The biggest worry is the USPS's financial stability. Unlike other agencies, the USPS is supposed to pay its own way, covering costs only from sales, not taxpayer money.
- Accelerating Losses: The USPS loses billions every year because profitable mail volume is dropping while costs keep going up.
- The Prefunding Mandate (A Past Burden): A huge, unique financial burden used to be the mandate to pre-fund employee retirement healthcare 75 years into the future. While Congress removed this in 2022, the debt remains a heavy burden.
- Twice-a-Year Price Increases: They are raising postage rates twice a year to get more revenue, which helps their budget but annoys customers.
- Aging Infrastructure: The vehicle fleet is often described as "really old," which means more breakdowns and higher maintenance bills. Network modernization has been criticized for poor rollout and failing to fix problems.
Customers often complain about the reliability and quality of mail and package delivery, especially since the big network changes meant to save money.
- Delays and Lost Packages: Missing or delayed packages are the most common complaints. In FY 2020, about 69% of all residential complaints were just about this issue.
- Tracking Problems: Customers frequently see packages get "stuck" with an "in transit" status or taking weird routes due to consolidation and bottlenecks.
- Local Delivery Failures: Common neighborhood issues include carriers leaving "attempted delivery" slips without actually attempting the delivery, misdelivery, and general poor service that make the service worse.
- Elimination of Overnight Delivery: The USPS cut processing centers and dropped local overnight delivery to reduce expensive air transport and cut processing centers.
Many service problems come from internal issues with staff and structure.
- Management Overload: People complain there are too many managers, leading to confusion and poor supervision.
- High Employee Turnover: Relying on temporary staff (non-career employees) makes it hard to keep service consistent and staff committed.
- Mail Theft: Theft of mail, targeting checks and credit cards, is a huge headache, often tied to organized crime recruiting postal employees.
- Focus on Cost-Cutting: Plans like the Delivering for America program are often criticized for prioritizing saving money over good customer service and employee welfare.
The Postal Service is stuck between huge financial and political demands while still trying to meet its universal service obligation to deliver to every single address in the country.