Postal Meltdown: Out Of Cash

Exterior view of a modern United States Post Office building surrounded by greenery

The man in charge of America’s mail is warning “we are out of cash” — and the numbers behind that claim should worry every household that still depends on a paycheck, a prescription, or a ballot arriving on time.

Story Snapshot

US Postal Service has lost about $9–9.5 billion a year and now says it could run out of cash within 12 months.
Postmaster General David Steiner blames a decades-old $15 billion borrowing cap and collapsing mail volume, and wants Congress to lift the cap and allow higher stamp prices.
Regulators and critics say Steiner is overstating the crisis, pointing instead to self‑inflicted price hikes, service problems, and a push to weaken oversight.
Behind the fight is a bigger question: will Washington fix the rules so USPS can serve the public, or use another “crisis” to grab power and dodge real reform?

Postmaster General warns: “We will run out of cash”

Postmaster General David Steiner has bluntly told Congress and the media that the United States Postal Service could run out of money within a year without help from Capitol Hill. In interviews and testimony, Steiner said that unless Congress lifts a decades‑old limit and lets the Postal Service borrow more, the agency may not be able to pay workers or vendors by early 2027, with serious risks for basic mail delivery nationwide.^[3] He ties that warning to nearly two decades of steady operating losses.

Financial statements back up part of Steiner’s alarm. The Postal Service reported a net loss of about $9.5 billion in fiscal year 2024 and another $9 billion in 2025, even though 2025 revenue inched up to roughly $80.5 billion thanks to higher package business and price increases.^[8] A Brookings Institution review notes the Postal Service has racked up over $100 billion in losses since 2007 and again hit its legal borrowing ceiling, leaving almost no room to cover new deficits.^[2] That long pattern makes this crisis feel different from a one‑time shortfall.

How USPS ended up nearly “out of cash”

To understand the cash crunch, it helps to look at both the balance sheet and the rules Congress wrote. Brookings reports that the Postal Service can only borrow from the United States Treasury, and only up to $15 billion — a cap that has not moved since the early 1990s, even as the number of delivery points and costs exploded.^[2] USPS first hit that ceiling in 2012 and then again in 2024. With the cap reached, the agency cannot plug yearly losses with more debt and must live on the cash in the bank.

That cash cushion is now dangerously thin. According to Brookings, USPS ended 2025 with about $8.2 billion in cash on hand, while annual operating expenses were approaching $90 billion.^[2] That means the Postal Service only had enough cash to cover around 33 days of normal operations. When you pair one month of liquidity with yearly losses of $9 to $10 billion, the phrase “out of cash” becomes less political and more literal. Without new borrowing authority or major changes to either costs or revenue, the math simply does not work for long.

What Steiner wants from Congress — and what he is not saying

Steiner’s main ask is simple: more flexibility from Congress. He has urged lawmakers to raise the $15 billion borrowing cap, possibly doubling it, and to back policy changes that let USPS adjust prices and invest pension funds more freely.^[3] He also floated a jump in the price of a first‑class stamp, pushing it from today’s range into the 90–95 cent territory, arguing that higher rates are needed to close what he calls a “structural revenue‑cost mismatch” as letter volume collapses.^[5] In his telling, no private company could survive such a hit without new tools.

Yet critics note what Steiner downplays. Postal regulators say their own commission just gave USPS relief worth up to $15 billion by deferring certain retirement payments through 2030, which undercuts his one‑year doomsday timeline.^[1] At the same time, his January 2026 internal reform paper floated abolishing the Postal Regulatory Commission itself, a move one commissioner summed up as “give us more money with less oversight.”^[1] For many conservatives, that sounds less like responsible reform and more like another Washington power grab behind a crisis headline.

Declining mail, rising prices, and a “manufactured crisis” fight

Everyone agrees on one basic fact: Americans are sending far fewer letters. Steiner told lawmakers that mail volume has fallen from about 213 billion pieces a year at its peak to roughly 109 billion today, wiping out an estimated $81 billion in revenue if priced at today’s stamp rate.^[12] That collapse leaves the cost of six‑day, universal delivery spread over a much smaller stream of mail. The result is higher pressure to raise prices on the customers who still rely on paper bills, checks, and letters — often seniors and rural families.

This – is Anti Democratic under the false guise of election protection: Postmaster General David Steiner told senators that, under a new proposed rule, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) will not deliver mail ballots unless states hand over their voter lists to Trump.

— crowsfeet (@crowsfeet98) June 24, 2026

But not everyone buys Steiner’s story about what comes next. Union leaders and some Republicans accuse USPS leadership of creating a “manufactured crisis” to justify more borrowing, more price hikes, and weaker oversight rather than cleaning up its own house.^[5] They point to the Postal Service’s aggressive rate strategy — a nearly 50 percent hike in stamp prices over five years — as one reason customers left faster, which then gets used as proof that the “business model is broken.”^[1] Regulators have also warned that service quality has dropped as prices climbed, which only pushes more Americans to online billing and private carriers.

Where conservatives should focus: accountability, not blank checks

For constitutional conservatives, the danger is not that the mail shuts down tomorrow. The real threat is that Washington uses another “emergency” to mask deeper failures. Congress already handed USPS about $50 billion in relief in 2022, and more than $100 billion in losses have piled up anyway.^[6] Simply lifting the borrowing cap again would load more debt onto a system that still cannot show how it will match its obligations with real revenue. That is the same spend‑now, fix‑later mindset that drove federal overspending and inflation.

Instead, lawmakers should demand sunlight and structure before another dollar moves. That means a full outside audit of route‑level costs to test Steiner’s claim that 71 percent of delivery routes lose money, public evidence on the promise of five‑day delivery savings, and clear answers on why an agency “out of cash” is quietly cancelling some local contract post offices while signing multibillion‑dollar shipping deals.^[1] Conservatives can support a strong national mail service while insisting it lives within its means, respects oversight, and stops using crisis talk as cover for bigger government and higher costs on everyday Americans.