Should old acquaintance be forgot as the calendar flips to 2026, we send best wishes for a swift recovery to an old friend that is ailing, operationally and financially — the U.S. Postal Service.
For most of its long life, USPS delivered the mail promptly and reliably in all sorts of conditions, no matter where you lived. Think, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
Sadly those appointed rounds now are all too often not completed in timely fashion, if at all. That fact was reinforced for a member of the editorial board last month when his home address went without delivery for seven days because of carrier absence. No Christmas cards, no bills, no newspapers and magazines, no important documents. No holiday cheer in the mailbox.
We infer anecdotally that others in the Upper Valley periodically experience similar frustration over delivery problems. A cursory consultation with the internet yields similar stories from Maine to Georgia to Montana, and from Boston to Chicago.
Why? Probably because the Postal Service is in such dire financial straits. It lost $9 billion last fiscal year. Postmaster General David Steiner recently warned that USPS is going broke, possibly sometime in 2027. “We certainly have a precarious cash position,” Steiner told Reuters. “You know, within probably 12 to 24 months, we are out of cash.”
Kevin Kosar, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, traces the problem back to 1970, when Congress decreed that the Postal Service would become a self-funded “independent establishment of the executive branch,” no longer supported by the taxpayers but rather funded by the sale of postal products.
Which, in Kosar’s telling, worked well for 40 years as rising mail volumes covered rising delivery costs. Then along came email. Society’s shift to digital communications launched a precipitate decline in first-class mail and, beginning in 2006, in the volume of all mail. Finances cratered along with the decline in volume.
Despite this shrinkage, the Postal Service remains a behemoth. It reports that its more than 500,000 employees process and deliver 44% of the world’s mail. USPS delivers 318 million pieces of mail each day (or most days) to every address in the country, all 169 million of them, six days a week. It operates 34,000 post offices and retail outlets. And it took in $80.5 billion in operating revenue for the most recent fiscal year.
Kosar points out that publishing companies (such as the Valley News) depend on the Postal Service to deliver 681 million copies of newspapers, journals and magazines each year; in 2019, pharmaceutical companies distributed 170 million prescriptions by mail, a number that is surely much larger now; that 99 million election ballots were delivered by the Postal Service in 2024; and that during the first two years of the pandemic, 380 million test kits were delivered by mail.
Mail carriers are also the face of the U.S. government for many people. For those living in isolation, their mail carrier may be the only human contact they have all day. Those carriers become part of a social network; they can and sometimes do perform informal welfare checks. The New York Times recently noted that John Prine delivered the mail in a Chicago suburb in the 1960’s, and his observations while walking his route gave rise to, among other songs, the haunting “Hello in There,” about the loneliness of old people.
The Postal Service observed its 250th birthday in 2025. Created in 1775, prior to the American Revolution, its first leader was Benjamin Franklin. Mail was deemed sufficiently important that Article 1 of the Constitution authorized Congress to “establish post offices and post roads.” And the statute that established the Postal Service provides that it “shall be operated as a basic and essential government service provided to the people by the Government of the United States.”
The Trump administration is suggesting that privatization may be in the Postal Service’s future, as has recently happened in Denmark. Private enterprise does some things well, but only when there’s profit to be made, and it’s hard to imagine that there’s any money to be made delivering daily to remote households strung out over miles of country roads in rural America.
If Congress manages to motivate itself to do anything useful this year, it ought to map out a future for the Postal Service that resumes taxpayer support and empowers it to seek new forms of revenue by providing other services. The mail remains, after all, what it was envisioned to be: an essential government service, not an enterprise that’s in business to turn a profit.