Yes, currently the service is expected to fund itself. This is short sighted and has progressively made one of the greatest public services worse.
I enjoy Christmas cards and personal letters as much as anyone, but with electronic payments and telecommunications taking more of the volume, it is increasingly becoming an advertising service. If it is operating unprofitably, we are paying a form of subscription fee to receive those ads.
The ubiquitous conservative media bombards them with lies about the quality, quantity and cost of these services, along with who receives the benefits.
They also haven't taken a step back to consider all the things they enjoy that are provided as government services, like roads, police, education, subsidized mail delivery, unemployment, support for dairy products, etc.
No efficient service will be allowed to survive long in the US, if anyone has any power to cut it. An efficient service is just one that temporarily lacks enough middlemen to increase costs, or enough red tape to reduce enrollment. If neither of these things happen, that means no one with any power has any personal interest in it, so it will be cut arbitrarily at some point in order to make a budget target.
The reason USPS has lasted so long (even in its degraded state) is just because it has lasted so long previously, and is deeply integrated into society. But there's been a bipartisan effort to privatize it and sell it off (to each other) for nearly a generation now. They've taken the steps of lowering its quality and level of service, barred it from entering lines of business that private companies have taken over, and played accounting games with it in order that people will depend on it less. This is not something "conservatives" did, but both Democratic and Republican Congresspeople have even dropped into deceit to try to make happen, and they publicly blame each other for the inexorable progress of dismantling USPS during each administration to distract extreme partisans.
Democrats talked a lot of trash about DeJoy before not firing him when they had the opportunity. It's like how they screamed about DeVos being horrible and out of touch, but Arne Duncan, the school privatizer-in-chief, got to play the "cool" white guy who plays basketball with the "cool" president with virtually identical policy positions.
Once people have stopped depending on the USPS because it is bad, they can give it the Royal Mail treatment that they've always wanted. Mail privatization in the UK was a massive success if you don't care about the mail. The people who got it made a lot of money. The mails there became so brutally expensive and unreliable that it probably affects exports and it still doesn't matter.
edit: sometimes I feel optimistic, though. There was a recent announcement that while hiring for a new person to run public transportation in Chicago, the city has decided that, this time, they will look for somebody with experience in transportation. This is unusual because the job is usually filled by political patronage, by someone with no experience.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/08/1203950823/15-minute-cities-c...
Right now I have about a 1% lost/damaged package rate (averaged over 12 months - it's a tiny amount and it is insured), but come Christmas, that shoots up to around a 10% lost/damaged package rate through USPS - some of those packages do eventually resurface, and I let the customers keep them (I've already filed the insurance claim and shipped a replacement).
UPS was at 5% on average - never used them around Christmas - so no data for that - they might be better than USPS and the were close enough in cost just further away from my workshop.
FedEx (only used for 2 weeks) cost double and 30% of my packages were lost or damaged - can't average it out since there isn't enough data, but having to file claims for 1 in 3 packages after already paying 2x USPS rates wasn't going to fly.
We ship packages via UPS, and have <1% lost/damaged. Not sure how long it's been now since a damaged/lost package - maybe 300?
It probably helps that our smallest packages are ~1000 cu inch and 6 pounds. Hard to lose.
I don't like dealing with UPS customer service, but I really like the actual shipping service. And it's very fast and predictable. Very rare that it takes any longer than UPS WorldShip predicts. 1 day shipping to most of our customers in our state, and some in neighboring states.
ETA: Except Christmas, that is basically 100% loss, though, about 50% of those losses seem to show up after the claims have been submitted.
And then UPS won't pay out a claim, since they don't cover perishables, even when it's their fault for smashing the cooler. So we started self-insuring at $3 per order, plus we've learned how to package the cheese in the cooler better so it's less likely to break.
And as I mentioned it's very rare now to get a damaged one.
This is actually one of the challenges of public services in the US today; many things, from mail delivery to bus and train service to road construction and vehicle registration, were once self-sufficient but haven't been for a long time. There's a lot of reasons for this, but one of the outcomes is that entities which used to take care of themselves now have to beg for a growing portion out of the general fund.
However, it's clear that the 1970s experiment to have it turn a profit again didn't work and likely never would have worked (it was, in many ways, set up for failure).
It was a political ploy to force the USPS into debt in 2006 with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. No other federal agency or private sector business pre-funds its retirement benefits.
https://about.usps.com/what/financials/financial-conditions-...
But to me, none of that really matters, because I don't believe a government entity should be turning a profit on me, because then it is a tax. So I want the USPS running at a loss (pulling from appropriations as needed), but as close to breakeven as possible. If it ever pulls a profit, I expect prices to drop in accordance.
About half of their liabilities were forgiven as part of the 2022 legislation. They still have debt and retirement liabilities, but those are more in line with other large services (private or public) now. However, they've each increased over 20% per year since 2022, which is quite a lot.
Personally, I would like to see a return of postal banking, in which case the postal service would pay out its profit to its accountholders.
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FY23 report showing the halving of liabilities from '21-'22 (p. 29): https://about.usps.com/what/financials/annual-reports/fy2023...
FY24 report showing the significant increase in other liabilities from '22-'24 (p. 28): https://about.usps.com/what/financials/annual-reports/fy2024...
I've been twice now in WV, in counties so far away from everything, the only government presence is USPS. The only proof you're in the modern US is USPS (and a bit further a weird, small public library near a weirder Dollar tree).
Some people have trouble getting their retirement money, other are destitute who found a new, non-homeless life (but have trouble with debt collection or just lost their papers), And from what I've understood, USPS has buildings and employees present everywhere and is really trusted in those deep parts, more than anything the government does.
Wouldn't offering basic banking (and maybe limited but free internet access) be a nice addition to help the poorest in the US?
Just an idle thought I had for a while
Paying by check in the mail put a huge dent in this and then having the utility automatically debit your account pretty much put an end to it from what I've seen. I'm sure there are some areas where it still is a thing but they'd also have a high number of people without bank accounts.
For a while, utilities would only debit checking accounts, presumably because ACH payments are so much cheaper than credit card ones. A few years, they opened up to credit card payments. There seem to be a lot of people who do everything on credit cards and they must have had to change with the times.
I usually actually have a handful of checking accounts for splitting up bills, not relying on a single bank, etc. And a couple years ago I started a Chime account for my "allowance" because they were partnered with Walmart, and you could deposit cash at Walmart, well not anymore (at least not at my Walmart). I can go to walgreens, but I never need to go to walgreens, so that card has been removed from my wallet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings...
> The United States Postal Savings System was a postal savings system signed into law by President William Howard Taft and operated by the United States Post Office Department, predecessor of the United States Postal Service, from January 1, 1911, until July 1, 1967.
Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren have suggested bringing it back.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings...
There are places in the US where the bank drives to the town once or twice a week, since there's otherwise no way to get cash or transact.
This logic could be applied to literally anything, so your argument is effectively that the government should never fund anything.
If there is a war, cancer/disease research is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't fund cancer/disease research.
If suddenly a famine strikes, war is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't fund the military.
If a sudden deadly disease arises, funding for food security/research is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't be funding any of that as well.
But a mail and parcel service, something that the private sector does profitably, shouldn't be deeply in the red though a little from time to time is probably fine.
What's causing the unlevel playing field?
Although I thought USPS had an enforced monopoly on US mail, so how did you do the comparison with private sector mail?
[0] https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2019/1114-...
The USPS has a monopoly on traditional delivery to a mailbox. So FedEx walks all the way to the door which makes it not "traditional delivery"
Sometimes I find Amazon packages in my mailbox, though I know sometimes amazon will use USPS, so could just be them.
Thankfully, the government guarantees it will deliver letters to some remote rural places at a price private companies can't touch, but we can do better to make life easier for everyone: the mail man, the people wanting their mail, etc.
I could not disagree more.
While I agree they don't "need" to be profitable and we "could" just give them tax money the fact that they try to be in the face of competition and come pretty close to doing so despite some dumb requirements really results in an incentive structure that puts them head and shoulders above pretty much any other subsection of government one interacts with. So perhaps let's not remove the incentive for profitability.
Edit: And before anyone tries to construe this as me advocating for privatization or anything else like that, I'm saying they're fine the way they are (on a macro level, I'm sure there's tons of individual items that could use refinement, like any organization) and ought to be a model for other government functions.
>and has progressively made one of the greatest public services worse.
What? Are you joking? Have you ever tried to do anything other than a bog standard transaction at the DMV or get anything beyond typical "homeowner pays professional to do typical thing" type work permitted? The USPS is one of the most user friendly services in existence even once you get off the beaten path of sending standardized envelopes and parcels. If you restrict the comparison to just federal services it's not even close except perhaps some very specific common workflows but even then when it goes off the rails it goes off the rails way harder and is way more painful to resolve. Ask anyone of social security age if you don't believe me.