WASHINGTON \u2014 The U.S. Postal Service reported a $2.5 billion net loss for the fiscal third quarter, nearly $600 million less of a loss than the same quarter last year, and urged a series of actions from Congress to address its mounting financial crisis.<\/p>\n
U.S. Postmaster General David Steiner said legislation passed by a Senate committee to add dozens of new ZIP codes could cost the cash-strapped postal service $800 million and said the agency is seeking approval for a new stamp price hike in January rather than waiting until July 2027.<\/p>\n
Steiner said without action from Congress this year, \u201cour plans would certainly have to entail changes that will impact service like taking a look at our service levels and closing thousands of unprofitable post offices, as well as raising prices.\u201d<\/p>\n
In June he warned: \u201cThe bottom line is that we are out of cash. We are borrowing from our employees\u2019 retirement funds to continue operations,\u201d Steiner said, urging Congress to compensate it for money-losing operations and make other reforms.<\/p>\n
In March, USPS hired restructuring advisers to help address its \u200bfinancial troubles.<\/p>\n
One key question is whether USPS should continue to deliver to 170 million addresses six days a week, which costs $3.4 billion annually \u2014 and 70% of those routes lose money, Steiner said. About 58% of its 18,000 post offices also lose money.<\/p>\n
The Postal Service has reported net losses of more than $120 billion since 2007, as first-class mail, its most profitable product, has fallen sharply with the shift to digital communication even as the \u200bagency must maintain costly \u200bnationwide delivery operations.<\/p>\n
USPS \u2060said in May it was suspending nonessential spending on travel, office supplies and consultants.<\/p>\n
In May, the \u2060Postal Service said it would temporarily suspend employer payments for a federal pension program and raised the price of first-class mail stamps to 82 cents from 78 cents, effective July \u206012.<\/p>\n
Suspending \u200bemployer pension contributions will conserve $2.5 billion through Sept. 30 \u200band potentially $15 billion through 2030.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 The U.S. Postal Service reported a $2.5 billion net loss for the fiscal third quarter, nearly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":807075,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-807074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=807074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/807075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=807074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=807074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=807074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}