Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday that the U.S. Postal Service’s immediate cash crisis has been pushed back, with the agency no longer projecting a shutdown in 2027. Instead, the agency’s latest financial forecasts estimate the next liquidity crunch could come sometime between 2031 and 2034.
The improvement is largely the result of what Steiner described as borrowing from retirement plans. “What we are doing right now is we’re basically borrowing money from our retirement plans to fund current operations,” Steiner said. He added that he was uncomfortable with the practice, and that employees and lawmakers should be as well.
Three months ago, Steiner had warned Congress that the Postal Service could run out of money and be forced to stop deliveries by February 2027. Since then, the agency has restricted non-essential spending and struck a multi-year deal to handle the last mile of DHL eCommerce’s U.S. package deliveries.
The Postal Regulatory Commission, the independent agency that oversees USPS, has also eased the pressure. Acting Chair Robert Taub said this month that the commission waived USPS’s required minimum retirement payments through fiscal year 2030 — a cushion worth around $15 billion that Taub described as offering “breathing room” before insolvency.
Customers have already seen temporary price hikes. In late April, USPS imposed an 8% surcharge on some services to cover rising fuel costs, set to expire in mid-January. A longer-term increase takes effect July 12, raising the price of a first-class “forever” stamp to 82 cents — the eighth such increase in five years.
Despite the delayed crisis, USPS continues to bleed money. It reported a net loss of $2 billion in the second quarter of fiscal 2026, following a $9 billion loss last fiscal year. Steiner has called on Congress to revise laws that constrain the agency, allowing it to borrow more and to reform its retirement plans.
Key lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee — Reps. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.), Pete Sessions (R-Texas), and James Walkinshaw (D-Va.) — have asked Steiner for five-year financial and service projections before moving ahead with any major reforms.
At the same time, USPS is being pulled into politically charged missions under the Trump administration. This month, postal carriers began knocking on doors in Huntsville, Ala., and Spartanburg, S.C., to conduct interviews for a field test of the 2030 census. Census advocates have expressed skepticism, citing a 2011 Government Accountability Office study that found having postal workers perform census interviews would not be cost-effective.
An even more contentious role involves mail voting. In response to President Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail, USPS has proposed using state election officials’ information to create lists of approved mail voters. Under the proposed regulation, Steiner told Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) on Wednesday, the Postal Service would refuse to mail ballots to a state that does not hand over its absentee voter list. “We would tell the state that we need the manifest,” Steiner said.
Democrats, nearly two dozen Democratic-led states, and voting-rights groups have filed multiple lawsuits arguing that the Constitution gives state legislatures and Congress — not the president — the power to set federal election rules, and that USPS has no authority to refuse to deliver ballots based on a list. On Tuesday, the entire Senate Democratic caucus wrote to USPS to demand the agency abandon the regulation and return to its core mission of universal postal service.
At a Senate confirmation hearing last week, two of Trump’s Postal Service governor nominees — Jeffrey Brodsky and William Gallo — avoided directly answering whether USPS should play a role in deciding who can vote by mail. “As far as I’m concerned, you have to have the courts and Congress make the decision,” Gallo said.
Editor’s note: NPR, which reported the original story, is a financial supporter of the U.S. Postal Service.