Leaders at the United States Postal Service (USPS) are raising alarms as the agency prepares to run out of money by 2027 if they don’t receive help soon. Now, Postmaster General David Steiner is pleading to Congress to step in and save the agency before millions of Americans are negatively impacted.
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It’s no easy job running the nation’s top delivery service. In fact, the agency serves over 169 million people, according to the USPS website, from delivering medications to Amazon packages, USPS has remained a reliable resource… Until now.
Postmaster General David Steiner outlined the agency’s financial problem in a written letter to Congress this week. “We got here because of the drastic reduction in the use of mail,” he explained. “From the historic peak volume of 213 billion pieces per year in 2006 to 109 billion pieces today, we have lost over 104 billion pieces per year in our system. For perspective, if all of that lost volume was paid at the current price of a stamp, which is 78cents, that’s about 81 billion dollars. No company could weather that much revenue loss.”
While other federal agencies rely heavily on government funding, USPS is a different story. The agency instead makes their money through stamps revenue, but in recent years, a decline in public use threatens to upset the natural balance of the postal service, Brookings explained.
The agency is set to run out of money in the next year, according to reports from Steiner read. He told Congress the agency has been operating in a deficiency for way too long. “I like to say that in the time since peak 2006 mail volume, the Postal Service was thrown overboard and instead of tossing us a life jacket, we were thrown an anchor,” Steiner said.
Paperless billing and digital communications have caused severe decreases in the postal service’s revenue. According to Axios, the postal agency is demanding the price of stamps be raise to up to 95 cents, marking a rise from 78 cents today in order to keep up with the current demands.
The USPS crisis couldn’t come at a worse time. Long-time parter Amazon revealed ongoing discrepancies regarding the joint contract could result in the billion-dollar company taking its business elsewhere, the outlet also reported.
“In December, USPS abruptly walked away at the eleventh hour instead of continuing the renewal agreement we’d been negotiating,” a statement from Amazon read. “This creates significant uncertainty for our long-term network planning. Despite this, we participated in good faith and submitted a bid in February 2026. We’ve received no response.”
In response to the financial crisis, Congress members agreed a problem exists, but they’re split on how exactly to avoid a much larger crisis for the country and the agency.
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