WASHINGTON — Below are the prepared remarks of Postmaster General and CEO David Steiner, delivered during the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors open session on Aug. 7, 2026.
Thank you, Chairwoman McReynolds, for your kind remarks.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Let me add my welcome to all attending or listening-in.
For a little more than one year, I have had the privilege to serve as America’s Postmaster General.
I have become deeply immersed in our business, visited facilities, met with many of our employees, and worked with our unions and management associations, customers, and suppliers, and stakeholders of all stripes.
And every day of the past year, my appreciation has grown for the incredible work our people do in every community, and for the value this organization brings to the nation.
I am especially grateful for the support and collaboration and good counsel of our Board of Governors over the past year.
Having served on corporate boards for large organizations in the private sector, I can tell you that goal setting, instilling accountability, and providing expertise by Boards are vitally important to the success of any CEO and the functioning of any organization.
I would like to thank this Board for its thoughtful work in representing the interests of the American public and for the good working relationship we have.
So… thank you.
Since our last open session meeting, the Postal Service has made good strides on a number of financial and operational fronts. On the financial front this quarter, we were $600 million better than in the same quarter last year. And the momentum has continued into the current quarter. On the operational side, we have reduced work hours and increased service performance, which shows that our employees are leveraging the network better than ever. And the operational momentum is continuing and will position us well as we move toward peak season.
We have done all of this amid a continuing and urgent financial crisis.
Despite the potential for distraction, our management team and the organization have been focused on what is within our ability to control.
As you will see, we are making good, steady strides with service improvements and cost reductions.
Many of you here, and the customers who follow the organization closely, will see that our network is functioning more smoothly, in more areas, with every passing month.
We are working hard to improve end-to-end visibility. This serves as the linchpin for improving customer service and drives efficient operations.
Our processing and transportation and delivery teams are grinding away at optimizing processes and the results are steadily better performance, along with reduced costs.
I believe that once we implement our end-to-end visibility, we will see further improvements in service. That is why the project is so important, and we have put our best people on it.
We will hear shortly about all of this progress from Greg White, our Vice President of Network Solutions & Performance Excellence.
I have been especially pleased that we are achieving strong service improvements while implementing new RPDCs and S&DCs.
These are complex operations, and we are integrating new facilities, technology, and equipment without the kind of hiccups that occurred in the past.
This reflects a maturity and resiliency in operating our network.
From a revenue perspective, I am pleased to say that we have recently been meeting our growth projections.
I believe we can attribute a lot of our successes in the marketplace to our service performance.
When we pair popular products with good pricing… when we deliver good service… we attract more business.
This is validation of our increasing value, and I am pleased about the revenue path we are now on. Of course, we can always do better, and our teams are hard at work trying to add profitable volume to our network.
From a cost perspective, we are fighting headwinds with inflation and especially with fuel costs.
We are continuing to reduce work hours and drive transportation efficiencies.
We are being very aggressive in these areas, but our cost issues remain a function of our business model requirements.
Luke Grossmann, our CFO and Executive Vice President, will present shortly on our financial results and challenges, but very simply, the bottom line is that we need to fix the business model that has produced the 17-year-long imbalance in costs and revenue – and that is going to require Congressional involvement.
On the pricing front, the results this quarter show the strong leverage that pricing can have on results, and pricing is one lever that we have to use now to grow revenue.
In our market dominant products — which is essentially postage for mail delivery — we have been raising prices consistent with our regulatory authority.
And as a result, even though mail volumes have declined, largely due to secular trends, we have seen mail revenues rise — due to our pricing strategy. This dynamic has been true for 14 out of 16 quarters. Total revenue is up due to price increases despite drops in volume.
Use of our pricing authority is absolutely necessary to improve our financial sustainability and we need to be given more flexibility if we are expected to cover our costs.
Obviously, we would like to both grow volumes and grow revenue, but if we can only do one, we want to do it in a way that maximizes total revenue. That is what all companies do — from airlines to grocery stores, they apply revenue management principles to maximize profitability. Thus far, applying those basic principles has favored raising prices even though there has been a modest decrease in volumes.
All of the statistics and results show that we have yet to cross the point that we should be changing our pricing strategy, and that we have more price to take in the marketplace. It would be financially irresponsible of us not to do so.
Of course, we are constantly handcuffed by the PRC when it comes to taking the most logical steps in revenue management and pricing, and our regulator recently limited us to one price increase per-year, a $700 million loss of revenue for the Postal Service.
Given our need to use price to generate needed revenue and the once a year restriction, we recently filed a request that we be able to use density rate authority in a January 2027 market dominant price increase. Doing an increase in January rather than in July is worth $600- $800 million to the Postal Service — cash that is desperately needed for us to fund operations.
The PRC should be taking into consideration our ability to cover costs and should recognize and approve the basic revenue management principles we are trying to follow.
So, if our viability means anything to the PRC, this should be an easy decision.
So pricing is important to our long-term viability, but reform is crucial to our viability. As we prepare to further detail our legislative agenda to Congress and to the Administration, we believe that the choices are clear. And there are choices. The only thing that will doom the Postal Service is not making a choice.
As things stand, the Postal Service is expected to be self-sustaining while, at the same time, fulfilling mandates that are inherently unsustainable and do not cover their costs.
Resolving this tension comes down to the policy choice of either eliminating uneconomical mandates or funding them through appropriations. And to be clear, that policy choice is one that is the right and job of Congress to decide. We at the Postal Service have a view as to which way we would go, but that is not our decision or role. Our role is to present the choices to Congress and ask them to decide.
And I believe that to make the best choices, you need to first define the goals.
To illuminate this point, I tell the story about a former colleague of mine, and our individual goals when we played golf.
When he played golf, his goal was to complete his round as fast as possible.
My goal was to shoot the lowest score I possibly could.
We were playing the same game, but you take very different approaches and very different steps and actions when you have different goals.
So, a lot of people approach problems by asking “what do we do”? I believe you have to approach problems by asking “what is our goal”…because, just like the golf game, what you do, what steps you take, is defined by the ultimate goal.
So what is the goal of the Postal Service? Is the goal to provide the current level of service to the American public regardless of the cost? Or is the goal to provide only the level of service that can be provided at a sustainable cost? That is the question I have asked myself over the course of my first year.
Given the unfunded mandates we labor under, it is a decision Congress needs to make — whether we adjust service or Congress pays the cost of mandates through policy changes and appropriations.
And I believe that we can do both — support economic activity and provide the desired level of service.
In fact, I believe with the right investment in the Postal Service we can break even and provide even better service.
How can we do that? Well, first you have to realize that “economic activity” for the Federal Government doesn’t just include the activity within the Postal Service.
You have to look at the entire $2 trillion ecosystem surrounding the Postal Service. Because if the Postal Service as a stand alone entity covers its cost, but as a result the surrounding ecosystem shrinks and economic activity and jobs resulting from that activity shrink, then net-net the nation’s economy is worse off.
So, you have to look at the Postal Service not in isolation, but as part of a larger ecosystem.
And we believe that a small investment in the Postal Service would create a large return for the American economy.
So, our proposed legislative package will do just that — call for a relatively modest appropriation to invest into the Postal Service to grow the $2 trillion ecosystem.
But we would also recommend that the appropriation be periodically revisited, to account for inflation and other factors. Moreover, as we reduce costs and improve revenue, we believe we will become more profitable, and the appropriation could be reduced.
This quarter we demonstrated that we are on the right track toward success — service scores improved and we did $600 million better this quarter than in the same quarter last year. Over the past few weeks, we have met our stated financial plan from both a cost and revenue point of view, so you can see the momentum building. So, we don’t think that the investment made in the Postal Service will need to be a permanent investment, but a temporary one.
And of course, our legislative package will include the common sense reforms to our benefit plans that virtually everybody agrees are necessary. And it will call for increased borrowing authority to help offset the over $20 billion of historical under investment in Postal Service assets and people.
So that is the crux of the legislative package that we will present to Congress and the Administration, and we hope it will be well received.
But as I have said in the past, we can’t rely on areas outside of our control, we have to look at other ways to achieve financial self-sufficiency if that is the goal. And we are working on those plans.
Of course, we have peak season coming up, so we would not take any action until after the New Year, but if we can’t get agreement on a legislative package this year, our plans would certainly have to entail changes that will impact service like taking a look at our service levels and closing thousands of unprofitable post offices, as well as raising prices. Again, whether we take these actions comes down to “what is our goal”?
If Congress agrees with us that facilitating economic activity is the goal, then they will enact some form of our legislative package. If they believe that our goal is to be “stand-alone” break even, without regard to the overall U.S. economy, we will proceed with the actions we need to take to get there. It is a very simple “either-or” scenario. We will either have a legislative package passed or we will take any available actions we can to achieve breakeven status.
And I want to make sure that I am very clear — we at the Postal Service do not make policy, we deliver the mail. And we truly look forward to working with Congress and the Administration to determine the best policy for their constituents — the American public. We have started to have these conversations, but we want to have more so that together, we are making the best, most informed decisions.
On that note of making the best decisions… we certainly look forward to working with Congress, but it would also be helpful if Congress would work with us. Their recent action in passing a bill out of Committee that would change postal ZIP Codes and other changes are not helpful to the Postal Service at all.
In a calendar quarter where our 630,000 hard working men and women struggled and strived to improve performance by $600 million, with a single action, with the stroke of a pen, Congress proposed to give it all away for no good reason. One bill that passed Committee to legislate 83 new ZIP Codes will not only eliminate the $600 million improvement, it will further erode our performance as we estimate costs from the bill to be well over $800 million. It will also affect service, not only for these ZIP Codes, but for the areas around those ZIP Codes.
So, we would ask Congress to quickly set aside this bill before it does irreparable harm to the Postal Service and to their constituents and our customers. In a glimmer of good news the Senate Committee DID pass a bipartisan alternative to the ZIP Code bill that would direct us to reform the process we use to help solve community addressing needs without the damaging delivery or financial impacts of legislated ZIP Codes — so we encourage the Senate to advance that common sense proposal instead.
But it just goes to show the systemic issues facing the Postal Service — even as the Postal Service takes one step forward, Congress imposes yet another money losing mandate that pushes us two steps back. This process has to stop.
We would prefer that rather than considering harming the Postal Service that Congress consider making an investment in the Postal Service, which after all, is making an investment in America.
I want to close by thanking the 630,000 men and women of the USPS for their commitment to our mission of service, for the great work they do for their customers and the nation every day, and for their extra effort during the busy mailing and shipping season ahead.
Last year, we did great during peak season. This year let’s do even better!
I only wish that every American citizen could see what we see every day – the commitment and energy of the 630,000 strong. The drive and determination to accomplish their mission and their devotion to the American people.
I believe when you see that…. you would agree that the Postal Service is an institution worth investing in.
Thank you.
Add your first comment to this post