Why It Matters
A Brookings researcher told a House subcommittee last week that the U.S. Postal Service’s financial condition cannot be fixed by cutting costs alone — and that Congress, not postal management, is the only actor that can resolve it.
Elena Patel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, submitted a statement for the record to the House Subcommittee on Government Operations on June 4, for a hearing on the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) financial condition, postal rates, and the Postal Regulatory Commission. Her central argument: the Postal Service is not mismanaged, but structurally underfunded by design — and the design is federal law.
The Big Picture
The USPS financial crisis is accelerating toward a hard deadline. The agency ended fiscal year 2025 with approximately $8.2 billion in cash — roughly one month of operations — and leadership has warned it could run out within a year. Its statutory borrowing ceiling of $15 billion, set in 1992 and never adjusted, has been maxed out since 2012.
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