching postal criminals if the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) stayed focused on its mission. Yet, as previously documented by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA), the USPIS has repeatedly reached beyond its mandate and gotten involved in cases far removed from stamps, envelopes, and packages. It’s time to end this mission creep and lawlessness in 2026.

2. Rethink the Last Mile

The USPS ended 2025 with a bang by making a U-turn on its last-mile delivery practices.

As part of its longstanding mandate, the USPS delivers directly to 170 million addresses across the country. For a while, it allowed private shippers only limited access to its last-mile network through a few large-scale deals conducted behind closed doors. On December 17, the USPS announced “it will open up entry to its valuable last mile delivery network. Shippers large and small will be able to access the more than 18,000 USPS delivery destination units (DDUs) nationwide via a solicitation process that will begin accepting bids in late January or early February 2026.”

Given that the USPS already reaches every address and is bound by a universal service obligation, it seems reasonable that the agency should play to its strengths and aggressively sell access to its last-mile operations. That’s only true if the cost of hiring and paying the extra workers needed to process all those extra packages is lower than the added revenue that will come from courting shippers’ business. As TPA has repeatedly pointed out, USPS labor costs are exceptionally high.

Given that private shippers and e-commerce companies such as Amazon are building comprehensive delivery networks, it may actually be more cost-efficient for the USPS to pay these companies to deliver mail the last mile to residential and business addresses. The agency already has these arrangements with private deliverers, albeit at a small scale. Doing another U-turn on the last mile could avoid a costly policy pothole in 2026.

3. Focus on Part-Time Hires

This holiday season, the USPS hired only 14,000 seasonal workers—down sharply from around 40,000 temporary workers in previous years. The USPS has claimed it’s developing “a more stable workforce” by converting more than 150,000 postal workers to full-time positions.

Focusing on full-time positions at the expense of non-career (i.e., “pre-career”) hiring is an exceptionally costly strategy for the USPS. A 2021 analysis by the Government Accountability Office estimates that the compensation gap between full-time and pre-career workers is around $25 per hour, though this total shrinks to $8 per hour when comparing similar types of workers with similar experience. Even after controlling for these factors, the USPS saves nearly $2 billion per year by retaining 115,000 non-career workers. Doubling the proportion of pre-career workers would likely double these annual savings, a welcome 2026 improvement to postal finances.

Conclusion

The USPS can turn around its financials with a few simple reforms and changes to its operating practices. Hopefully, 2026 will be the year that America’s mail carrier starts delivering for taxpayers and consumers.

A more accurate rewrite of the unofficial U.S. Postal Service (USPS) motto might be, “Through snow, rain, heat, and gloom, the agency seems bound for fiscal doom.” America’s mail carrier has lost about $100 billion since 2010, and there’s no sign the USPS’s losses will be stopping anytime soon. According to data released today by the agency, the USPS lost $9 billion in fiscal year 2025. This jaw-dropping total is somehow an improvement from last year’s loss of $9.5 billion. However, that improvement mostly has to do with actuarial values and fluctuations. Net expenses within the agency’s control actually increased from $1.8 billion to $2.7 billion, mainly driven by compensation and benefit growth.

No matter how much money the USPS loses, some will inevitably try to pin the blame elsewhere. For example, earlier this year, the left-wing Economic Policy Institute lamented that the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) “imposed unreasonable costs on the Postal Service for retiree benefits that resulted in large transfers from the agency to federal coffers.” The truth is that, even when this retirement “prefunding” mandate was in place, everyday operating expenses still exceeded revenues. Because the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 removed the prefunding mandate and foisted those costs onto taxpayers, the USPS can no longer hide behind PAEA.

If the USPS is truly serious about correcting course, there are three simple ways the agency could save $5 billion per year:

End Saturday Delivery (estimated annual savings: $2.6 billion)

The USPS currently delivers mail Monday through Saturday, along with Sundays for some packages. However, some have argued for switching to a five-day delivery system to decrease costs and improve worker morale. Agency leadership suggested this idea (with some wiggle room for weekend package deliveries) in its “Five-Year Business Plan” in 2013. They concluded that it would save $1.9 billion per year. That’s $2.6 billion after adjusting for inflation, which is about a third of the average USPS annual loss over the past couple of years.

In 2015, the Inspector General surveyed consumers on whether six days of delivery was worth it at various stamp price points. The watchdog found that a large majority of consumers favored five-day delivery at any price point over 50 cents. Now that the price of a first-class stamp is 78 cents and rapidly rising, it’s reasonable to think consumers prefer five days of delivery over six. While this idea would likely need lawmakers’ sign-off, it’s worth considering.

Hire Fewer Career Workers (estimated annual savings: $2 billion)

Most private delivery companies have a simple formula for keeping labor costs low. They have a stable base of career employees and then ramp up with tens of thousands of seasonal and part-time workers to respond to upticks in demand. Unfortunately, the USPS has not gotten the memo. Former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy gloated, “We converted 190,000 employees to full career status over the past 4 years, increasing our total career employees by approximately 28,000 employees.”

Given that USPS part-time or temporary employees cost far less than their career counterparts, these conversions are a significant budget-buster. A 2021 analysis by the Government Accountability Office estimates that the compensation gap is around $25 per hour, though this total shrinks to $8 per hour when comparing similar types of workers with similar experience. Even after controlling for these factors, the USPS saves nearly $2 billion per year by retaining 115,000 non-career workers. Doubling the proportion of non-career workers would likely double these annual savings.

Crack Down on Counterfeit Postage (estimated annual savings: $400 million)

The USPS has a substantial problem monitoring and preventing counterfeit postage. In April 2024, a California woman pled guilty to defrauding the USPS out of more than $150 million in counterfeit postage. And, according to a recent report by National Public Radio’s Manuela López Restrepo, “Customs and Border Protection agents in Chicago seized nearly 162,000 counterfeit U.S. Forever stamps [in February], shipped from China. … had they been real, [they] would have been worth over $118,000.”

The estimated market worldwide for counterfeit postage is $500 million per year, and the U.S. likely accounts for a majority of that figure. The U.K.’s Royal Mail has been able to reduce fake stamp circulation by more than 90 percent by consistently barcoding stamps, and there’s no reason why the USPS can’t do the same.

Data centers need land, and a lot of it. According to a recent analysis by real-estate investment management firm Hines, the world will need about 40,000 new acres of land—or almost 2 billion square feet—to meet growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) services. To maintain its global share of output capacity, the U.S. will need to contribute about 25,000 new acres worth of land for these power-intensive operations. In other words, America will need to find almost two Manhattan’s worth of land to continue to be a global leader in AI.

Enter the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). America’s mail carrier owns 8,500 properties (including about 7,200 post offices) totaling an astounding 20,000 acres of land. What the USPS does not have is a lot of money. The struggling agency lostmore than $9.5 billion in fiscal year 2024, and has accumulated more than $100 billion in red ink over the past fifteen years. Selling underused land to high-valued operations such as data centers would cement American AI leadership while delivering the USPS out of debt.

The USPS is sitting on thousands of acres of land it does not need. Post offices of course provide a valuable function to the millions of Americans that need their mail delivered every day. But it doesn’t follow that there needs to be dedicated brick-and-mortar post offices with an army of federal employees serving consumers. The USPS can sell its real estate and save a significant sum on labor and maintenance costs by outsourcing “window” operations (e.g., stamp sales, package hand-offs) to private retailers. The USPS currently has about 2,500 “alternative retail access points” in which private retailers take the lead on postal operations.

The Inspector General (IG) notes though that “these locations have declined by nearly 20 percent in recent years” and closures have been especially significant recently (possibly because of DOGE). The USPS can save money by reversing course and expanding retail contracts, but it needs to tweak its current model. According to the IG, most of these locations are paid fixed sums to provide services, and payouts aren’t closely monitoredto ensure that the locations are serving consumers. Instead, the USPS should switch to a commission-based model to make sure that taxpayer dollars aren’t being wasted on seldom-used locations.

The USPS used to be more ambitious at contracting out at scale. In 2013, the agency launched a pilot to put postal retail operations in more than eighty Staples locations. The idea was to expand this partnership if everything went smoothly. Despite the convenience and reasonableness of this idea, unions (predictably) killed the partnership shortly after it began. A similarly large effort today would probably require Congress to override these unions and mandate that the USPS contract out a large percentage of its retail operations.

Allowing this to proceed and selling off redundant post offices would result in a large windfall for the struggling agency. According to a 2025 Wells Fargo analysis, the USPS could rake in $12 billion selling its post offices. Even assuming it kept half of its retail properties, the agency could use sale proceeds to erase most of its current year net losses. While that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to accumulated losses over the decades, it’s a significant start toward solvency.

To avoid confusion and red tape, lawmakers should step in and exempt any such mass sales from a lengthy National Environmental Policy Act review process. Assuming regulations don’t get in the way, USPS property sales to data center operations could be a rare all-around win for the government, innovators, taxpayers, and consumers. It’s time for a new and bold approach that drives American AI and digital leadership forward.

Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the U.S. Postal Service v. Konan case. At stake is whether the USPS can be held accountable for refusing to deliver the mail. Under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), the USPS cannot be hauled into court for “[a]ny claim arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter.”

SCOTUS will now consider the limits of that statutory language.

The original case was brought by Texas landlord Lebene Konan — who is black and rents to white tenants. Konan was allegedly the victim of a years’ long harassment campaign by two local postal employees who weren’t fond of interracial renting. As her legal team notes, “[t]he harassment campaign started when Rojas, the local mail carrier, changed the designated owner of one of Ms. Konan’s properties to one of her white tenants. ... When Ms. Konan complained to the local post office, the USPS Inspector General ‘confirmed that [she] owned the property’ and ordered ‘that mail be delivered.’” But the local postmaster overrode that directive, and things only escalated from there. The local post office marked her mail “undeliverable,” refused to deliver to her, and gave her a hard time when she came in to pick up her mail. This despicable course of conduct not only cost Ms. Konan rental income but also prevented her from accessing critical mail such as medications and doctor’s bills.

Fortunately, Konan could (seemingly) hold the USPS legally accountable because acts of sabotage by the USPS are more than just “loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission” of mail. However, the government begs to differ, reading these words implausibly broadly to include intentionally holding up the mail. And, according to the Department of Justice, holding postal predators accountable under the FTCA would create a litigation free-for-all in which “any person whose mail is lost or misdelivered could bring a federal tort suit—and potentially proceed to burdensome discovery” on the theory of intentional tampering. This is a silly argument designed to let the USPS off the hook for anything it does wrong. The reality is there’s a world of difference between (rightly) claiming that the mail is way too slow and alleging a series of coordinated efforts to sabotage communications. As Konan’s legal team rightly points out, only a small proportion of complaints against America’s mail carrier are remotely sinister enough to compare to Konan’s plight and probably wouldn’t be worth the plaintiff’s while to pursue in court.

In its amicus brief filed at the Supreme Court, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance argued that longstanding legal precedent and even old language found in eighty-year-old Post Office Department manuals make the government’s interpretation of FTCA untenable. Hopefully, SCOTUS agrees and finally holds the USPS accountable.

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) cannot stop losing money. America’s mail carrier lost an astounding $9.5 billion last year and has already lost more than $6 billion this year. These gargantuan losses are hardly an anomaly for the agency. Rather than responding by focusing on its core competency of delivering mail, the USPS continues to take on work and responsibilities wholly unrelated to mail delivery. From enforcing antitrust law to selling money orders, the USPS is now adding another boondoggle to the mix: the census.

According to recent reporting, the U.S. Census Bureau “plans to try using U.S. Postal Service mail carriers to conduct census interviews at two census test sites” in preparation for the 2030 count. The USPS should leave the census to the Census Bureau, which ought to seriously rethink how it counts America’s populace.

The U.S. census is already on a course collision with runaway expenses. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) considers the census a “high-risk program,” citing escalating expenses and cost overruns. In 2020—when the most recent census was conducted—the inflation-adjusted cost of counting a household was more than double the 1990 price tab. The 2020 Census cost taxpayers an astounding $14 billion, and the 2030 Census will likely cost even more absent reform. And it will likely cost even more than it needs to if the USPS runs the show.

Over the past few years, America’s mail carrier has been on a mission to grow its career workforce as much as it can, overlooking less expensive temporary (or “pre-career”) employees. Before leaving office, former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy gloated, “We converted 190,000 employees to full career status over the past 4 years, increasing our total career employees by approximately 28,000 employees.”

Given that USPS pre-career employees cost far less than their career counterparts, these conversions are a significant budget-buster. A 2021 analysis by the GAO estimates that the compensation gap is around $25 per hour, though this total shrinks to $8 per hour when comparing similar types of workers with similar experience. Yet, it will (most likely) be those pricey postal employees going door to door for any census project, instead of the temporary field representatives who ordinarily do the door knocking at a fraction of the cost.

But maybe knocking on doors isn’t needed at all for the U.S. to get an accurate count of its population.

In fact, other countries have begun to realize that an “actual” count can be achieved by bringing together data already collected via various systems such as social safety nets. In more than a dozen European countries (i.e. Switzerland, Norway, Germany), bureaucrats cobble together data already on the books to create elaborate, linked records in master databases.

To see what this would look like in practice, consider how websites such as Ancestry.com help consumers find relatives past and present. Their master database contains wide-ranging records such as birth, marriage, and death certificates, as well as citizenship/naturalization documents. If the government wanted even more information in their “census” database, they could make use of more detailed records at their disposal such as tax records. The National Research Council has suggested that this could work, noting in a 1995 report that a, “high proportion of the U.S. population is included in one or more existing administrative records…the coverage…may well expand in the future.” Thirty years later, surely more information is available.

While this approach may pose constitutional questions, a less-intensive census is still perfectly consistent with Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution. While the text requires an “actual Enumeration,” this likely refers to any deliberate effort to count the population (e.g., compiling records) and the clause grants Congress plenty of discretion as to how to accomplish that. The Census Bureau and Congress should start reforming this “actual Enumeration” by rejecting attempts to insert an overextended and debt-ridden agency into the mix. Only then can they consider real reforms to the centuries-old practice.

No matter the party in power, one thing is always true: bureaucrats will set their sights on successful and innovative businesses. After Google survived overzealous antitrust enforcers trying to break it up, the government is again targeting the company—this time over bogus charges of discrimination against Republicans. It’s bizarre that antitrust authorities are spending so much time and taxpayer dollars going after companies that are clearly not monopolies, as admitted by the judges presiding over their cases. Stranger still, the government is empowering actual monopolies like the U.S. Postal Service to enforce antitrust law.

The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division recently announced that it is partnering with the USPS to “offerrewards for individuals who report antitrust crimes and related offenses that harm consumers, taxpayers, and free market competition across industries.” In other words, the DOJ is letting an agency that routinely harms consumers and taxpayersuse money it doesn’t have on paying antitrust whistleblowers. The USPS should look in the mirror before it tries to enforce “competition” laws.

The new partnership between the DOJ and USPS—an agency with zero antitrust enforcement cred—is baffling to say the least. For a whistleblower’s report to qualify for a reward under the program, it needs to be “postal-related” in some way. As the law firm WilmerHale notes, “This standard is vague, and the MOU [Memorandum of Understanding] only requires that USPIS [United States Postal Inspection Service] must identify a ‘specific and credible harm’ to the USPS, though the harm need not be substantial or material.” Based on this ridiculous standard, a supermarket employee who is grumpy about her company’s pricing practices or plans to merge with another supermarket can report and receive a reward from the USPS. After all, supermarkets buy and sell stamps and any change to their business practices theoretically has some impact on other business lines.

This setup seems bizarre, at least until one reads the fine print of the MOU. According to the agreement, “After determining the size of the reward, the portion of the criminal fine or penalty remitted to the Postal Service will be set so that the appropriate whistleblower reward is one-half of the amount remitted to the Postal Service. The Postal Service will retain one-half of the amount remitted to the Postal Service, and agrees to pay the whistleblower the other half as the reward.” Both the USPS and the whistleblower get a finder’s fee when the whistleblower’s tip results in a criminal fine.

In other words, this scheme is a cockamamie backdoor way to fund the USPS through other parts of the government. The DOJ is handing the USPS money that it would have otherwise used to fund its enforcement capabilities, with taxpayers presumably making up the difference. Meanwhile, the USPS gets to maintain its fiction that it is “self-funding” and “generally receives no tax dollars”—despite a history of government bailouts.

Even if the USPS thinks this arrangement is financially wise, the truth is that mission creep always costs the agency (and taxpayers) over the long run. The USPS and its enforcement arm the USPIS have a long history of costly mission creep.

According to the USPIS, “We enforce more than 200 federal laws and investigate any crime that involves the mail. ... Postal Inspectors work tirelessly to protect the mail while building cases against anyone who misuses it.” If only this were true. Over the years, the USPIS has repeatedly reached beyond its mandate and gotten involved in cases far removed from stamps, envelopes, and packages. One famous example was in August of 2020, when “gun-toting members of the Postal Service’s investigator unit” arrested Trump acolyte Steve Bannon on his yacht.

Bannon and his business partners were indeed up to no good, pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars from an online crowdfunding campaign known as “We Build the Wall” after promising donors that all the money would go toward constructing a border wall. However, this fraud took place over the World Wide Web, and any connection to the USPS is far-fetched at best. It is of course possible that a few donors decided to go the old-fashioned route and mail their donations in to Bannon and company. But this scheme promising 100 percent wall construction was 100 percent a byproduct of the digital age and had nothing to do with the USPS.

Ditto with BitConnect, a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme in which “co-conspirators obtained approximately $2.4 billion from investors [and paid] earlier BitConnect investors with money from later investors.” The DOJ reported in 2021 that the USPIS was “assisting with the liquidation of the cryptocurrency proceeds,” even though the fraud was digital and far removed from the Postal Service.

The USPS would be wise to stop playing internet and antitrust cop. And the rest of the federal government would be wise to recognize the USPS for what it really is—a bumbling monopoly—and stop bankrolling its shenanigans. It’s time to cut this anti-competitive leviathan down to size.

To the dismay of billions (yes, billions) of consumers around the world, De Minimis Day is here. As President Trump specified in a July 30 Executive Order, tariff-free importation of goods valued at $800 or less will end on August 29. In one fell swoop, the daily mountain of small packages arriving at consumers’ doorsteps will now be hit with import taxes.

In anticipation of this grim day, postal services around the world are suspending their services to the U.S. The list is growing by the hour. In a previous post, I argued that the taxpayer-funded Universal Postal Union (UPU) should be hurriedly getting all these countries together and cobbling together some kind of compromise to get the mail flowing again. That still hasn’t happened.

However, the UPU has belatedly entered the fray. On Tuesday, the UPU penned a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressing alarm at the hasty imposition of new tariffs and corresponding duty collection and transmission requirements. The UPU also released the following statement:

Recognizing that the short implementation timeline poses a significant challenge for the international postal network, particularly for the delivery of e-commerce items, the UPU is working with the relevant U.S. authorities to ensure that information on the operational requirements of the measures is communicated effectively.

The UPU further stated it is “working with relevant postal stakeholders on network-wide and sustainable solutions [such as] a scalable delivered duty paid solution that will facilitate duty collection and remittance across the UPU network.”

But without a substantive agreement between member countries on tariff rates for inexpensive items, further postal boycotting is very likely. The good news is the UPU could (in theory) propose significant reforms to try and persuade the U.S. to ditch this reckless tariff tantrum. As I wrote earlier this week, the UPU moved a few years ago from fixed terminal dues—which benefited China and developing countries—to U.S.-friendly self-declared postage rates. Now, when China comes knocking with incoming shipments, the U.S. Postal Service has more discretion to charge China what it deems reasonable for taking said shipments the last mile to U.S. addresses.

The problem is these new self-declared rates are only flexible to a point. Countries are generally limited to demanding 70 percent of equivalent domestic postage, meaning that imports still have an artificial advantage and domestic producers will still be paying more for in-country shipments than their Chinese-based competitors shipping across the Pacific. Meanwhile, this cap is based on prior year domestic postage rather than current year rates. That creates an artificially large gap between domestic and foreign inbound rates when USPS rates have lately been changing twice a year.

Reforming the system to allow more fully self-declared rates would be a significant boon to the U.S. and maybe even cause the Trump administration to think twice before ending the de minimis exception. But first, the UPU needs to get everyone back to the negotiating table. It’s been six years since the last significant UPU agreement. It’s time for another accord to stave off De Minimis Day.

The great postal boycott has begun. On August 25, NBC News’ Steve Kopack and Brian Cheung reported, “Postal services in Japan and Switzerland are the latest to pause shipments to the United States this week, days before an exemption for certain import taxes is about to expire.” As of August 26, more than 20 nations—including France, Germany, and the U.K.—have announced the suspension of at least some shipments into the U.S. And once tariff exemptions on goods shipped to the U.S. worth $800 or less end on August 29, the number of countries on this list will surely proliferate.

These changes not only highlight the (many) unintended consequences of trade wars but also underscore the failure of international postal rules and norms. For the sake of billions of consumers and trillions of dollars of economic activity, the postal services of the world must push the envelope on cooperation.

The growing postal boycott of the U.S. is the latest proof that eliminating the de minimis tariff exemption on goods valued $800 or less is a shortsighted policy. As Taxpayers Protection Alliance Chief Regulatory Analyst Juan M. Londoño noted in a recent piece for The Baltimore Sun, “Under the executive order [ending the de minimis exemption], international suppliers will have two options: either pay the tariffs as a percentage of the package value or pay a simplified flat fee that starts at $80 and can go as high as $200 per package, depending on the effective tariff rate of the country of origin. Suddenly, [a] $17 bag of Colombian coffee could cost you a whopping $97. Justifiably, you go back to the lesser-quality option that you could find at the grocery store, which will also likely be higher in price (and probably not from the U.S.).”

As the recent postal news demonstrates, this harsh immediate impact on U.S. consumers is just the start of the problems. When consumers cannot get their products from foreign posts, they are suddenly faced with far fewer options at a significantly higher price. And if they need a product from one of the many countries boycotting the U.S., they may need to ship the product in a convoluted and costly way.

One key player in this growing international crisis has been conspicuously quiet: the Universal Postal Union (UPU).

When mail originates in one country and is sent to another country, different countries’ postal agencies must agree on who pays what. Under the “terminal dues” system established by the UPU, the postal agency of the country where the mail comes from must compensate the destination country’s postal service for delivering mail to the recipient. As the U.S. Postal Service notes, “each postal administration that receives mail from another administration has the right to collect payment from the originating post to compensate for costs incurred to deliver that mail.” The UPU is also supposed to be a forum in which postal services can iron out their differences on pressing matters such as tariffs.

Unfortunately, the UPU has neglected its role as a forum and doubled down on unfair and confusing terminal dues. In 1999, the UPU opted to create a “terminal dues” system based on participating countries’ wealth rather than underlying delivery costs. Nations deemed to be in economic “transition” such as China would not have to pay wealthy “target” countries such as the U.S. full delivery costs. As a result, the USPS—and American taxpayers and consumers—footed the bill when China was allowed to underpay for mail inbound to the U.S. One 2015 Inspector General (IG) report estimated that this China-first system cost the USPS about $75 million per year. And, because the USPS had to fork over a fortune to China Post to deliver American packages to Chinese destinations, it was far cheaper for China to export products than for Americans to sell to Chinese consumers. As Linn’s Stamp News noted, “shipping a 1-pound parcel to New York City from Greenville, S.C., would cost almost $6 via the United States Postal Service, but only $3.66 from Beijing to New York.”

This changed during the first Trump administration, when President Trump threatened to withdraw from the UPU unless the bureaucracy leveled the playing field for American businesses and the USPS. In response, the UPU called an “Extraordinary Congress” in 2019 to discuss possible changes. The result was a win for American taxpayers and consumers. In exchange for the U.S. staying in the UPU and handing the organization $40 million over five years, the UPU agreed to let member-countries self-declare their own international postage rates. Americans would no longer be doomed to subsidize Chinese shipments and could demand renumerations reflecting actual delivery costs.

The results have been largely positive so far. A 2024 analysis by the Government Accountability Office found that, for the first time in a long time, USPS’ international mail revenue is covering inbound delivery costs.

But there are signs of trouble brewing. The UPU is still trying hard to “reduce inequalities” and tackle poverty, unusual goals for a global postal organization. The only real lever the UPU has to address these issues is using the “terminal dues” system to subsidize supposedly poor nations. That tinkering not only fuels the grievances that have led to the current tariff debacle but also undermines the UPU’s status as a forum of disputes.

The UPU should step up during this crisis and get all the postal services in the room to work out growing trade disputes. The postal powers-that-be should be striving to find agreement, not fueling tariff tantrums.

Today is new Postmaster General (PMG) David Steiner’s first day on the job. And, he certainly has his work cut out for him. America’s mail carrier has lost more than $3 billion so far in fiscal year (FY) 2025, $9.5 billion in FY 2024, and more than $100 billion over the past fifteen years. Unfortunately, PMG Steiner has already started off on the wrong foot by hiking first-class mail (i.e., letter) prices from 73 cents to 78 cents. PMG Steiner should ditch these senseless rate hikes and focus instead on cutting costs to get postal deficits under control. It’s time for a new approach from the new PMG.

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has cycled through plenty of Postmasters General. Some have largely stood for the status quo, while others such as PMG Louis DeJoy have had bolder reform agendas. But, one thing that unites most of these postal CEOs is nonsensical price hikes. In the past five years, America’s mail carrier has raised prices seven times, from 55 cents to 78 cents. And for all the financial pain foisted on customers, there’s little evidence that these first-class rate hikes raise more money instead of simply driving business away. According to a 2024 analysis by the non-profit group Keep US Posted, the agency’s models used to determine how much to hike prices fail to take consumer preferences and demand into account. As the study notes, the USPS has “instituted biannual rate increases that are allowed to exceed the historical CPI [consumer price index] cap. Under the current process, the USPS proposes new rate increases before the impact of prior increases can be fully realized.” The group estimates that agency miscalculations of consumers’ price sensitivity cost the USPS roughly $2 billion per year in volume losses.

In other words, the USPS can actually increase revenue by halting price hikes on first-class mail.

There’s also plenty that PMG Steiner can do on the spending side to get the agency on firmer fiscal footing. For example, the USPS can save a significant sum on labor and maintenance costs by outsourcing “window” operations (e.g., stamp sales, package hand-offs) to private retailers. The USPS currently has about 2,500 “alternative retail access points” in which private retailers take the lead on postal operations. The Inspector General (IG) notes though that “these locations have declined by nearly 20 percent in recent years” and closures have been especially significant recently (possibly because of DOGE). The USPS can save money by reversing course and expanding retail contracts, but it needs to tweak its current model. According to the IG, most of these locations are paid fixed sums to provide services, and payouts aren't closely monitored to ensure that the locations are serving consumers. Instead, the USPS should switch to a commission-based model to make sure that taxpayer dollars aren’t being wasted on seldom-used locations.

There are plenty of other ways the USPS can turn around its fiscal fortunes. The USPS currently delivers mail Monday through Saturday, along with Sundays for some packages. However, some have argued for switching to a five-day delivery system to decrease costs and improve worker morale. Agency leadership suggested this idea (with some wiggle room for weekend package deliveries) in its “Five-Year Business Plan” in 2013 and concluded that it would save $1.9 billion per year. That’s $2.6 billion after adjusting for inflation, which is about a third of the average USPS annual loss over the past couple of years.

In 2015, the IG surveyed consumers on whether six days of delivery was worth it at various stamp price points. The watchdog found that a large majority of consumers favored five-day delivery at any price point over 50 cents. Now that the price of a first-class stamp is 78 cents and rapidly rising, it’s reasonable to think consumers prefer five days of delivery over six. While this idea would likely need lawmakers’ sign-off, it’s worth considering.

PMG Steiner has just started one of the world’s most difficult jobs. But, if he succeeds in turning around America’s mail carrier, hundreds of millions of taxpayers and consumers will be immensely grateful. It’s time for the USPS to start delivering again.

The U.S. Postal Service has been (doing a very bad job of) figuring out how to save money. America’s mail carrier has lost more than $100 billion over the past fifteen years. Slowing down the mail to cut down on expenses hasn’t exactly been a popular move, and in response, the USPS has gotten “creative” in its service cutbacks.

One approach: sticking it to apartment complexes and their residents.

As I documented in The American Spectator a few weeks ago:

Recently, America’s mail carrier has been sending notices to ordinary apartment buildings, bizarrely claiming that the complexes are “dormitories” and therefore responsible for distributing their own mail.

Located in Statesboro, Georgia, the Copper Beech apartment and townhouse complex operates similarly to any other apartment/townhouse complex. Residents enjoy private kitchens, bathrooms, and living rooms, with a few community amenities such as fitness facilities and a pool. However, the USPS has a different (and distorted) view of this property. After a petty feud over electronically logging packages escalated between an apartment property manager and the local postmaster in late 2023, the postmaster notified Copper Beech that they are, in fact, a dormitory (after considering them an apartment complex for 15 years). As a result, Copper Beech would be in charge of delivering mail from the front office to its residents.

This is far from an isolated incident. In October 2024, Texas CBS affiliate KBTX reported, “The USPS recently reclassified the Vibe on Harvey and Atrium Apartments [in College Station, Texas] as ‘apartment-type mailboxes for dormitories or residence halls,’ a move that has residents and property managers questioning its accuracy and fairness.” The reclassification impacted several College Station-area complexes, despite the residences catering mainly to local families and having setups indistinguishable from run-of-the-mill apartment buildings.

If complexes are unable to accept responsibility for sorting the mail, residents are instructed by the USPS to pick up their mail at the local post office. But the local post office then told residents that this wouldn’t be possible, and residents would need to purchase their own P.O. boxes.

These changes are, of course, a massive hassle for customers and will likely force these complexes to raise rent-related fees. While the USPS definitely needs to save money, it doesn’t need to resort to these shady tactics. Here are five ways the agency can get back on firmer fiscal footing.

It looks like the Senate will not force the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to sell its electric vehicles (EVs) and charging equipment after all. Reuters reports,

Senate Republicans cannot force the U.S. Postal Service to scrap thousands of electric vehicles and charging equipment in a massive tax and budget bill, the Senate parliamentarian said late on [June 22]. The U.S. Postal Service currently has 7,200 electric vehicles, made up of Ford e-Transit ... vehicles and specially built Next Generation Delivery Vehicles built by Oshkosh Defense.

The Senate version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA) included this forced sell-off, and the provision didn’t seem like a half-bad idea. After all, ongoing fleet acquisition plans are costing the agency nearly $10 billion and EVs are far from the cheapest option out there. Shifting course away from $80,000 trucks could save the agency significant sums.

Yet, the USPS wasn’t fond of this proposal. On June 13, USPS Government Relations and Public Policy Vice President Peter Pastre warned,

Replacing the current 7,200 BEVs [Battery Electric Vehicles] would directly cost the Postal Service $450 million, at a minimum. Preparing for wider BEV adoption, the Postal Service has spent $540 million on electrical infrastructure upgrades. These sunk costs are largely unrecoverable and can only yield a return on investment by being put to their intended use.

...

The funds realized by auctioning the vehicles and infrastructure would be negligible. Much of infrastructure is literally buried under parking lots, and there is no market for used charging equipment. The Ford e-Transit vehicles would likely yield significantly less than even their undepreciated book value, and it would not be possible to sell NGDVs due to security concerns.

None of this is true. Used Ford EV vans from around 2022 or 2023 are regularly selling for more than $30,000, which is significantly more than what used gas-powered vans are selling for. Selling the former to purchase the latter would almost certainly result in a profit, perhaps of $40 million.

Pastre’s assertion that “there is no market” for EV infrastructure is similarly untrue. There is plenty of EV charging equipment awaiting install at facilities such as the Material Distribution Center in Topeka, Kansas. This location has seen repeated thefts of charging station heads and related IT equipment worth thousands of dollars. And, if thieves can easily steal and resell this equipment, the USPS can certainly auction off the equipment with some help from the General Services Administration.

Another option for already-installed EV chargers is to sell (or lease) usage and access rights on USPS premises. New private owners of the stations would reap 100 percent of station revenues, and their consumers would be permitted to drive onto agency property to charge their vehicles. The USPS already leases space at some of their larger post offices to private retailers, and this is basically the same concept. The agency would likely have to figure out how to rework some security fencing for hassle-free access, but this is eminently doable.

But because the USPS currently only has 7,200 BEVs and plans to buy roughly 60,000 more, the real savings are in cancelling yet-unfulfilled orders. Given that the USPS is paying $20,000 more for EVs than gas-powered alternatives, cancelling these orders and pivoting to gas trucks could easily save the USPS $1-2 billion. Fortunately, the USPS’ main EV supplier Oshkosh Corp. appears to be open to contract changes along these lines.

It's long past time for the USPS to ditch its EV plans.

The Hill’s Elizabeth Crisp reports,

House Democrats are seeking more information and a face-to-face briefing from the U.S. Postal Service about the Trump administration’s use of Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) officers to aid the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with President Trump’s immigration crackdown. … The House Oversight Democrats wrote in their letter [to postal leadership] that they want to know more about how postal workers are aiding with immigration efforts after a Postal Inspection Service officer was spotted at a recent immigration raid of a Colorado nightclub where more than 100 migrants were detained.

This USPS-DHS collaboration has been going on for at least a couple of months. According to an April report in The Washington Post by Jacob Bogage and Hannah Natanson, USPIS “recently joined a Department of Homeland Security task force geared toward finding, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants.” At the time, it was reported that immigration officials were using outside pictures of envelopes and packages and tapping into USPIS’ broad surveillance network as part of a nationwide hunt against illegal immigrants.

Unfortunately, the USPIS has a long history of mission creep and focusing on much more than mail crime.

According to the USPIS, “We enforce more than 200 federal laws and investigate any crime that involves the mail. ... Postal Inspectors work tirelessly to protect the mail while building cases against anyone who misuses it.” If only this were true. Over the years, the USPIS has repeatedly reached beyond its mandate and gotten involved in cases far removed from stamps, envelopes, and packages. One famous example was in August of 2020, when “gun-toting members of the Postal Service’s investigator unit” arrested Trump acolyte Steve Bannon on his yacht.

Bannon and his business partners were indeed up to no good, pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars from an online crowdfunding campaign known as “We Build the Wall” after promising donors that all the money would go toward constructing a border wall. However, this fraud took place over the World Wide Web, and any connection to the USPS is far-fetched at best. It is of course possible that a few donors decided to go the old-fashioned route and mail their donations in to Bannon and company. But, this scheme promising 100 percent wall construction was 100 percent a byproduct of the digital age and really had nothing to do with the USPS.

Ditto with BitConnect, a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme in which “co-conspirators obtained approximately $2.4 billion from investors [and paid] earlier BitConnect investors with money from later investors.” The Department of Justice reported in 2021 that the USPIS was “assisting with the liquidation of the cryptocurrency proceeds,” even though the fraud was digital and far removed from the Postal Service.

Even when the USPIS does carry out mail-related enforcement, the actions reek of overreach. The USPS has jealously guarded its monopoly on first-class mail, even if that means raiding private companies for doing nothing wrong.

The USPS allows for “extremely urgent” mail to be delivered privately but interprets this niche in a very narrow way. Postal scholars J. Gregory Sidak and Daniel F. Spulber recount, “In a highly publicized incident in 1993, armed postal inspectors arrived at the Atlanta headquarters of Equifax Inc., a large credit reporting company, and demanded to know whether all the mail that it had sent by Federal Express was truly urgent.” While subsequent postmasters general have pledged not to repeat these costly raids, private companies delivering time-sensitive correspondence must now constantly watch their backs against an aggressive agency.

And, consumers must face the ever-present prospect of surveillance by the USPIS and USPS. In April 2021, Yahoo News reported that the service runs an investigation unit known as the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP; since renamed the “Analytics Team”) that spies on Americans via social media. Yahoo noted, “[t]he work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as ‘inflammatory’ postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.” The USPS and USPIS refuse to release any information about this program, despite Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance Foundation.

The USPIS should be focused on postal crime, and agency officers must be allowed to do their jobs. Stretching agency resources paper thin to focus on the priority of the week makes everyone less safe.

May 19 marked the start of Mailbox Improvement Week, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is urging consumers to “spruce up their mailboxes.” Even amid declining mail volumes, America’s mail carrier wants mailboxes to be “large enough to support the customer’s daily mail and package volume — within allowable size limits — and be of a design approved by the postmaster general.” Yet, consumers are deterred from keeping up with their mailboxes due to the USPS zealously overregulating these prime pieces of postal real estate. The ailing agency needs to let a thousand flowers bloom and allow consumers to use their mailboxes as they see fit—including permitting deliveries from the USPS’ competitors. The USPS must also take basic and common-sense steps to keep mailboxes safe from postal thieves.

It’s Property Ownership 101: people only want to invest in things they own and for which they can reap the rewards. While homeowners are responsible for mailbox upkeep, the USPS has the ultimate say in what the boxes can, and cannot, be used for. The agency has repeatedly warned people that only authorized agency personnel can deposit (postage paid) materials in mailboxes. And, consumers “are not allowed to affix anything to [mailboxes or place anything on top of them], including flyers, signs about missing items or animals, and advertisements.”

Even the Girl Scouts have gotten the memo. For example, the Girl Scouts of North East Ohio explicitly instruct their members and volunteers not to place any materials, such as flyers or cookie program information, into mailboxes without proper postage, acknowledging the federal prohibition. First put into place by Congress in 1934, these onerous mailbox restrictions aren’t going away anytime soon. In 1997, the Government Accountability Office noted that nearly six in ten Americans favor allowing USPS competitors such as United Parcel Service (UPS) and FedEx access to their mailboxes. But, America’s mail carrier opposes any reform that could erode its monopoly in any way. Other agencies such as the Department of Justice are similarly against mailbox reform, but for the bizarre reason that “the restriction deters the distribution of sexually explicit materials to mailboxes.”

Whatever the reason offered, maintaining this prohibition makes Americans far less likely to buy larger and more package-friendly mailboxes that the USPS is so fond of. If Americans cannot legally get most of their packages delivered into their mailboxes, they likely won’t go the extra mile to spend money upgrading their receptacles. That reluctance in turn makes it more likely that postal workers will have to spend the extra time (and risk dog bites) to bring packages to Americans’ doorsteps rather than simply driving up to a mailbox.

For all its stipulations on what can go in or on a mailbox, the USPS does a remarkably abysmal job protecting its de facto property. Thieves have been targeting personal mailboxes in addition to blue USPS collection boxes, yet the postal police force remains sequestered around federal properties. Postal leadership has claimed that these police officers cannot patrol the streets because of laws on the books. The relevant legal language states that the service “may employ police officers for duty in connection with the protection of property owned or occupied by the Postal Service or under the charge and control of the Postal Service, and persons on that property, including duty in areas outside the property to the extent necessary to protect the property and persons on the property.”

That’s a mouthful, but it’s easy to see where postal leadership has gone astray in their interpretation of the law. The “protection of property owned or occupied by the Postal Service” makes it sound like the postal police force is limited to securing post offices and administrative buildings. The key overlooked language addresses property “under the charge and control” of the service. Because the service claims a monopoly on what goes inside mailboxes, it’s reasonable to infer that the agency effectively controls that property even though it doesn’t outright own mailboxes. And, if mailboxes meet the definition of protectable property under the law, postal police are indeed permitted to patrol mail carriers’ delivery routes.

If the USPS does a better job protecting Americans’ mailboxes and allows consumers to use them as they see fit, perhaps there would finally be some incentive for do-it-yourself “mailbox improvement.” A little choice and flexibility shouldn’t be such a red flag for America’s mail carrier.

On Friday, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) reported losing an astounding $3.3 billion. The agency is on track to lose roughly $7 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2025, on top of the $100 billion the USPS has lost over the past fifteen years.

But there’s some good news: two new executives will be joining the ranks of the United States Postal Service (USPS). On April 30, President Trump posted on Truth Social, “I will be nominating Anthony Lomangino to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors. He built one of the most successful sanitation businesses in the country. He knows how to fix a problem — and the Postal Service has many!” Then, on May 9, the USPS announced that David Steiner will be the next Postmaster General. As two prominent figures with sanitation industry experience, Lomangino and Steiner will hopefully be able to apply their business know-how to America’s mail carrier.

Anthony Lomangino began his career in the waste industry by joining Allied Sanitation, and his profile quickly rose. He played a pivotal role in transforming the company into Star Recycling, which became the 14th largest privately owned solid waste management company in the United States before its sale in 1996. In 1999, Lomangino founded Southern Waste Systems (SWS) and its affiliate, Sun Recycling, in South Florida. Under his leadership, SWS expanded to 12 facilities and employed over 750 people, focusing on recycling construction and demolition materials.

Lomangino’s waste management career has not been without controversy. WM (formerly known as Waste Management) — a leading waste management company — bought SWS in 2016, and Lomangino’s former partner “Alligator” Ron Bergeron alleged that Lomangino was in cahoots with WM to kneecap Bergeron’s rival business. These claims have proven flimsy at best, and fortunately, judges have rejected Bergeron’s grievance-fueled antitrust arguments. Not only was the acquisition legally legitimate, but consolidation has resulted in WM running a more capable and cost-effective business. WM has been able to keep otherwise-surging labor costs under control, and retention rates are on the rise while business is booming.

WM’s success is likely why President Trump tapped David Steiner to be the latest Postmaster General. Steiner served as CEO of WM from 2004 to 2016, leading the company through a significant transformation following a major financial scandal in the late 1990s. His leadership was pivotal in restoring the company's credibility and financial health. He streamlined operations, improved safety records, and enhanced employee morale, effectively repositioning WM as a leader in the recycling sector. Since then, he’s gained significant experience in the delivery and parcel sectors.

Compare this record of success to the USPS’ sorry status quo, marred by low retention and high costs. Hopefully, Steiner and Lomangino will reverse course and pull America’s mail carrier out of the red. If they need some ideas, I have a few modest suggestions.

Ever wanted to sue the U.S. Postal Service (USPS)? Well, you can in theory, but there are broad-based exceptions in the law that confer at least partial sovereign immunity on America’s mail carrier. Under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), the USPS cannot be hauled into court for “[a]ny claim arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter.”

SCOTUS will soon consider the limits of that statutory language.

The original case was brought by Texas landlord Lebene Konan — who is black and rents to white tenants. Konan was allegedly the victim of a years’ long harassment campaign by two local postal employees who weren’t fond of interracial renting. As her legal team notes, “[t]he harassment campaign started when Rojas, the local mail carrier, changed the designated owner of one of Ms. Konan’s properties to one of her white tenants. ... When Ms. Konan complained to the local post office, the USPS Inspector General ‘confirmed that [she] owned the property’ and ordered ‘that mail be delivered.’” But the local postmaster overrode that directive, and things only escalated from there. The local post office marked her mail “undeliverable,” refused to deliver to her, and gave her a hard time when she came in to pick up her mail. This despicable course of conduct not only cost Ms. Konan rental income but also prevented her from accessing critical mail such as medications and doctor’s bills.

Fortunately, Konan could (seemingly) hold the USPS legally accountable because acts of sabotage by the USPS are more than just “loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission” of mail. However, the government begs to differ, reading these words implausibly broadly to include intentionally holding up the mail. And, according to the Department of Justice, holding postal predators accountable under the FTCA would create a litigation free-for-all in which “any person whose mail is lost or misdelivered could bring a federal tort suit—and potentially proceed to burdensome discovery” on the theory of intentional tampering. This is a silly argument designed to let the USPS off the hook for anything it does wrong. The reality is there’s a world of difference between (rightly) claiming that the mail is way too slow and alleging a series of coordinated efforts to sabotage communications. As Konan’s legal team rightly points out, only a small proportion of complaints against America’s mail carrier are remotely sinister enough to compare to Konan’s plight and probably wouldn’t be worth the plaintiff’s while to pursue in court.

Will SCOTUS embrace a common-sense reading of the FTCA, or will the justices construe words such as “loss” and “miscarriage” broadly to include intentional misdeeds? Stay tuned to find out!