The U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors has announced Daniel Steiner as the next postmaster general. This decision comes at a momentous time as the Postal Service will celebrate its 250th anniversary in July. It also comes at a perilous time, since the Postal Service has been losing billions of dollars each year, is running out of cash, and has abysmal service performance across the country. The Government Accountability Office has had the financial condition of the Postal Service on its High-Risk List since 2009 and has called its business model “unsustainable.”
When he becomes the postmaster general sometime in July, Steiner should run the Postal Service based on two commonsense principles.
First, the Postal Service should continue to make its top priority the delivery of mail and packages, together, six days a week, to every address everywhere across America. This universal service obligation was codified again by Congress in 2022. While the private sector has expanded its deliveries, no single company or group of companies matches the last mile delivery that has always been made by the Postal Service.
Second, consistent with President Trump’s executive orders to make the federal government more efficient, the Postal Service should increase its work with the private sector on processing, logistics and transportation of mail and packages close to their final destinations. The private sector has performed these tasks for decades, and the Postal Service should take greater advantage of the cutting-edge technology and flexible contracting arrangements that will allow these tasks to be performed more efficiently.
To achieve these two overriding objectives and get the Postal Service on the right track quickly, Steiner must address the largest impediment to improving its financial position and improving service.
He should immediately pause implementation of the agency’s Delivering for America plan. The Postal Service Office of Inspector General Fall 2024 Semiannual Report to Congress identified complications and risks associated with the implementation of Delivering for America. Serious concerns about Delivering for America were also raised in Senate and House hearings in last December. In addition to hitting the brakes on Delivering for America, the new postmaster general should make the following three changes.
First, he should impose an immediate moratorium on spending billions of dollars on new Postal Service processing facilities which it cannot afford and duplicate existing efficient private sector operations. There should also be an analysis of the Postal Service’s entire real estate portfolio to determine what is needed to only deliver mail and packages six days a week.
Second, there should be an immediate hiring freeze for all non-delivery positions, especially as mail volume continues to decline. Labor constitutes 80 percent of Postal Service costs, and rather than trimming the number of employees, former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy converted more than 100,000 positions from part-time to full-time. The hiring freeze should exempt letter carriers, since addresses continue to expand nationwide and delivery to every address is the core of the Postal Service’s mission.
Third, the misnamed “Regional Transportation Optimization” initiative should be terminated. The Postal Service is cutting in half the number of times it goes to more than 24,000 post offices, located mostly in rural areas, to pick up mail and packages. The Postal Regulatory Commission excoriated the Regional Transportation Optimization in a Jan. 31, 2025, advisory opinion. The Postal Regulatory Commission determined that it had a negative impact on service, overstated its savings and used a defective model that will fail to create a more efficient network than it is currently using.
The universal service obligation does not have exceptions for any part of the United States. Steiner should end the Regional Transportation Optimization and restart mail and package pickup twice a day at all post offices.
For the sake of households and businesses across the country, the Delivering for America plan must be halted and replaced with policies that will allow the Postal Service to revitalize its sagging fiscal outlook and continue to connect communities with affordable and efficient delivery of mail and packages. That would be something to celebrate along with the rest of the festivities for America’s 250th anniversary.
Tom Schatz is president of Citizens Against Government Waste.