The United States Postal Service is on the brink of financial collapse. Appearing before a House Oversight subcommittee, the agency warned Congress it will run out of cash in less than a year without significant reforms.
Postmaster General David Steiner laid out a series of cost-cutting proposals — including reducing mail delivery from six days to five days a week, closing some post office locations, and raising stamp prices — while urging lawmakers to increase the agency's $15 billion borrowing cap. The USPS currently delivers to more than 170 million addresses six days a week and has reported net losses of $118 billion since 2007. According to reports from December 2025, Steiner believed the agency would run out of money as early as 2027.
According to The U.S. Sun, Steiner did not sugarcoat the situation. In written testimony seen by Reuters, he stated: "To ensure our survival beyond next year, we need to increase our borrowing capacity so that we don't run out of cash." He warned bluntly: "The failure to do this could lead to the end of the Postal Service as we know it now."
The issue has sparked debate about whether USPS can survive in its current form — or whether Congress and taxpayers should continue propping up an institution whose core business has been in freefall for nearly two decades. From a free-market perspective, the numbers tell a damning story of a government monopoly that has failed to adapt.
The service's peak postage volume was 213 billion pieces of mail in 2006. By 2025, that figure had plummeted to 104 billion pieces — a drop of more than half. First-class mail volume has fallen to its lowest level since the late 1960s. Steiner put the financial toll in stark terms. He noted that at current stamp prices, the volume decline "translates to a loss of $81 billion." In the years since 2006, he said, the USPS "was thrown overboard and instead of tossing us a life jacket, we were thrown an anchor."
Meanwhile, consumers have already been absorbing rising costs. Stamp prices have climbed 46% since early 2019, when a stamp cost 50 cents. That's a significant jump that has done little to close the financial gap created by collapsing mail volume.
Among the proposals Steiner outlined, reducing weekly deliveries from six to five days stood out as the most consequential. He estimated the change would save about $3 billion a year. Yet he acknowledged that the delivery reduction and post office closures "may not be palatable to Congress or the American public."
That's a telling admission. In a private enterprise, a company hemorrhaging $118 billion over nearly two decades would have restructured long ago — or ceased to exist. The USPS, shielded by its government charter, has instead relied on congressional lifelines while its underlying business model deteriorates further.
In 2022, Congress provided USPS with $57 billion in financial relief over a decade and required future retirees to enroll in a government health insurance plan. That was supposed to stabilize the agency. It clearly hasn't been enough.
The Government Accountability Office has now told lawmakers it is critical to "address USPS's unsustainable business model before it will be responsible for billions in new annual expenses for retiree health care, likely in 2031." That looming obligation adds another layer of urgency to an already precarious situation.
This is what happens when a government entity operates without the market discipline that forces private companies to innovate or perish. The USPS has watched email, electronic billing, and digital communication eat away at its core revenue stream for two decades. Rather than fundamentally rethinking its operations, it has repeatedly turned to Congress for bailouts and borrowing authority.
For everyday Americans, the implications are straightforward. Either deliveries get cut, stamp prices keep rising, post offices close — or some combination of all three. The alternative is continued taxpayer-funded support for an institution that the GAO itself calls unsustainable.
Here's what the USPS financial picture looks like at a glance:
The hard truth is that no amount of borrowing capacity or congressional relief packages will fix a business model built for a world that no longer exists. Five-day delivery may be just the beginning. Until USPS is forced — or allowed — to operate with the efficiency and accountability the market demands, these financial crises will keep coming back, each one worse than the last.