The Post Office Should Be Closed Forever

The U.S. Postal Service lost $3.1 billion last quarter, and it is on its way to losing $10 billion this year. America no longer needs it. At the very least, it should be made so small that it would not be recognized and have an extremely narrow mission.

In the quarter that ended June 30, the Post Office lost $3.1 billion on revenue of $18.8 billion. That is much worse in the same quarter the year before, when the loss was $2.5 billion on about the same revenue. Since there was no good excuse for the loss, management turned to the Post Office’s history. “The Postal Service continues to play an important role in the American economy and society, and in the daily lives of the American public, as it has for 250 years,” said Postmaster General David Steiner.

The Post Office is huge and unwieldy. There were 533,000 career employees in 2024. The number of non-career employees was 106,000. It has 34,000 retail locations, some of which are in tiny towns that only have a few thousand people. The Post Office delivers six days a week, Monday through Saturday.

Over the last few decades, the Post Office services have become less and less useful. Tens of millions of Americans use email instead of First Class mail. Documents that were once delivered by hand are now email attachments. Even promotions and catalogues are sent electronically. Many people get their bank statements and pay bills online. This means that among the primary reasons that the Post Office existed for two centuries, many are gone.

The fact that the Post Office has thousands of Post Offices in small towns means tens of thousands of unnecessary workers. It also, in many cases, means that the Post Office has to pay for leases.

The fact that the Post Office needs to deliver mail six days a week is completely unnecessary. There are almost no pieces of mail important enough that this delivery calendar can’t be cut to two or three service days a week.

The Post Office bills itself as a way to deliver packages, including overnight delivery. FedEx (NYSE: FDX) and UPS (NYSE: UPS) each have services that can do this. The prices of the service are tiered based on the delivery date.

There is not a single substantial reason the Post Office shouldn’t be closed and never open again.