Even after $916 Million Budget Increase USPS ends FY 2025 with $9 Billion Net Loss

The bleeding continues full throttle at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), the agency plagued by scandals for secretly spying on Americans that just a few years ago received a staggering $107 billion taxpayer bailout to mitigate its chronic losses. USPS is under water yet again closing fiscal year 2025, which ended in September, with a net loss of $9 billion despite receiving a $916 million increase in operating revenue over 2024, for a total of $80.5 billion to perform its duties. Postmaster General David Steiner, who inherited a huge mess when he took over in July, says the USPS must explore new revenue opportunities to improve the agency’s business model. “More importantly, we must operate more efficiently and compete more effectively to best perform our public service mission,” he stressed.

At least the new Postmaster General, who is paid $346,780 a year, is not in denial like his predecessor, Louis DeJoy, who laughably claimed throughout his five-year tenure that a so-called modernization plan was making significant progress and 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. Though the USPS performed horribly under his leadership, DeJoy remained optimistic, saying at last year’s Board of Governors meeting that he had “complete confidence that in 2025 we will accomplish more meaningful progress” with 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 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. Under his leadership the USPS, with around 533,000 employees, just kept racking up debt. He left the ailing agency in March, around halfway through the fiscal year, and Steiner took over a few months later. In its 2025 financial report the USPS reveals that its total operating expenses were nearly $89.8 billion, an increase of $317 million, or 0.4 percent, compared to the prior year. “The overall increase in operating expenses was primarily due to increases in compensation costs and other operating costs, including the incentivized voluntary early retirement offer to certain employees, partially offset by the impact of discount rates on workers’ compensation costs and lower transportation costs,” the annual report states. The agency’s Chief Financial Officer, Luke Grossmann, assures the USPS remains “focused on moving toward financial sustainability.”

Various USPS officials have delivered similar statements over the years, even as American taxpayers repeatedly bail out the agency that has long been a bastion of mismanagement and frivolous spending. In the last few years alone, the postal service has fleeced the public out of enormous sums. For instance, in 2020 the USPS reported a net loss of $9.2 billion, and it ended 2021, apparently a good year, $4.9 billion in the red. 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 filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the USPS for information on the devices used by the agency to hack cell phones.

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