More than three years ago, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a sweeping 10-year plan meant to steer the organization out of a financial crisis. The plan, which included consolidating locations, raising prices and lengthening promised delivery times, was meant to stabilize an agency that had lost $87 billion over the past 14 years.
That effort has run into major obstacles. Early attempts to modernize the delivery network temporarily led to worse service in areas like Atlanta and Richmond, Va., where the agency has rolled out new regional processing and distribution centers.
The Postal Service’s long-term financial viability also remains in doubt. Revenue is up, but expenses have climbed, in large part because inflation has surged in recent years and driven up labor expenses. The agency has also called for administrative action that would adjust its pension costs, which has not occurred. At the same time, the Postal Service is grappling with declining mail volume.
In early 2021, Postal Service management initially projected that it would break even by fiscal year 2023. Instead, the agency, which is supposed to be self-sustaining, lost $6.5 billion that year and is projected to lose an additional $6.3 billion this fiscal year.
Lawmakers have pushed back on the changes, in part because of complaints about mail service in their districts. In May, a bipartisan group of 26 lawmakers sent a letter to the agency’s leaders expressing concern about the decline in on-time delivery in regions where there have been major changes. The lawmakers also called on the agency to pause changes to its processing network until its regulator fully studied their potential impact.
In response, Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general, said the agency would pause some of the changes until January and move forward with others that were underway.
In a lengthy interview, Mr. DeJoy defended the 10-year plan. He acknowledged that officials faced some initial challenges but said that the agency had long been in a “death spiral” and that he wanted to accelerate many of the changes. He also noted that service in the Atlanta and Richmond regions had substantially improved recently.
“Everybody wants to stop and do what?” Mr. DeJoy said of the requests to pause the changes. “Nobody has any other options for us.”
Senator Gary Peters, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which oversees the Postal Service, said he was concerned that some of the changes had negatively affected service and had not significantly improved the agency’s financial condition.
“I believe that we need to have changes at the Postal Service,” said Mr. Peters, a Michigan Democrat. “But given the performance of some of the actions that have been taken so far, I think it’s important to have a pause and evaluate exactly what’s happening.”
Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, has also pressed the agency to “fully resolve disastrous performance failures,” which he said were affecting his constituents.
“I’m still hearing from Georgia families and businesses about the difficulty they continue to face sending and receiving their mail,” he said in a statement last month.
Read more: [Postal Service Overhaul Runs Into Challenges \- The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/29/us/politics/postal-service-changes-dejoy.html)