USPS Reveals Fourth Consecutive Quarterly Loss, Further Highlighting the Need to Abandon DeJoy’s Failing Delivering for America Plan

The Nearly $1.3 Billion Loss for Q1, Typically its Most Profitable, Follows a $9 Billion Loss for 2025, Yet USPS Leadership is Still Pursuing the Same Broken Strategy

(February 5, 2026) — Washington, DC — Keep US Posted, a nonprofit advocacy group of consumers, nonprofits, newspapers, greeting card publishers, magazines, catalogs and small businesses united in the belief that a reliable, affordable U.S. Postal Service is essential to our way of life and should be protected, again urges Postmaster General David Steiner to desert his predecessor Louis DeJoy’s strategy in favor of actions that will produce more mail and boost productivity. Under Steiner’s leadership, USPS today announced a Q1 2026 loss of nearly $1.3 billion — up nearly $1.4 billion compared to same quarter last year, when it experienced a net income of $144 million — follows a 2025 loss of over $9 billion. The USPS Q1 results cover October 1 to December 31, 2025, making the quarter typically its most profitable because it includes the busy holiday mailing season — and meaning that today’s loss likely corroborates the anticipated 2026 loss of $8.1 billion.

Since the launch of DeJoy’s 2021 Delivering for America plan, USPS has lost more than $25 billion — even with the passage of 2021 CARES Act, which provided $10 billion, and the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022, which resolved a massive $120 billion in liabilities. Despite such overwhelming indications that the Delivering for America plan’s shift to favoring packages over mail is not working, USPS is still following the same path, taxing mail — which is still its biggest revenue-generator — by excessively raising prices while reducing service, thereby driving even more mail out of the system.

Postmaster General Steiner last month filed a petition with the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) to provide USPS with unlimited power to raise prices for Market Dominant mail, which includes all first-class mail, marketing mail, newspapers and magazines, and generated more than $42 billion (about 53 percent of USPS’ total operating revenue) for fiscal year 2025. Since the Delivering for America plan was implemented, USPS has raised mailing rates and stamp prices seven times at unprecedented rates far above inflation and with unprecedented frequency, as most of the price hikes occurred twice per-year. Even though more mail volume has left the system with every rate increase, Steiner is asking for unrestricted rate increase authority to commence in 2027. And for the first time, he has publicly admitted that USPS could be insolvent by February 2027. And if the PRC grants his petition to lift price caps, the American public and businesses alike will face even steeper cost increases.“It’s abundantly clear that the Delivering for America plan should be marked ‘return to sender,’” said former Congressman Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.), executive director of Keep US Posted. “We had hoped that Postmaster General Steiner would take a fresh approach and shift away from DeJoy’s tax-and-spend strategy, but so far, he appears to be doubling-down on his predecessor’s failed strategy, even though he has admitted that USPS will be insolvent by early 2027. It’s time for Congress to take up the USPS SERVES US Act, which would restore reliability and affordability, and increase accountability and productivity. Otherwise, USPS is headed for a taxpayer bailout.”

“USPS cannot afford to continue to prioritizing packages over mail and penalizing its biggest revenue generator,” Yoder continued. “The package growth DeJoy sought has not, and will not, materialize. While businesses and consumers have many private sector options for package delivery, we all rely on USPS to deliver the mail, and it’s the only service provider that delivers anywhere in the U.S.  It’s easy to attribute decreasing mail volume to the growth of digital communication, but the fact is that price increases and productivity declines are pushing even more mail out of the system. The USPS cannot continue to vampirize the mail, its biggest revenue source, and compromise the mail delivery on which both Americans and businesses depend.”

Keep US Posted supports H.R.3004 — federal legislation called the “USPS Services Enhancement and Regulatory Viability Expansion and Sustainability for the U.S. Act” (USPS SERVES US Act). An alternative to a taxpayer bailout of USPS, the bill will limit the negative effects of DeJoy’s Delivering for America plan and restore reliability, consistent customer service, and rate certainty by empowering the Postal Regulatory Commission to course-correct past USPS decisions that are hurting its ability to serve the American people and driving it into financial ruin.

Key reforms contained in the USPS SERVES US Act will:

• Limit Rate Hikes: Restricts USPS to one rate increase per year and prohibits price caps without limits.

• Improve Productivity: Reduces USPS rate authority if it fails to improve productivity. Also creates an autonomous Office of the Customer Advocate to hear Americans’ concerns and protect the public.

• Restore Service Quality: Holds USPS accountable for improving efficiency and ties rate authority to service performance. In addition, the legislation makes the PRC's service evaluations binding and requires the PRC to develop its own volume estimation model independent of USPS.

  
  
  
  

About Keep US PostedKeep US Posted is a nonprofit advocacy group of consumers, nonprofits, newspapers, greeting card publishers, magazines, catalogs and small businesses — all united in the belief that a reliable, affordable U.S. Postal Service is essential to our way of life and should be protected. Keep US Posted supports alternatives to current and future efforts to slow the mail and increase postage rates. To learn more, visit www.KeepUSPosted.org.

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Press Contact: Beth Dozier – beth@revelcommunications.com | 202-599-7261