The US Postal Service will run out of funds within a year, unless lawmakers lift a cap on how much money the agency can borrow, according to the postmaster general.
In an interview with the Associated Press, David Steiner warned that the postal service – which relies on stamps and service fees rather than tax dollars to deliver mail six days a week to every address in the country – would run out of cash for employees and vendors by February 2027.
The agency has operated with a financial shortfall almost every fiscal year since 2007, as people and businesses have moved toward paperless billing and digital communication, forgoing first-class mail. But mail deliveries have continued, with USPS borrowing money from the US treasury to compensate for losses.
Steiner, who is scheduled to testify before Congress this month, has called for changes to a federal law that caps the agency’s borrowing at $15bn.
The former CEO of the nation’s largest waste-management company and a former member of the FedEx board of directors who took over the postal service last July has also said that USPS needs to boost revenue by expanding a nationwide “last-mile” delivery network. Last-mile delivery – the most labor-intensive part of the delivery process – involves moving packages from distribution centers to customers’ doors.
Despite talk in the Trump administration of privatizing the postal service or repositioning it as part of the commerce department, Steiner has told USPS employees that he does not believe in fundamentally changing the agency’s structure or mission. “I do not believe that the postal service should be privatized or that it should become an appropriated part of the federal government,” he said in his first video message to USPS employees in July 2025. “I believe in the current structure of the postal service as a self-financing, independent entity of the executive branch.”
Multiple postmaster generals over the past two decades have repeatedly asked Congress or regulators to change the various rules governing the postal service. In 2022, Congress did pass the Postal Service Reform Act, which ended a requirement that the agency pre-fund its retiree health benefits, but it left other constraints intact.
Still, Steiner said, the agency needs intervention. The number of mail pieces that the service handles has dropped from 220bn to 110bn in recent years.
“Take those 110bn and put a $0.78 stamp on them. That’s $86bn of revenue that evaporated in 15 years,” Steiner told the AP. “If either FedEx or UPS lost $86bn of revenue, they would have no revenue.”
Steiner said that the postal service must also be allowed the authority to raise postage prices, including upping the price of a first-class stamp from $0.78 to $0.95.
