USPS Arrow Lock In Key Keeper

The United States Postal Service (USPS), also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or Postal Service, is an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal service in the U.S., including its insular areas and associated states. It is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the U.S. Constitution. The USPS, as of 2021, has 516,636 career employees and 136,531 non-career employees.

The USPS traces its roots to 1775 during the Second Continental Congress, when Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster general; he also served a similar position for the colonies of the Kingdom of Great Britain. The Post Office Department was created in 1792 with the passage of the Postal Service Act. It was elevated to a cabinet-level department in 1872, and was transformed by the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 into the U.S. Postal Service as an independent agency. Since the early 1980s, many direct tax subsidies to the USPS (with the exception of subsidies for costs associated with disabled and overseas voters) have been reduced or eliminated.

The USPS has a monopoly on "letter" delivery within the U.S. and operates under a universal service obligation (USO), both of which are defined across a broad set of legal mandates, which obligate it to provide uniform price and quality across the entirety of its service area. The Post Office has exclusive access to letter boxes marked "U.S. Mail" and personal letterboxes in the U.S., but has to compete against private package delivery services, such as United Parcel Service, FedEx, and Amazon.

History

On March 18, 1970, postal workers in New York City—upset over low wages and poor working conditions, and emboldened by the Civil Rights Movement— organized a strike against the United States government. The strike initially involved postal workers in only New York City, but it eventually gained support of over 210,000 U.S. Post Office Department workers across the nation. While the strike ended without any concessions from the Federal government, it did ultimately allow for postal worker unions and the government to negotiate a contract which gave the unions most of what they wanted, as well as the signing of the Postal Reorganization Act by President Richard Nixon on August 12, 1970. The act replaced the cabinet-level Post Office Department with a new federal agency, the U.S. Postal Service, and took effect on July 1, 1971.

See also:
* 2020 United States Postal Service crisis
* Postal Service Reform Act of 2022

Current operations

Deliveries

The USPS is by geography and volume the globe's largest postal system, delivering 47% of the world's mail. As of 2021, the USPS operates 31,330 post offices and locations in the U.S., and delivers 128.8 billion pieces of mail annually, to 163 million delivery points (as of 2022).

USPS delivers mail and packages Monday through Saturday as required by the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022; on Sundays only Priority Express and packages for Amazon.com are delivered. During the four weeks preceding Christmas since 2013, packages from all mail classes and senders were delivered on Sunday in some areas.
Parcels are also delivered on holidays, with the exception of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the busiest time of the year for the USPS with the agency delivering an estimated 900 million packages during the period of 2018.

Fleet

The USPS operates one of the largest civilian vehicle fleets in the world, with an estimated 227,896 vehicles, the majority of which are the easily identified Chevrolet/Grumman LLV (long-life vehicle), and the newer Ford/Utilimaster FFV (flex-fuel vehicle), originally also referred to as the CRV (carrier route vehicle). Made from 1987 to 1994 and with no air conditioning, no airbags, no anti-lock brakes, and lacking space for the large modern volume of e-commerce packages, the Grumman fleet ended its expected lifespan in fiscal year 2017. The LLV replacement process began in 2015, and after numerous delays, a contract was awarded in February 2021 to Oshkosh Defense to finalize design and produce 165,000 vehicles over 10 years.

The number of gallons of fuel used in 2009 was 444 million, at a cost of . For every penny increase in the national average price of gasoline, the USPS spends an extra million per year to fuel its fleet. Starting in 2026, all delivery truck purchases are scheduled to be electric vehicles,The Postal Service pledges to move to an all-electric delivery fleet
/ref> partly in response to criticism from the Environmental Protection Agency and an environmental lawsuit.

The fleet is notable in that many of its vehicles are right-hand drive, an arrangement intended to give drivers the easiest access to roadside mailboxes. Some rural letter carriers use personal vehicles. All contractors use personal vehicles. Standard postal-owned vehicles do not have license plates. These vehicles are identified by a seven-digit number displayed on the front and rear.

In May 2019, the Postal Service announced that it will be releasing a pilot of self-driving trucks to haul mail across the U.S. The 18-wheelers were developed by startup company, TuSimple. The pilot will last two weeks, making five total round trips to cities across the country.

Military mail

The Department of Defense and the USPS jointly operate a postal system to deliver mail for the military; this is known as the Army Post Office (for Army and Air Force postal facilities) and the Fleet Post Office (for Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard postal facilities).

Operation and budget

In Fiscal Year 2021, the Postal Service had $77.06 billion in revenue and expenses of $81.99 billion with a net loss of $4.93 billion.

Revenue decline and planned cuts

In 2016, the USPS had its fifth straight annual operating loss, in the amount of $5.6 billion, of which $5.8 billion was the accrual of unpaid mandatory retiree health payments.

Declining mail volume

First-class mail volume peaked in 2001 to 103.65 billion declining to 52.62 billion by 2020 due to the increasing use of email and the World Wide Web for correspondence and business transactions. USPS also almost delivered the first email but did not do so.

Private courier services, such as FedEx and United Parcel Service (UPS), directly compete with USPS for the delivery of urgent letters and packages.

Lower volume means lower revenues to support the fixed commitment to deliver to every address once a day, six days a week. According to an official report on November 15, 2012, the U.S. Postal Service lost $15.9 billion its 2012 fiscal year.

Internal streamlining and delivery slowdown

In response, the USPS has increased productivity each year from 2000 to 2007, through increased automation, route re-optimization, and facility consolidation. Despite these efforts, the organization saw an $8.5 billion budget shortfall in 2010, and was losing money at a rate of about $3 billion per quarter in 2011.

On December 5, 2011, the USPS announced it would close more than half of its mail processing centers, eliminate 28,000 jobs and reduce overnight delivery of First-Class Mail. This will close down 252 of its 461 processing centers. (At peak mail volume in 2006, the USPS operated 673 facilities.) As of May 2012, the plan was to start the first round of consolidation in summer 2012, pause from September to December, and begin a second round in February 2014; 80% of first-class mail would still be delivered overnight through the end of 2013. New delivery standards were issued in January 2015, and the majority of single-piece (not presorted) first-class mail is now being delivered in two days instead of one. Large commercial mailers can still have first-class mail delivered overnight if delivered directly to a processing center in the early morning, though as of 2014 this represented only 11% of first-class mail. Unsorted first-class mail will continue to be delivered anywhere in the contiguous United States within three days.

Post office closures

In July 2011, the USPS announced a plan to close about 3,700 small post offices. Various representatives in Congress protested, and the Senate passed a bill that would have kept open all post offices farther than from the next office. In May 2012, the service announced it had modified its plan. Instead, rural post offices would remain open with reduced retail hours (some as little as two hours per day) unless there was a community preference for a different option. In a survey of rural customers, 54% preferred the new plan of retaining rural post offices with reduced hours, 20% preferred the "Village Post Office" replacement (where a nearby private retail store would provide basic mail services with expanded hours), 15% preferred merger with another Post Office, and 11% preferred expanded rural delivery services. Approximately 40% of postal revenue already comes from online purchases or private retail partners including Walmart, Staples, Office Depot, Walgreens, Sam's Club, Costco, and grocery stores. The National Labor Relations Board agreed to hear the American Postal Workers Union's arguments that these counters should be staffed by postal employees who earn far more and have "a generous package of health and retirement benefits".

Elimination of Saturday delivery averted

On January 28, 2009, Postmaster General John E. Potter testified before the Senate that, if the Postal Service could not readjust its payment toward the contractually funding earned employee retiree health benefits, as mandated by the Postal Accountability & Enhancement Act of 2006, the USPS would be forced to consider cutting delivery to five days per week during June, July, and August.

H.R. 22, addressing this issue, passed the House of Representatives and Senate and was signed into law on September 30, 2009. However, Postmaster General Potter continued to advance plans to eliminate Saturday mail delivery.

On June 10, 2009, the National Rural Letter Carriers' Association (NRLCA) was contacted for its input on the USPS's current study of the effect of five-day delivery along with developing an implementation plan for a five-day service plan. A team of Postal Service headquarters executives and staff was given a time frame of sixty days to complete the study. The current concept examines the effect of five-day delivery with no business or collections on Saturday, with Post Offices with current Saturday hours remaining open.

On Thursday, April 15, 2010, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing to examine the status of the Postal Service and recent reports on short and long-term strategies for the financial viability and stability of the USPS entitled "Continuing to Deliver: An Examination of the Postal Service's Current Financial Crisis and its Future Viability". At which, PMG Potter testified that by 2020, the USPS cumulative losses could exceed $238 billion, and that mail volume could drop 15 percent from 2009.

In February 2013, the USPS announced that in order to save about $2 billion per year, Saturday delivery service would be discontinued except for packages, mail-order medicines, Priority Mail, Express Mail, and mail delivered to Post Office boxes, beginning August 10, 2013. However, the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2013, passed in March, reversed the cuts to Saturday delivery.

Retirement funding and payment defaults

The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA) obligated the USPS to fund the present value of earned retirement obligations (essentially past promises which have not yet come due) within a ten-year time span.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is the main bureaucratic organization responsible for the human resources aspect of many federal agencies and their employees. The PAEA created the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefit Fund (PSRHB) after Congress removed the Postal Service contribution to the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS). Most other employees that contribute to the CSRS have 7% deducted from their wages. Currently, all new employees contribute into Federal Employee Retirement System (FERS) once they become a full-time regular employees.

Running low on cash, in order to continue operations unaffected and continue to meet payroll, the USPS defaulted for the first time on a $5.5 billion retirement benefits payment due August 1, 2012, and a $5.6 billion payment due September 30, 2012.

On September 30, 2014, the USPS failed to make a $5.7 billion payment on this debt, the fourth such default. In 2017, the USPS defaulted on some of the last lump-sum payments required by the 2006 law, though other payments were also still required.

Proposals to cancel the funding obligation and plan a new schedule for the debt were introduced in Congress as early as 2016. A 2019 bill entitled the "USPS Fairness Act", which would have eliminated the pension funding obligation, passed the House but did not proceed further. As of March 8, 2022, the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022, which includes a section entitled "USPS Fairness Act" cancelling the obligation, has passed both the House and the Senate; President Joe Biden signed the bill into law on April 6, 2022.

Rate increases

Congress has limited rate increases for First-Class Mail to the cost of inflation, unless approved by the Postal Regulatory Commission. A three-cent surcharge above inflation increased the rate to 49¢ in January 2014, but this was approved by the commission for two years only.
As of July 10, 2022, first-class postage for up to 1 ounce is $0.60.

Reform proposals and delivery changes

Robert Reisner - Digital - Email

Robert Reisner, an undergraduate degree holder from Yale and an MBA degree holder from Harvard, was the agency’s first chief president of technology applications in 1993. He helped USPS launch its first website in 1994. He tried to bring USPS into the digital age. He brought a new digital postmark which allowed email to be certified just as the traditional postmark did paper envelopes. Another improvement he did allowed customers to create fliers and catalogs on their home computers and e-mail them to the USPS that delivered them as hard copies. Reisner wanted to bring email service to the USPS. William Henderson, a past Postmaster General, was also interested. Henderson had a plan for every American to get a free email address. He says now, “If we could control millions of mailboxes in the United States effectively, we can certainly control e-mail addresses.” Reisner, tried but was unsuccessful to bring the USPS into the digital age with an email service for the public. Bloomberg Businessweek''’s Devin Leonard wrote in his book,'' Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service, that if things had gone differently, the first email would have been delivered by your USPS mailman. On the whole there were a failed visionaries, such as Robert Reisner, who tried to turn the United States Postal Service into an internet pioneer but ultimately could not due to it being a bureaucracy that was not willing to adapt.

During the Obama administration

Comprehensive reform packages considered in the 113th Congress include S.1486 and H.R.2748. These include the efficiency measure, supported by Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe of ending door-to-door delivery of mail for some or most of the 35 million addresses that currently receive it, replacing that with either curbside boxes or nearby "cluster boxes". This would save $4.5 billion per year out of the $30 billion delivery budget; door-to-door city delivery costs annually on average $353 per stop, curbside $224, and cluster box $160 (and for rural delivery, $278, $176, and $126, respectively).

S.1486, also with the support of Postmaster Donahoe, would also allow the USPS to ship alcohol in compliance with state law, from manufacturers to recipients with ID to show they are over 21. This is projected to raise approximately $50 million per year. (Shipping alcoholic beverages is currently illegal under (f).)

In 2014, the Postal Service was requesting reforms to workers' compensation, moving from a pension to defined contribution retirement savings plan, and paying senior retiree health care costs out of Medicare funds, as is done for private-sector workers.

During the Trump administration

As part of a June 2018 governmental reorganization plan, the Donald Trump administration proposed turning USPS into "a private postal operator" which could save costs through measures like delivering mail fewer days per week, or delivering to central locations instead of door to door. There was strong bipartisan opposition to the idea in Congress.

In April 2020, Congress approved a $10 billion loan from the Treasury to the post office. According to ''The Washington Post'', officials under Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin