Postal Service Retirement Crisis: How USPS Broke Career Workers’ Promised Security

For decades, career postal workers were told that if they served long enough, their retirement would be secure.

On the late 2000s through the early 2020s, the United States Postal Service and Congress approved and enforced retirement and health-benefit policies that fundamentally reshaped how postal retirees would be covered.

What followed was a retirement system thrown into uncertainty, where long-promised stability gave way to rising healthcare costs, mandatory Medicare enrollment, delayed reforms, and years of financial anxiety for workers who had already earned their benefits.

This is the documented story of the Postal Service retirement crisis, told through records, testimony, and evidence.

Kathy, PostSecret’s Mail Carrier

In 2004, a customer of mine, Frank Warren, began receiving a few post cards in his daily mail. They were preprinted with his address and looked like a card that a dentist office would send reminding you of an upcoming appointment.