A Service is a Service

You may have heard reports in the news lately of the financial crisis facing USPS—they could run out of funding by October. And while there are attempts to cut costs (by cutting services) and generate more revenue (by raising prices), neither of those things are really enough to overcome the institutional barriers that have put USPS in this position in the first place (more on these later).

As a business owner and manufacturer of greeting cards, I of course have a vested interest in the ongoing success of the United States Postal Service. After all, over 50% of greeting cards are still sent through the mail. The ever-increasing cost to mail a letter worries me on a personal level.1

But putting aside my own values for a moment, I just want to talk about the way we talk about the U.S. Postal Service.

Reuters just reported on the U.S. Postal Service’s net quarterly ​loss of $2 billion for the first quarter of 2026.

That’s what they called it, a “loss.”

But a loss implies this independent institution is a profit-generating business, which it is not. It’s a service, just like all the other independent services within the executive branch. It’s something the government provides for the benefit of the governed.

Apparently this is a polarizing take—that the U.S. Postal Service is a service just like any other government service and that as such it should be held to the same standards as any other government service. Someone who slid into my DMs recently was so offended by this line of thought that they encouraged me to “seek professional help.”

Meanwhile, defense spending in Q1 of 2026 alone totalled nearly a trillion dollars. Even breaking out specifically defense “services” spending it’s still 200-some billion dollars. Surely the military costs more to operate than it generates in revenue. Where is the outrage at the military for this financial loss?

But we don’t talk about defense spending that way. We as taxpayers have elected officials who have allocated a certain amount of our tax dollars to the armed services. Personal politics or opinions aside on how tax dollars are allocated, we don’t, as far as I know, ask the armed services to be financially self-sufficient.

We do ask this of the Postal Service though, and it can be traced back to the postal strike of 1970, which directly led to to the Postal Reoganization Act of 1970, which in turn provided collective bargaining rights to postal workers but also made concessions to Congress that the service would be self-sufficient. You can read the whole thing here—but without getting too into the weeds, it’s basically saying that revenue from postal fees should cover operational expenses. However, in case it doesn’t, Congress could still give them money as needed.

The important part of this act though, in my opinion, is in the very first paragraph.

You see, there is still an obligation from the government to operate the USPS as “a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people.” You can’t favor one group over another, and everyone must be served equally.

Today, it costs more to run USPS than they take in in postage fees, and the service reimbursement that Congress is supposed to pay USPS for literally the services it provides has not been raised alongside inflation over the last 35 years.

This supposed 2 billion dollar loss in 2026 Q1 can also be blamed in part on arcane technical requirements for funding the USPS pension plan—they can’t invest efficiently and the numbers are being counted incorrectly anyway.

Additionally, the borrowing cap for the USPS has not been raised in line with the needs of a modern carrier, so projects requiring more upfront capital like facilities upgrades go undone (I learned all this listening to the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service2 Open Session from May 8, 2026 which you can hear here).

So there are a bevy of contributing factors to the looming fate of the Postal Service, many of which can be addressed by an act of Congress.

But more pressing is the fact that falling mail volumes in the wake of email and the internet has caused a sea change in how people send mail. What was once the ONLY way one might communicate across distances is now just ONE way. It all boils down to less revenue from postage.

All the systems engineers in the world can’t squeeze more value out of this reality. It’s been a fundamental change to how society functions, and there needs to be a new way to continue providing postal services to the people who rely on it.

This seems like an appropriate place to highlight the fundamental necessity of USPS. Just as we defend our nation from outside threats, we are obligated, as participants in out nation, to support our citizens at home.

The Postal Service could shut down tomorrow, some say, and everything would be fine—the private sector would simply fill the void. It’s just mail, it’s just junk, right?

But that’s simply not true.

Only USPS will deliver to every single address in the United States, even the most rural and far-flung. This is not true of private carriers like UPS and FedEx. And there are people living in some of these far-flung places who rely on USPS to deliver things like life-saving medication—think blood pressure meds, insulin, things that can be truly dangerous to go without.

We saw the reality of this just a couple years ago.

If you live in Georgia, perhaps you recall the disastrous 2024 opening of the infamous Palmetto, GA mail sorting facilty that caused a lot of mail to go missing, or the mail never even got scanned into the system and kind of just disappeared into the void (there are tracking numbers I could look up from orders I shipped at this time and they are still is marked “in transit”).

Anyway, the facility was supposed to streamline operations but instead it was a months-long mail nightmare that made big enough news for lawmakers to start asking questions. There were reports of semi trucks full of mail just parked in rows down the street from the sorting facility. Mail was not getting delivered and successful and on-time delivery rates plumetted.

Constituents were reporting missing mail—mail that should have arrived weeks ago, things like absentee ballots, critical medications, legal documents, paychecks—things that could really have a negative effect on your life if you are depending on them in the mail and they don’t show up.

The good news is the Palmetto facility gradually got back on track. But the fact remains that the specter of a shuttered Postal Service is more than just a minor inconvenience to the American people. Folks living in rural areas and people with disabilities would be impacted disproportionately by a shut-down because there simply are not viable alternatives to relying on the USPS.

Rival carrier UPS itself relys on USPS for some of its own last-mile delivery. If the postal service shut down tomorrow or cut service days, besides the short-term chaos, there would be, in the long term, certain routes that any private sector carrier would just not serve because it’s not profitable.

I would prefer it to be run like a family, where everyone is taken care of even if it means some people (billionaires?) chip in a little more. Some people need more help than others and they deserve that help.

I don’t think I’m crazy for pointing out that the narrative around the Postal Service has been skewed by people who have something to gain from its demise.

Former Postmaster General Louis De Joy got a lot of blame for the aforementioned Palmetto snafu. He was a controversial figure when he was selected for his post by a Trump-appointed USPS board of Governors in 2020 because of his reputation as a Republican mega-donor and conflicts of interest.

According to NBC in 2020, “DeJoy and his wife, a Trump appointee to the Commission on White House Fellowships who is his nominee to be the U.S. ambassador to Canada, own $30.1 million to $75.3 million in assets in Postal Service competitors or contractors, like UPS and the trucking company J.B. Hunt.”

The unspoken thing around all of this is that Louis DeJoy was kind of fucking things up a little bit on purpose in order to shift public opinion on the Postal Service to pave the way for privitization.

Privitization of the Postal Service would be bad, really bad. God, just look at private insurance.

It’s a privilege to ignore the politics of it all. You can argue that it’s “more” important to fund the military, I don’t care, that’s your opinion.

I would rather fund healthcare, education, and the fucking Postal Service. It wouldn’t take that much to do it, and there would be savings to be had for doing it better than we have been allowed to do it.

We are all going to have our pet causes and this one just happens to be one of mine. I fucking love the mail! It connects us in a way that we need now more than ever.

All I ask is that we value and talk about USPS in the same way we value and talk about the other services our government is supposed to be providing us, the governed, the American people. It’s not that radical an idea, really.