Our Perspective
The U.S. Postal Service released a 10-year strategic plan, titled Delivering for America (DFA), in March 2021 to address continuing annual financial losses, unmet service performance goals, and diminishing market relevancy as consumer behaviors have changed. Through its DFA plan, the Postal Service intends to realize service excellence and financial sustainability.
While progress has been made, implementation of network changes, particularly the large facility modernization efforts, has been very challenging and have resulted in negative service impacts to communities. Communication, internally to employees and their leaders on expectations and workflow, and externally to customers and stakeholders on plan changes and potential impact, needs to be significantly strengthened for the Postal Service to achieve success with implementing these historic and complex changes to the logistics network.
We, the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General (OIG), have provided essential oversight of the Postal Service for over 25 years and since the release of the DFA plan, have worked to integrate an independent and objective review of the plan into our work. Key pillars of our oversight work of the DFA plan include how we assess its impact on Service, Financial Performance, Sustainability, and its Labor force. The Postal Service’s Network Modernization plans touch all these pillars.
This is the first of a series of reports, which will be issued every six months. It will highlight our oversight work over the DFA plan and the Postal Service’s progress towards meeting the essential goal of being a high performing organization through service excellence and financial stability.