The United States Postmaster General, citing a “broken” business model, recently signed an agreement with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that pledges to cut 10,000 jobs. Which statement reflects your thoughts on the United States Postal Service?
I worked for the USPS for 10 years. They spend money like Congress. They have employees making 7 and 8 figures that do nothing but hand down more and more procedural changes that screw up the delivery system more and more. They spend millions on purchasing stamp “artwork” that a kindergartener could draw better. They and the Union agree to work rules that CRIPPLE the workers’ abilities and enthusiasm, and stultify growth, while insisting “It’s all for YOU!” Get rid of the Union first, then fire the morons upstairs!
Allow people to opt out of receiving junKmail. It will reduce USPS workload, consumer trash and frustration, and landfill growth. Very simple, inexpensive suggestion with enormous benefits.
The USPS began in 1775, when the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin to be the first American Postmaster General. The USPS is one of the few federal agencies explicitly authorized by the Constitution. Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution even states: [The Congress shall have the power] “to establish Post Offices and Post Roads;”
Our Founders authorized a post office because a representative republic requires an informed citizenry. James Madison noted at the Constitutional Convention that the primary purpose of the post office was to secure easy communication between the states. For example, the early USPS played a big role in precipitating communication between elected representatives and their constituents; suppliers and customers; and friends and families. Before radio, telephone, television, the internet, and social media, there would have been very little national conversation without a post office.
The USPS had some years with billion-dollar surpluses, as recent as 2003 to 2006, but has since been bleeding money with losses in the billions of dollars each year since. This financial hemorrhaging can be attributed to the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which required the USPS prefund retiree health benefits. Other federal agencies and most private sector business use a pay-as-you-go system (where the business or agency pays premiums as they are billed.
Currently there are over 700,000 retirees relying on pensions and health benefits from USPS. Since Congress has authority to establish the postal system, it has pretty tight oversight regarding rules and procedures USPS to follow, thus making it difficult for the USPS to implement a more competitive and sustainable compensation system.
Short of Postal Service privatization, Congress should allow the Postal Service to adopt sensible operational reforms. The USPS should be able to adjust the frequency and method of delivery, consolidate its retail facilities and determine their hours of operation, and manage its own real estate assets to leverage their full potential. But do you really think that will be successful? Should we privatize and move on?
One more thing, as DOGE is a smashing success at the federal level, let’s pray that it can become a force at the state and local level, where real corruption lives!
“When the country is in chaos, everybody has a plan to fix it— But it takes a leader of real understanding to straighten things out.” Proverbs 28:2
I was a rural mail carrier. The problem at the post office is way too many people in management. DOGE needs to cut upper management. It will save millions in bonuses and needless people overseeing every little thing. Mail delivery has slowed down due to all the cuts upper management made at the plants. Stop closing plants and hire workers to sort the mail instead of having so many upper management people
Great !!
Cut 10,000 postal workers but cut them based on performance not at random.
Last time they cut people who handle mail. They NEED to cut MANAGEMENT. the only sector to grow in the last buyout cuts. TO DAMN MANY PEOPLE DEMANDING REPORTS THAT DO NOT HANDLE MAIL.
I’ve worked at the USPS for 19 years now, after working at other jobs for many years and running my own service business for over 20 years also. I can tell you first hand that the Postal service needs help desperately! The amount of waste and mis management is incredible. A large part of the problems are the regulations imposed upon the Postal service that tie its hands on many things. Yes, a reduction in work force is helpful but would only be a band aid. It needs a complete overhaul, but alot of people, mostly management, are terrified because they will be held up to ” real” expectations and will be held accountable for their decisions. It doesn’t need to be privatized, it needs a real common sense overhaul. Like any other government agency, it needs to be fixed so that it can prosper for the many good hard working people that are employed there and for the people it services.
The post office along with government agencies needs an overhaul with a serious look at pension and salary benefits. Job “guarantees” and nepotism is major concern.
If the delivery personnel didn’t have to waste their time on junk mail, maybe efficiency would improve
Recently received 2 cards in the mail. Each was from within the city. One took 10 days to get to us, the other 3 days. Also, have been waiting on a piece of mail for over 2 weeks. It also is from within the city. Something is terribly wrong…
So many problems to solve but Trump will prevail. The continued same old same old running of various departments in the U.S. must but changed. If people employed are doing their jobs keep them, but too many are in jobs they are unqualified for or are just through the motions. Trump inherited a mess and will succeed and there will be pain but the end result will put the country back on track to the greatness he envisions. Thank God for Big “D”.
The problem is that no government agency of any kind will ever be efficient. Most government jobs are secure for life and there is no profit motive thus employees can get by with doing the minimum. I could do with mail 3-4 days a week since over half of it is now junk mail and so many bills are paid on line. Although a lot of smaller packages come through the USPS and that can be less costly than using UPS or Fedex.
Being a former mail carrier, we never had enough carriers. We logged ungodly amounts of overtime because we were constantly undermanned. The system is broken largely due to micromanagement/excessive overpaid supervisors and a corrupt union. Employees are initially employed as assistants and do not receive any benefits until they become “a regular” which takes many years (personally 5 years for me). There should be a realistic probation period, not to exceed 6 months to receive benefits. Additionally there is no merit base incentives mainly due to the Union defending employees who exploit the system. The USPS is broken and needs a complete restructuring.
It should be noted that all of the top 3 apply, and #4 must be taken into consideration as well.
-TheUSPS #1 problem is the Bloated Corrupt Union that compounds the issue. year after year they cry poor, and when they’re given the money, it disappears and nothing changes.
-DOGE desperately needs to get in here, and follow the money, then turn that evidence over to DOJ, I assure you it’s criminal.
-Yes, the Job cuts will slow things down, not because they don’t have the staff, Because the union will order a slow down. Every time they get hit with something they dont like, the retaliate.
-and finally, yes, USPS is a part of American history, and actually embedded in our Constitution.
But it still has to be fixed.,
Or Dismantled.
USPS does not need to spend millions on an advertising budget. Total waste of $.
I ordered a package online in the evening recently. The seller shipped it out the next morning, a Friday via USPS. Tracking this product, I noticed it arrived in my hometown on Monday AM but was, then, sent to a town on the opposite end of my state before being sent back to my town’s post office before being delivered to my address. How is that efficient? That certainly required more personnel to handle.
get rid of the Union thing will get better, upper members of the USPS make lot more than there worth.
I have watched my postal workers work. The rural delivery carriers work hard and have great work ethics as well as those that go door to door. But when I have gone to the post office itself, 50% of the workers seem to crawl and have an “I don’t care” attitude. Until we return the value of work ethic to ALL government jobs, all jobs in the USA for that matter, nothing is going to change. People have an entitlement attitude for their checks and give little in return to earn them. Gone are the days where the farm kids who knew how to work can fill these jobs. God help us all!
I worked Building Maintenance for 25 years at a USPS mail processing facility. USPS is top heavy in “management”. It could take two weeks, or longer, just to get a parts order approved through the chain of command before a clerk went to the local parts house and picked up the parts. For example, just before I retired, I ordered flag pole halyard (wire core nylon halyard incorporates multi strands 3/32 in. galvanized aircraft cable inside the halyard, decreasing the chances of halyard failure caused by abrasion or cutting.) The Supervisor approved the order, the Tour 2 Maintenance Manager approved the order, the Facility Maintenance Manager approved the order and it then went to the Finance Manger, who would then send it to the Maintenance Operations Support Manager, who would give it to a clerk to order. However, the Finance Manager sent it back down the chain of command because he wanted me to order cheaper nylon rope. I emailed him and explained that flag pole halyard lasts 4 to 5 time longer, so in the long run the 18 cent per foot difference in cost would be saved in less frequent change-outs. E-mails went back and forth for awhile until I called a friend in Area Maintenance who picked up some for me and put it on his USPS credit card. Area Maintenance has its own chain of command so for this small order I was able to bypass this fool.
As a retired USPS employee, I am well aware of the post office issues. For decades the USPS has been wanting to stop Saturday deliveries. But congress is preventing them from doing that. That act alone would solve most of their money problems. Cut back the postal unions ability to protect deadhead workers from being fired. Those two issues alone would solve 80 to 90% of USPS’s problems.
I am alarmed that without the USPS, that it will give FEDEX, UPS, and others to ridiculously raise the cost of shipping/mailing anything. We the consumer will be at their mercy. I do believe that the USPS needs an overhaul and to identify inefficiencies. However, for the sake of the common American, the USPS needs to remain. Mailing a simple letter should not cost me ‘an arm and a leg and my first born’.
Pray that this doesn’t become another excuse for giving us worse service than we get now.
Do we really need service 6 days a week? I think NOT ! I would be happy with 3 day a week.
Thinking “outside the box” I wonder how many people would be OK with having central boxes like trailer parks or apartment buildings, say at the end of the block, or even at a post office building like the rental boxes many have, but as a free options. I’d go for either of these. Opting out of “junk mail” would be another thing. Yes, businesses could send junk mail to me, but at the first-class postage rate, not at the reduced rate designed to attract the junk-senders.
Bottom line is we (the U.S.A.) is broke, and the deficit must be ended, as painful as it is to do so. The USPS is just another red line in the hemorrhaging body of this country, and the bleeding mest be stopped.
As a 28 year career postal employee, there are fat too many redundant levels of bureaucracy in the postal service. A large percentage of postal employees that do not actually handle mail should be eliminated. Local managers are micromanaged. If local managers aren’t trustworthy; then fire them. Let the people who know their job do their job!
USPS has no I repeat no management training at all. They should put all veterans getting out of the service though a training course and give them jobs so all will have a job upon separation. It will give them a safe space as they get back to civilian life.
I retired after 25 years of being a rural carrier, and bad management was main reason I retired. There are too many entrenched bad practices and layers of bad/poor management practices. The rules are there, but nobody follows them, except when it suits their purpose (i.e., selective enforcement), most postmasters and supervisors I knew just make up their own. It would take a better business plan, lots of re-training and dedicated people doing the right things, consistent accountability, dismiss the bad employees, for the current USPS to succeed. Personally, I don’t think it could be done. People with bad attitudes, too many entrenched bad practices and layers of bad/poor management practices. Going to take people committed to doing the right things, and a lot of persistence from the ones there to if it can succeed
When I was a kid my dad would give me a dollar to run to the post office and buy him 20 stamped envelops for business use. It was an errand I loved because I could keep the twenty cents change. After delivering the envelops to dad I’d hustle over to Bruce’s News to blow the money on a comic book and two candy bars. Ah, the good old days!
I’ve definitely felt this pain. I’m in Georgia and my siblings are on the West Coast. Last year I had to send out checks to family members as part of the estate being settled. All we’re sent with tracking numbers. All mailed the same day.
One check took three weeks and only made it to Atlanta (35 miles). Then it made it to Oregon in t two days.
Another got to Oregon in four days and took six weeks to go the remaining sixty miles.
A Christmas card postmarked November 25 finally reached me January 3.
Then there’s the cost. If I ship it, it will cost an arm and a leg. If I order from most businesses and have an item or gift direct shipped, it is either free or low cost.
To eliminate the revenue losses, consider this.
The amount of real mail, letters from love ones and statements from businesses, is a very low percentage of the mail received each day or week. If you send a legitimate piece of mail, it cost you about 70 cents. Advertisers only pay a few pennies for the junk that fills your mailbox. The bulk of all mail is junk. How many return trips to the sorting facility are added to the letter carriers day because of this? How many more carriers, vehicles, staff, and fuel fillip’s does this create?
Make the advertisers pay their fair share. I really don’t need, or want, a weekly flyer from the same there furniture retailers filling my mailbox. I bought my furniture six years ago and when I need more I’ll check online or use Google to find out who is near me. The flyers and junk mail all cause multiple problems. They got the mailbox, water or time sorting it out, fill out trash can, and then fill the landfills.
Personal letters could be sent for 20 cents if advertisers paid 5 cents more per mailing. The intent of the founding of the post office was about government and personal communication, not will advertisers.
Do this and the post office would be solvent within a year. Response times would greatly improve and they would only need about 50% of current staffing.
All the above on #1 plus their delivery is atrocious!! Packages take WEEKS to get. We constantly get our neighbors mail. I had a certified letter come to the house. Instead of our delivery person getting out of his truck and coming to my front door so I could sign for it, He put a notice in our box to go down to the main post office to pick it up. ( I am completely disabled and I don’t drive) So in order to get my letter, because of his laziness, I had to go down to the post office to get my letter! This wasn’t the first time that had happened either ! He constantly does it with packages! Plus!! He’s extremely rude!
It costs me $72/year for a P.O. Box rental. I could have home delivery for free. It costs the P.O. much more to fund vehicles and drivers than the space used for a P.O. Box. It should be the other way around. Additionally, the hours their offices are open are very limited and people who work out of town cannot get to the P.O. to pick up or mail packages which drives people to use UPS or FedEx. They should add hours on the front and back ends with limited staff and have full staff during peak hours. Pretty much everything they do is completely backwards.
DOGE is right Americano is broke and we need to stop all this Dem waste , fraud , and abuse in the Billions. They are wasting Gods blessing and God sent us Trump and DOGE to fix it. Time is running out with the interest on this wasteful spending exceeds the military spending.Trump will fix it & tariff reciprocity will definitely help a lot!
Have you stood in line lately at your local post office it’s like going to the dmv. I could move faster in my sleep very few seem happy to be there also when you mail a bill that has to go across town it takes 3 days to get there .something needs to change maybe they ought to survey there customers and ask us what we would like to see,they might learn something.
Don’t need mail every day. Three days a week would be sufficient.
We get pretty good service where I live, but on a national level USPS is just AMTRAC 2.0, a typical government agency that answers to nobody and is always insolvent. Not sure DOGE can fix it as, “the fish stinks from the head first”.
I’d love to say that the USPS should be privatized, but we need a federal postal system. Certain types of mail need a trustworthy investigative service, such as the USPS Marshall System. They investigate hijacked mail and other criminal acts using mail delivery services that private companies cannot or will not correctly investigate due to sensitive mail and government business. It would be better to eliminate personnel, especially people with English language barriers!
The mail is no what it used to be! I recall getting the mail on a regular schedule for years, this is not so today. I know a postal worker. She is lazy and calls in to take days off regularly until she uses all of her “Paid Time Off”. You would think she’d be fired if she were in the private sector.
I think the management has damaged the postal service. By closing distribution centers and forcing all local mail through a distribution center up to 100 miles away, mail is slow, less dependable, and often lost. Local mail should stay local! Their ideas of efficiency are laughable.
Our local Post Office has one of the most unfriendly, unsmiling and unhelpful set of nasty clerks I’ve ever experienced in my 85 years. Personnel of the past would be as appalled as I am. They need a complete hosing out.
Funny that this question comes up today as I have a package “lost in the mail”. Let DOGE look at the organization and the processes that are making the USPS so inefficient.
I am 89 years old. Have advocated for 60 years that P.O. should be broken in clearly defined sections: personal mail, commercial mail, mail requiring air shipments, etc. and sold out to private carriers like UPS, FEDEX, etc. The tax burden is astronomical and does not produce an equivalent service for the money spent and the employee benefits like retirement at 20 years, health care etc. I had to work 35 years for full retirement benefits. The future pension liability for retired postal workers is extreme. It is a government organization which is going to bankrupt the American taxpayer. Privatize it now.
I often don’t get the mail delivered until late in the day. Sometimes I don’t get it at all. I have the Informed Delivery app and often the mail showing on the app doesn’t arrive or it arrives another day or it has been delivered to someone else’s address. I don’t like it too much.
In our area they can’t keep employees. No one wants to work. We sometimes don’t see our mail for days even when informed delivery tells me otherwise.
Privatize or cut service to 1-2 times per week. Who needs the taxpayer subsidized junk mail anyway?
If the USPS does stay intact, I have a suggestion. It may not fare well with others, but for residential customers, deliver three times a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Personal mail is very seldom that almighty important. Business-wise, most of the time, the same way. However, businesses are a bit different and would push back on that probably, though I think the same could apply. And I agree with James Allbright: get rid of junk mail.
The letter carriers and the local post offices aren’t the problem… it’s the central distribution centers and administrators that are.
They could keep most USPS workers if they would change/cut benes pkg. Our postal carrier used to get 12 weeks vacation–which he was required to take! He could be out as long as 4 weeks @ a time, during which there was a sub doing 2 routes & messing up everyone’s mail. I never got 12 weeks of vacation at any job, & the best places still limited employees to a max 2 weeks @ a time. Gov’t workers in general need to have benes that align with what most of us get in the private sector. I suspect that change alone would save billions.
Congress did a half-assed job partially privatizing the postal service in 1971 as a government-private hybrid. They shackled the USPS with a bloated personnel system and told it to make money. In 1982, they stripped it of government subsidies but still retained oversight. It’s been a typical government cluster-f*ck. I like having a postal service, but if DOGE can’t fix it… shutter it. No one uses it for critical items anymore.
Well, if you think about it long enough you go to the mailbox everyday and get 90% junk mail. Do we really need a delivery everyday? I don’t think so. Maybe three delivery’s a week should do it and definitely not on Saturday. That should get the Postal service in the black and DOGE happy.
We could deliver mail ever every other day and Sunday off