The United States Postal Service lost $9 billion last fiscal year, burned through another $1.3 billion in just the first quarter of 2026, and expects to be completely out of cash by early 2027.
Postmaster General David Steiner’s solution: more borrowing.
Steiner told his Board of Governors last month that the USPS “cannot cost-cut its way to prosperity.” He wants Congress to lift the cap on Postal Service borrowing from the U.S. Treasury so the agency can take on even more debt. (He did not clarify which path to prosperity DOES involve losing nine billion dollars per year. We’re all very curious about this alternative strategy.)
Let’s put these numbers in perspective, because they are genuinely spectacular.
The Postal Service has lost more than $70 billion since the year 2000. It carries $120 billion in unfunded liabilities. The Government Accountability Office has flagged it as “high risk” for 14 consecutive years — not 14 months, not 14 quarters, fourteen straight years. It currently owes the U.S. Treasury $15 billion. And in FY2025, despite receiving an unprecedented COVID-era taxpayer bailout, it posted a $9 billion net loss — a full $2 billion worse than its own projections.
This is the government monopoly experience in its purest form.
The USPS has a legally protected monopoly over first-class mail delivery. No competition. No risk of losing customers to a rival. Just a captive market, a government backstop, and somehow — somehow — nine billion dollars in losses every single year.
McDonald’s sells 70 million hamburgers a day and turns a profit. FedEx. UPS. Amazon. DHL. All of these companies deliver packages at scale without a government guarantee, and not one of them is about to run out of cash in 2027. The Post Office has a legal monopoly and cannot figure out how to break even. How does this keep happening?
Steiner’s quote from his February 5th Board of Governors remarks is worth reading twice: “We cannot cost-cut our way to prosperity.” This is the operating philosophy of a man running an organization the GAO has called “high risk” for fourteen consecutive years. His answer to a $9 billion annual loss is to think less about costs and more about revenue.
And what is the revenue strategy? The most recent innovation was raising the stamp price to 73 cents.
People are mailing fewer envelopes every year — because it’s 2026 and there’s email — and the USPS’s bold answer is to charge more per envelope. Any entrepreneur who pitched this business model on Shark Tank would be laughed out of the building before finishing the first slide. The federal government has been running this version of it for 26 years.
The ask to Congress is simple: lift the borrowing cap, let us take on more Treasury debt, and we’ll sort out this “revenue” situation eventually. The current tab is $15 billion owed, $120 billion in unfunded liabilities, and $9 billion more in losses every fiscal year.
We’ll be picking up that tab. We always pick up the tab.
Here is a confident prediction: Congress will give Steiner his borrowing authority. The Postal Service will continue losing billions. In five years, whoever is Postmaster General at that point will hold a press conference to explain that the USPS cannot cost-cut its way to prosperity and needs Congress to lift the borrowing cap again. Nobody will be surprised. Nobody will be held accountable.
The cycle is extremely predictable and has been for two decades.
Somebody get this man a whiteboard. And maybe a calculator.
