Four months after informing Congress that the United States Postal Service is “close to a financial cliff,” the head of the agency has announced that all is well…at least for the immediate future.
Testifying before the House Oversight Subcommittee on Government Relations in March, Postmaster General David Steiner revealed: “At our current rate, we’ll be out of cash in less than 12 months.” Steiner added: “So, in about a year from now, the Postal Service would be unable to deliver the mail.”
Steiner has since said that the agency’s money crisis has been staved off due to a decision to delay payments to the Federal Employee Retirement System to save money.
That means what appeared to be an imminent cash crisis most likely won’t become reality until, at the earliest, 2031.
“What we are doing right now is we are basically borrowing money from our retirement plans to fund current operations,” Steiner has since reported in new testimony to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“I’m not particularly comfortable with that.” Steiner continued. “I promise you, our employees are not particularly comfortable with that.”
The most recent USPS figures show that the agency has just under $9 billion currently available in cash, while confronted with upwards of $30.9 billion in obligations.
The challenges confronting the USPS are easy to understand, contends the publication The Street, noting that “fewer people send letters, and digital communication has hollowed out USPS’s most profitable business.”
Over the course of the last two decades, in fact, mail volume has dropped from about 220 billion pieces to the current 110 billion pieces.
Steiner has also said that possible approaches to the agency’s woes include both a workforce and service reduction, along with an increase in mailing prices.
Not surprisingly, while most post office facilities run by the USPS are leased, an effort has been underway to sell as many of the properties it does own in order to generate needed revenue.
Currently just over 40 post offices are listed for sale via the CRBE Group Incorporated, which is the sole provider of real estate affairs for the USPS.
Meanwhile, the Brookings Institute has suggested that such properties could bring in new money as rental housing.
Noting that the number of USPS “under-utilized” sites could be repurposed into around 237,000 housing units, the Brookings report added: “Approximately 117,000 of these units are located in high- or medium-demand areas where new supply is most urgently needed.”
July 13, 2026
By Garry Boulard
1960s USPS advertisement
