Steiner’s appearance before Congress comes as he has been warning that the service will run out of money by the end of 2026 if it does not receive regulatory reforms and financial help from Congress.

Here’s what to know ahead of the hearing on the financial future of the postal service.

What is the current financial state of the Postal Service?

USPS has lost money as an entity nearly every year since 2007, bleeding about $109 billion in that 17-year period, according to a December 2025 Government Accountability Office report. 

Since the service became a semi-independent government corporation after former President Richard Nixon signed the Postal Reorganization Act in 1970, USPS has operated on its own revenue, without taxpayer funding. USPS makes money from the sale of products such as stamps and shipping labels, as well as from services such as last-mile delivery and P.O. Box rentals.

USPS’s revenue system has largely allowed it to break even with its operating expenses and controllable costs. However, the service runs into debt largely when it comes to its retirement liabilities.

“The main problem in terms of the debt has always been – at least for the last 15-or-so years – how they have to pay off their liabilities associated with the pensions and the retiree health funds,” Save the Post Office advocate Steve Hutkins told the Washington Examiner. 

After nearly two decades of operating at a loss and periodically raising the price of stamps, USPS is calling for action from Congress.

Steiner will tell the subcommittee that the “drastic reduction in the use of mail,” from the peak of 213 billion pieces sent in 2006 to 109 billion pieces sent in the past year, is what has led the postal service to its current crisis.

“In the time since peak 2006 mail volume, the Postal Service was thrown overboard and instead of tossing us a life jacket, we were thrown an anchor,” Steiner will testify.

Steiner has warned repeatedly that this could be the last operating year of the postal service if the federal government does not step in to help.

“At our current run rate and if we continue to pay our required obligations in the same manner as we have done in recent years, then we will be out of cash in less than 12 months. So, less than a year from now the Postal Service will be unable to deliver the mail if we maintain the status quo,” Steiner will testify.

Steiner will list nearly 10 concrete reasons for the funding struggles. He will testify that USPS is unfairly “regulated like a monopoly” by the Postal Regulatory Commission, with standards like the limit of one price increase on services per year. He will also testify that the way the service has to allocate its Civil Service Retirement System benefits to its retirees is “disproportionately high,” that the borrowing cap is too low, and that the service should be able to invest its retirement funds in places other than Treasury notes. 

Steiner’s proposed solutions

At the end of his opening statement, Steiner will present three options to Congress. First, do nothing, and USPS will run out of cash by the year’s end. Second, make severe service cuts and price increases — including increasing the price of stamps to over $1.00 — that will likely not be favored by Congress or the American public. Or third, go for what he will call “common-sense and reasonable solutions” and the “Goldilocks option.”

As part of the “Goldilocks option,” Steiner will primarily ask Congress to raise its $15 billion cap on borrowing from the Treasury, a limit that Congress has never adjusted and one that USPS hit years ago. Steiner will suggest in his testimony that if inflation over the 30-year period were applied to the borrowing limit or if it were evaluated based on USPS revenue, it should be raised to “$30 to $40 billion” per year.

“I am confident that we can grow revenue, reduce costs, and solve our financial predicament. But that takes time, and we don’t have a lot of time. One small and easy action, increasing the borrowing limit, buys us that time—time that we can use to determine what the Postal Service should do to best serve the American public,” Steiner will say. 

As part of this third suggested solution, Steiner will also ask Congress to reapportion how much the Postal Service contributes to the Civil Service Retirement System, a reform Steiner says each stakeholder and union is in favor of. He will testify that the reapportionment would ”provide the single biggest contribution to our long-term financial stability.”

“It would not only eliminate the Postal Service’s annual CSRS amortization expense (which last year alone was over $3 billion), it would also ensure the solvency of the Postal Service’s retiree health benefits fund for decades. Currently, that fund is projected to be exhausted in the early 2030s,” Steiner will say.

Steiner will also suggest that the federal government should grant it more flexibility in the investment of USPS retirement funds beyond Treasury notes, reform USPS’s pension funding obligations, and reform the way USPS can handle workers’ compensation expenses.

“These reasonable changes amount to billions in savings and provide us the time and space to take continued self-help actions and to have the discussion about what the Postal Service should do to best serve the American public,” Steiner will say.

What to expect from the members of the subcommittee

Subcommittee chairman Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) has grimly marketed the testimony as an opportunity to “assess whether USPS is reliable enough for Congress to allow it to borrow more money from the Department of the Treasury.”

“USPS is rapidly losing money and becoming more unreliable each year and is dire need of a course-correction. While some progress has been made to improve USPS operations, there is still much more work to be done to reform the agency and make up for the billions it has already lost. The Government Operations Subcommittee remains committed on a bipartisan basis to transform and modernize USPS, and I look forward to hearing from Mr. Steiner on his plans to improve its dependability,” Sessions said in a statement. 

Sessions will certainly be a member to listen to keenly as he questions Steiner. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) will also be a member to watch, as she represents Washington, D.C., where USPS headquarters and much of its headquarters staff are located. Reps. Gary Palmer (R-AL), Brandon Gill (R-TX), and Maxwell Frost (D-FL) each represent states with high numbers of postal mail carriers.

Hutkins told the Washington Examiner he expects some fiscal hawk members on the subcommittee to take their five minutes to rip USPS “for not doing a good job cutting costs” and would expect some subcommittee members to bring up the issue of late mail in their districts.

In response to concerns about the way USPS is independently cutting costs, Steiner will list several cost-cutting measures, including reducing the number of employees by 28,675 over the past four years and reducing local transportation costs by $150 million. 

Steiner will also testify that if the USPS regulator allows the service to increase the price of stamps to between 90 and 95 cents from 78 cents, it would “largely solve” USPS’s controllable loss issues.

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Though he makes the case that “the stamp price would still be the lowest in the industrialized world by a lot,” this is likely to get pushback from members of Congress whose ears will be perked for any mention of effects on ratepayers. 

Steiner is set to testify before the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on Government Operations at around 2 p.m. on Tuesday. He will testify along with David Marroni, the Director of Physical Infrastructure at the U.S. Government Accountability Office.