About 500,000 postal retirees receive retiree health benefits. The Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund pays most of the costs. The Postal Service has not made $38.2 billion in required payments to this fund through fiscal year 2017. If it makes no more payments, the Office of Personnel Management projects the fund will be depleted in fiscal year 2030. We highlighted several approaches to...

USPS faces unsustainable financial challenges. It was structured to be self-supporting but First-Class Mail volume continues to drop and it has seen operating losses for 11 straight years. After years of reduced capital spending, USPS says it has critical capital spending needs. For example, to help it meet its statutory obligation for prompt, efficient and reliable services, it plans to replace...

The Universal Postal Union (UPU), a specialized agency of the United Nations, created the terminal dues system so that designated postal operators in member countries could compensate designated postal operators in other countries for delivering mail in those countries. GAO found that it is not possible to quantify the financial effects of the terminal dues system on various U.S. mail stakeholders...

The value of the U.S. Postal Service's (USPS) letter delivery and mailbox monopolies was $5.45 billion in fiscal year 2015, according to the most recent estimate prepared by the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), the regulator of USPS. This figure suggests that USPS's net income would decline by this amount if its monopolies were eliminated. To develop these estimates, PRC identifies the mail cov...

The U.S. Postal Service's (USPS) deteriorating financial condition is unsustainable as a result of trends including:Declining mail volume : First-Class Mail—USPS's most profitable product—continues to decline in volume as communications and payments migrate to electronic alternatives. USPS expects this decline to continue for the foreseeable future.Growing expenses: Key USPS expenses such as...

The U.S. Postal Service touches virtually every U.S. household and business and is critical to the national economy. However, it has lost over $78 billion in recent years due to declining mail volumes and rising costs. Businesses and foreign postal organizations that faced similar challenges made significant changes, such as reducing less profitable products and services. However, USPS can’t ma...

The U.S. Postal Service has over 31,000 retail facilities—a network reaching into almost every community in the nation. As demand for some mail products has declined, USPS has been unable to cover its costs as it is required to do—putting it on our High Risk list. A task force and others have suggested allowing USPS to offer additional services at its facilities, such as hunting licenses, to...

In the past 11 years, USPS’s revenue hasn’t covered its costs. To help address this, USPS lowered its employee compensation costs—a significant part of its expenses—mostly by paying new employees less. We found USPS overestimated its cost savings from these efforts. We substantiated $8 billion in savings and found USPS’s estimates ($9.7 billion in 2016-2018) may be overstated. Also, USP...

The U.S. Postal Service's (USPS) financial condition continues to deteriorate as a result of trends including:Declining mail volume : First-Class Mail—USPS's most profitable product—continues to decline in volume as communications and payments migrate to electronic alternatives. USPS expects this decline to continue for the foreseeable future.Growing expenses: Key USPS expenses continue to gro...

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) had largely completed Post Office Structure Plan's (POStPlan) implementation prior to a 2014 POStPlan arbitration decision and expected millions in cost savings. Specifically, under POStPlan, USPS planned to reduce hours at about 13,000 post offices (from 8- to 2-, 4-, or 6-hours of retail service a day) and to staff them with employees less costly than postmasters....

The U.S. Postal Service's (USPS) financial condition continues to deteriorate as a result of trends including:Declining mail volume : First-Class Mail—USPS's most profitable product—continues to decline in volume as communications and payments migrate to electronic alternatives. USPS expects this decline to continue for the foreseeable future.Growing expenses: Key USPS expenses continue to gro...

From fiscal years 2006 through 2013, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) decreased the size of its workforce and the number of employee work hours through retirements, attrition, and initiatives to streamline its operations. According to USPS's data, its workforce declined during this period from approximately 796,000 to 618,000 employees, or by about 22 percent. The total number of work hours also dec...

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) revised its delivery standards, which has generally increased delivery time for some First-Class Mail and Periodicals from 1 day to 2 days, notably by reducing mail with a 1-day standard.USPS also revised its delivery standards for 2-day delivery. Mail must now be within a 6-hour drive between the applicable processing facilities rather than within a 12-hour drive ti...

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) estimates of delivery mode costs and potential savings from converting to less costly modes show that door-to-door delivery is much more costly than delivery to a curbside or centralized mailbox and that USPS could achieve large savings by mandating large-scale conversions from door delivery to other modes. For fiscal year 2012, USPS estimated average annual costs of...

The extent to which the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has funded its liabilities varies due to different statutory funding requirements specific to each benefit program and USPS's financial means to make payments. For example, USPS has been required to prefund its pension benefit liability over decades, and as shown in the table below, its pension liability is 94 percent funded. Prefunding USPS's ret...