United States Postal Service

• 1. Introduction

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  The United States Postal Service employs 525,377 career employees and 114,623 pre-career employees, as of the 29th of March 2024. That workforce serves an agency that runs independently of the ordinary federal budget, yet isn't built to turn a profit like FedEx or UPS. How does an organization that large keep defaulting on its own bills while still overhauling its entire truck fleet? What legal power lets it lock other people out of certain mailboxes, and why has that power survived a Supreme Court challenge? And what job did one of the country's most famous inventors hold before the United States existed as a country at all? The answers start with an agency older than the nation it now serves.

• 2. Older Than the Nation

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  On the 26th of July 1775, the Second Continental Congress founded the United States Post Office in Philadelphia. That was months before the colonies formally declared independence. Benjamin Franklin became the first postmaster general, a role he had already held for the American colonies under British rule. Congress wrote a Postal Clause into the Constitution when it was ratified in 1788, empowering itself to establish post offices and post roads. That clause was meant to knit the states together through communication and to give the young government a source of revenue.

  In 1792, the Postal Service Act created the Post Office Department, formalizing what had grown out of that revolutionary-era post office. Congress elevated the department to cabinet level in 1872, giving it a permanent seat among the government's top agencies. It stayed there until the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 pulled it back out, turning it into the independent U.S. Postal Service instead.

  In 1844, entrepreneur and legal theorist Lysander Spooner decided the government's mail monopoly wasn't sacred and founded the American Letter Mail Company. His company undercut the Post Office with lower rates and faster service between major cities, and it was popular with customers. Federal legal pressure eventually forced Spooner's business to close, and in 1851 Congress moved to reinforce the postal monopoly against future rivals.

  Starting in 1844, the Post Office Department owned and ran the country's first public telegraph lines, from Washington to Baltimore. The network later stretched to New York, Boston, Buffalo, and Philadelphia. The government privatized the telegraph system in 1847. One exception came during World War I, when the wires were pressed back into service to speed up mail arriving at night. Between 1942 and 1945, the Post Office ran a wartime program called V-Mail, short for Victory Mail. Letters were photographed onto microfilm and reprinted near their destination, freeing cargo space on transport vehicles for military supplies. During the Cold War, the United States Information Agency helped the Post Office Department redesign postage stamps around more patriotic slogans.

  On the 18th of March 1970, postal workers in New York City walked off the job. They were angry over low wages and poor conditions, and emboldened by the Civil Rights Movement. The strike began in New York alone but grew to include support from more than 210,000 postal workers nationwide. It ended without the federal government granting any concessions. Even so, it pushed postal unions and the government into negotiating a contract that gave the unions most of what they wanted. On the 12th of August 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the Postal Reorganization Act. It replaced the cabinet-level Post Office Department with the new U.S. Postal Service, effective the 1st of July 1971. That new agency would soon have to answer a question no cabinet department ever had to: how to pay its own way.

• 3. Chronic Money Trouble

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  First-class mail volume peaked in 2001 at 103.65 billion pieces. By 2020 it had slid to 52.62 billion, as email and the web took over everyday correspondence and business transactions. Private couriers such as FedEx and UPS compete directly with the Postal Service for the packages that remain, squeezing revenue further. That falling volume collided with a fixed commitment: deliver to every address once a day, six days a week. On the 15th of November 2012, an official report showed the Postal Service had lost $15.9 billion in that fiscal year alone.

  Between 2000 and 2007, the Postal Service pushed productivity up every year through more automation, route re-optimization, and facility consolidation. Even so, it ran an $8.5 billion budget shortfall in 2010, and by 2011 it was losing roughly $3 billion every quarter. On the 5th of December 2011, the USPS announced sweeping cuts. It would close more than half of its mail processing centers, eliminate 28,000 jobs, and slow overnight delivery of First-Class Mail. The plan meant shutting 252 of the agency's 461 processing centers, down from a peak of 673 facilities in 2006. The first round of closures was set to begin in the summer of 2012, pause from September to December, and resume in February 2014. Even after the cuts, 80 percent of first-class mail was still delivered overnight through the end of 2013. New delivery standards took effect in January 2015, slowing most single-piece first-class mail from overnight to two-day delivery. Large commercial mailers who dropped mail directly at a processing center before dawn could still get overnight service. By 2014, though, that exception covered only 11 percent of first-class mail. Unsorted first-class mail would still reach anywhere in the contiguous United States within three days.

  In July 2011, the Postal Service unveiled a plan to close roughly 3,700 small post offices around the country. Members of Congress objected. The Senate passed a bill that would have kept open any post office more than 10 miles from its nearest neighbor. By May 2012, the agency revised its approach. Most rural post offices would stay open, some with retail hours cut to as little as two hours a day. Communities could choose a different option if they preferred one. A survey of rural customers found 54 percent preferred keeping reduced hours. Another 20 percent wanted a Village Post Office, a nearby business providing basic mail service. Fifteen percent preferred merging with another post office, and 11 percent wanted expanded rural delivery instead. By 2012, about 40 percent of postal revenue came from online purchases or private retail partners. Those partners included Walmart, Staples, Office Depot, Walgreens, Sam's Club, Costco, and various grocery stores. The National Labor Relations Board agreed to hear a union argument that these counters should be staffed by postal employees instead. The American Postal Workers Union said those employees earn far more and have "a generous package of health and retirement benefits."

  On the 28th of January 2009, Postmaster General John E. Potter testified before the Senate. He warned that without relief from mandated retiree health payments, the Postal Service might cut delivery to five days a week. The cuts would fall during June, July, and August. Congress passed H.R. 22 to address the issue, and it was signed into law on the 30th of September 2009. Potter, however, kept advancing plans to eliminate Saturday delivery. On the 15th of April 2010, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing on the Postal Service's finances. The hearing was titled "Continuing to Deliver: An Examination of the Postal Service's Current Financial Crisis and its Future Viability." Potter testified that by 2020, cumulative losses could exceed $238 billion, with mail volume potentially dropping 15 percent from 2009 levels. In February 2013, the USPS announced Saturday delivery would end on the 10th of August that year. The move was meant to save about $2 billion a year. It spared only packages, mail-order medicines, Priority Mail, Express Mail, and mail bound for post office boxes. Congress reversed the cuts in March, when the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013 restored six-day delivery.

  The 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act gave the USPS ten years to fully fund the present-day value of retirement benefits its workers had already earned. The act set a goal of saving $5 billion a year for the first 10 years of a 50-year schedule. Within six years, the Postal Service began defaulting on those payments. Running low on cash while still meeting payroll, the USPS missed a $5.5 billion retirement payment due the 1st of August 2012. It missed a second payment of $5.6 billion on the 30th of September that same year. On the 30th of September 2014, it failed to make a $5.7 billion payment, the fourth default in a row. By 2017, the agency was defaulting on the law's last lump-sum payments as well. Congress considered proposals to cancel the funding obligation in 2016 and again in 2019. A 2019 bill called the USPS Fairness Act passed the House but went no further. The Postal Service Reform Act finally passed both chambers on the 8th of March 2022, and President Biden signed it into law on the 6th of April. It forgave $57 billion of Postal Service debt and dropped the obligation to prefund retiree healthcare. It also added new requirements for delivery timing and performance reporting, and let the USPS offer some non-mail services.

  A three-cent surcharge above inflation pushed the one-ounce First-Class rate to 49 cents in January 2014, though regulators approved it for only two years. By the 13th of July 2025, the same stamp cost 78 cents. A later filing with the Postal Regulatory Commission set a further increase, to 82 cents, effective the 12th of July 2026. In fiscal year 2022, the Postal Service reported $78.81 billion in revenue against $79.74 billion in expenses. One-time appropriations tied to the 2022 reform act turned that into a reported net income of $56.04 billion. The following year, revenue rose to $79.32 billion, but the agency posted a net loss of $6.48 billion. In fiscal year 2024, revenue reached $79.53 billion, and the net loss grew to $9.5 billion. None of those losses stopped the agency from spending billions to replace the trucks its letter carriers had been driving for decades.

• 4. Wheels of the Postal Empire

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  As of 2024, the USPS operates more than 235,000 vehicles, one of the largest civilian fleets in the world. Most are the distinctive Chevrolet and Grumman LLV, the long-life vehicle, alongside a newer Ford-Utilimaster model once called the carrier route vehicle. Built between 1987 and 1994, the LLVs have no air conditioning, no airbags, and no anti-lock brakes. They also lack room for the volume of e-commerce packages carriers handle today. The Grumman fleet outlived its expected 24-year lifespan by 2017. Replacement planning began in 2015, and after repeated delays, Oshkosh Defense won a $6 billion contract in February 2021. The contract covers the design and production of 165,000 new vehicles over the following decade. The resulting Next Generation Delivery Vehicle comes in both gasoline and battery-electric versions. Half of the first 50,000 vehicles will be electric, and every vehicle bought after 2026 will be. In 2009, the fleet burned through 444 million gallons of fuel. Every one-cent rise in the national gas price adds millions more to the annual fuel bill. Many of the vehicles are built right-hand drive, an unusual choice meant to put drivers closer to roadside mailboxes. Some rural carriers and all contractors use their own personal vehicles instead of postal-owned trucks. Standard postal vehicles carry no license plates at all. Instead, a seven-digit number is displayed on the front and rear.

  Starting in 2026, every new delivery truck the USPS buys must be electric. The shift was pushed along by criticism from the Environmental Protection Agency and an environmental lawsuit. New funding also came from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which set aside $3 billion for electric postal vehicles. That money backed a push by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and the Biden administration to add 66,000 electric vehicles to the fleet by 2028. The electric fleet is set to include 9,250 Ford-built EVs, 11,750 commercial off-the-shelf EVs, and 45,000 electric Oshkosh Next Generation Delivery Vehicles. In February 2023, the Postal Service announced its Ford EV purchase along with 14,000 electric vehicle charging stations. The electrification plan aims to cut emissions from fuel and electricity by 40 percent, and from contracted services by 20 percent, by 2030. Most of the savings come from cheaper power and less maintenance, with a side benefit of less pollution in the neighborhoods where children live and play. In August 2024, the USPS rolled out its first modernized vehicles at the Topeka Sorting and Delivery Center in Kansas. One new model offers higher clearance for routes with heavy package volume. The other, built with Canoo, is a smaller, "pod-like" van. That fleet is owned by an agency whose exact legal identity even courts have had to sort out.

• 5. Neither Corporation Nor Cabinet

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  The Board of Governors of the United States Postal Service sets policy, procedure, and postal rates, much like a corporate board of directors. Nine of its eleven members are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Those nine appointees then select the postmaster general, who becomes the board's tenth member and runs the agency's day-to-day operations as chief executive. The full ten-member board then nominates a deputy postmaster general to fill the eleventh and final seat, serving as chief operating officer. A separate body, the Postal Regulatory Commission, formerly known as the Postal Rate Commission, is also staffed by presidential appointees confirmed by the Senate. It has the authority to approve or reject USPS proposals on rates and related matters.

  People often mistake the USPS for a state-owned enterprise like Amtrak, since it operates much like an ordinary business. Legally, though, it is described as "an establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States." It is controlled by the postmaster general and by presidential appointees. That status comes with unusual powers, including sovereign immunity, eminent domain, and the ability to negotiate postal treaties with foreign nations. It also holds an exclusive legal right to deliver first-class and third-class mail. In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Postal Service is "not subject to antitrust liability." The Court found the agency is "not a separate antitrust person from the United States but is part of the Government." That put it outside laws like the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Unlike a true state-owned enterprise, the USPS lacks a transparent ownership structure and doesn't answer to the standard rules that govern commercial companies.

  The Postal Reorganization Act of 1971 required the USPS to be self-financing, living entirely on revenue from stamps and package deliveries rather than tax dollars. In 1982, postal stamps were reclassified as products rather than a form of taxation, and the Postal Service has taken no taxpayer funding since. Republicans have floated privatizing the Postal Service since the 1990s. In 2017, President Trump criticized the Postal Service's relationship with Amazon, though Amazon maintains the arrangement is profitable for the agency. As part of a governmental reorganization plan in June 2018, the Trump administration proposed turning USPS into "a private postal operator." The plan met strong bipartisan opposition in Congress. The agency also assigns city names to mailing addresses that don't always match a town's real boundaries, a quirk few customers ever notice.

• 6. The Mail Monopoly

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  Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to establish post offices and post roads. Courts have read that language as a monopoly over ordinary, non-urgent first-class residential mail, separate from packages. No other system, public or private, has been allowed to deliver that kind of mail without Congress's consent. The Postal Service's mission is described in statute as providing the American public with "trusted universal postal service." That universal service obligation covers several dimensions: geographic reach, product range, access to facilities, delivery frequency, uniform pricing, service quality, and mail security.

  The monopoly itself has two parts: the Private Express Statutes, which cover letter delivery, and the mailbox rule, which covers exclusive access to customer mailboxes. Supporters argue the monopoly has funded the universal service obligation for more than a hundred years. Any obligation to serve every address, they say, needs a matching source of money to pay for it. Supporters warn that eliminating the letter monopoly and mailbox rule would strip away that funding base. Billions in tax dollars, or some other source, would then have to fill the gap. Some argue that keeping mail delivery under government protection guards the privacy of personal communication. A government carrier, they say, is harder to corrupt into spying than a private for-profit or non-profit one would be. Congress requires by statute that anyone who "knowingly and willfully deposits any mailable matter" in a letter box can be fined. That applies specifically to matter "on which no postage has been paid." The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld that monopoly against a challenge that it violates the First Amendment's protection of free speech. As a result, it remains illegal for anyone besides USPS employees and agents to deliver mail into a box marked "U.S. Mail."

  FedEx and UPS are barred from delivering non-urgent letters or dropping items directly into U.S. Mail boxes at homes and businesses. Both companies do have transit agreements with USPS. An item dropped off with FedEx or UPS can travel to the destination post office. USPS then takes over for final delivery, including to Post Office Boxes. USPS itself contracts with UPS for air transport of its 2-3 day Priority Mail and its overnight Priority Mail Express. This is true even though the two companies are direct competitors. Mail service has still been contracted out to private firms for decades in some remote places. One example is Arnold Aviation's delivery to residents of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. A local news station, KTVB-TV, later covered a notice ending that same wilderness mail route.

• 7. Crime and the Mail

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  Benjamin Franklin founded the United States Postal Inspection Service on the 7th of August 1775. It is one of the oldest law enforcement agencies in the country. Its mission is to protect the Postal Service, its employees, and its customers from crime, and to guard the nation's mail system from criminal misuse. Postal Inspectors enforce more than 200 federal laws covering crimes that touch the mail, the postal system, or postal employees. The service also has the power to raid businesses suspected of routing ordinary mail through overnight competitors just to dodge the postal monopoly. According to the American Enterprise Institute, a private conservative think tank, the USPIS raided Equifax's offices in 1993. Investigators found the mail was not truly "extremely urgent," and Equifax was fined $30,000. The Postal Inspection Service also oversees the Postal Police Force, which patrols and secures major postal facilities across the country.

  Under the Mail Cover Program, USPS photographs the front and back of every piece of mail as it moves through the sorting process. That imaging lets law enforcement obtain a piece's address information and outside images for an investigation without needing a warrant.

  The USPS Office of Inspector General was authorized by law in 1996, taking over duties the Postal Inspection Service had handled until then. The inspector general answers directly to the Board of Governors, independent of postal management itself. The office's job is to prevent, detect, and report fraud, waste, and program abuse, and to promote efficiency across the Postal Service. It even holds oversight responsibility over the Postal Inspection Service itself. None of that law enforcement muscle was built for what hit the Postal Service in 2020. That year brought a pandemic, a contested election, and a brand-new postmaster general, all at once.

• 8. A Pandemic and an Election

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  In May 2020, the Board of Governors appointed Louis DeJoy as postmaster general. He was the first appointee in two decades to come from outside the postal service itself. Before taking the job, DeJoy had founded and run the logistics company New Breed Logistics. He had also been a major Republican Party donor and fundraiser for Donald Trump. DeJoy quickly banned overtime and extra delivery trips to cut costs, measures he admitted were causing delays but said would eventually improve service. More than 600 high-speed mail sorting machines were scheduled for removal from postal facilities. That raised fears that ballots mailed for the 3rd of November election might not arrive on time. Mail collection boxes disappeared from streets in many cities. After photos of the removals spread on social media, a postal spokesman said they were only being moved to busier locations. The agency's own inspector general opened an investigation into the changes. On the 16th of August, the House of Representatives was called back from summer recess to consider a bill reversing them. On the 18th of August 2020, DeJoy announced he would roll back the changes until after the election. The announcement came a day after several individuals filed lawsuits against him and the Postal Service in federal court. He promised to reinstate overtime, reverse service reductions, and halt the removal of sorting machines and collection boxes. By then, though, 95 percent of the scheduled machines had already been removed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said DeJoy had no plans to replace them. The federal government forgave a separate $10 billion loan to the Postal Service in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, signed on the 27th of December 2020.

  Mail voting had already been growing before 2020, with 25 percent of voters nationwide casting ballots by mail in both 2016 and 2018. The coronavirus pandemic was expected to push that number sharply higher, since gathering at polling places carried its own health risk. One state-by-state analysis found 76 percent of Americans were eligible to vote by mail in 2020, a record share. It projected as many as 80 million mailed ballots that year, more than double the 2016 total. In July 2020, the Postal Service warned 46 states that it might not be able to meet their deadlines for requesting and casting last-minute absentee ballots. The House voted to send the Postal Service an emergency $25 billion grant to handle the expected flood of ballots. The bill never reached a vote in the Senate. A March 2021 report from the Postal Service's inspector general reviewed the 2020 election. It found that most mail-in ballots and registration materials arrived on time. The Postal Service handled roughly 135 million pieces of election mail between the 1st of September and the 3rd of November. It delivered 97.9 percent of ballots to election officials within three days, and 99.89 percent within seven.

  Postmaster General DeJoy also oversaw the delivery of about 380 million free at-home COVID-19 test kits between January and May of 2022. By the time the program ended in March 2024, the USPS had delivered more than 1.8 billion free test kits in total. It restarted free distribution again in September 2024. In March 2021, the Postal Service launched a 10-year overhaul called Delivering for America. The plan is backed by $40 billion in planned investment in technology and facilities. It has already added three new parcel services: USPS Connect, USPS Ground Advantage, and Priority Next Day. It has also installed 348 new package-sorting machines. By September 2023, the agency could process about 70 million packages a day, up from 53 million in 2021. One of the first of these new regional hubs opened in November 2023: a 700,000-square-foot facility in Gastonia, North Carolina. It is part of a plan to eventually replace smaller, redundant post offices across the country.