Two years after $107 Billion Taxpayer Bailout, U.S. Postal Service Reports $9.5 Billion Loss

The famously mismanaged U.S. Postal Service (USPS), also plagued by scandals for secretly spying on Americans, lost a staggering $9.5 billion in fiscal year 2024, which ended in September. The loss marks a substantial increase of $3 billion over the previous year when the agency reported an already hefty $6.5 billion deficit. In the meantime, taxpayers continue bailing it out despite a well-documented history of transgressions and exorbitant debt. Just two years ago Congress provided the long troubled USPS with a clean slate, relieving it of $107 billion in obligations. In its latest year-end financial statement the USPS blames 80% of the fiscal year’s net losses on the “amortization of unfunded retiree pension liabilities and non-cash workers’ compensation adjustments” due to inflation.

Laughably, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy claims that a transformation and modernization plan issued in the spring of 2021 has made significant progress since its implementation and assures the initiative is driving the USPS forward to financial stability. “Our pricing and product strategies are continuing to improve our revenue picture and fuel market share gains in our package business, demonstrating the increasing competitiveness of the Postal Service,” said DeJoy, a wealthy Republican donor and ally of President Donald Trump unanimously selected Postmaster General by the USPS Board of Governors in 2020. In a statement the panel describes DeJoy as “an accomplished business executive with more than 35 years of experience” who, transformed a small, family-owned transportation company into a nationwide provider of highly engineered, technology-driven contract logistics solutions. A 2001 federal audit found that DeJoy’s North Carolina-based firm, a USPS contractor for over two decades, overbilled the government by at least $53 million after receiving no-bid contracts that should have been competitively awarded. That did not stop him from getting the job, however.

Though the USPS has performed horribly under his leadership, DeJoy remains optimistic, saying at a recent Board of Governors meeting that he has “complete confidence that in 2025 we will accomplish more meaningful progress as we accelerate our execution and refinement of Delivering for America strategies.” He describes the project as the “only comprehensive plan that attempts to rescue the United States Postal Service in the last 25 years” and “the only plan that focuses on growth and viability.” It is worth noting that the Postmaster General recently came under fire for referring to public sector unions as his “comrades” and proclaiming his goal of achieving a “100 percent unionized” operation at the nation’s ailing postal service. In a recording published online, DeJoy says “I was actually with our supervisors’ union yesterday, and I said ‘comrades, how come you’re not celebrating me?’”

The colossal 2024 loss marks the latest of many scandals for the USPS, long a bastion of mismanagement and frivolous spending that has fleeced American taxpayers out of enormous sums in the last few years alone. In 2021, the USPS reported a net loss of $4.9 billion and in 2020 a net loss of $9.2 billion. One federal audit slammed the agency for blowing the opportunity to save nearly $22 million had it bothered to maintain its fleet of vehicles more efficiently. A few years before that the USPS blew hundreds of thousands of dollars on professional sports tickets, alcohol, and fancy meals while it claimed to be crippled by an $8.3 billion deficit. The items were purchased by USPS managers and employees with special charge cards issued to U.S. government agencies. The USPS’s top executives have also been found to receive illegally high salary and compensation packages that should outrage the public.

The nation’s postal service has also been caught conducting surveillance operations unrelated to its official duties. In the summer of 2021 Judicial Watch sued the USPS for information about a secret program that tracks and collects Americans’ social media posts and flags the posts as “inflammatory” or otherwise worthy of further scrutiny by other government agencies. The USPS’s law enforcement arm, U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), has also admitted using sophisticated hacking devices that can breach cell phones to spy on Americans. The hacking tools, known as Cellebrite and GrayKey, have been used by the agency to extract previously unattainable information from seized mobile devices. Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the USPS for information on the devices used by the agency to hack cell phones.