For 2026, the USPS IG is asking for $306.7 million, all of which would be funded by the Postal Service and not tax revenues.
The OIG asked for $294 million in 2025, but with the CR, received only $271 million each of the last two years.
Tammy Hull, the inspector general of the U.S. Postal Service, told House Appropriations Committee members on April 30 that this increase would allow them to expand their investigative efforts to root out additional fraud, waste and abuse.
“Our relatively flat budget has resulted in a loss of employees over time. We make the most of our limited resources by using sophisticated analytics to effectively allocate our budget and personnel,” Hull said. “For example, we are beginning to leverage AI to organize millions of customer complaints, allowing us to quickly find where there may be delivery problems. Data insights also allow us to determine where our quick response team should visit, where criminals are recruiting postal employees on social media sites, and where healthcare providers may be fraudulently charging the Postal Service. While data analytics and AI have allowed us to be more strategic and efficient, they have also highlighted how much more we could do. We’ve identified more than 100,000 potentially actionable leads that we do not have the resources to address. A decline in funding will only make that worse for fiscal 2026.”
