Postmaster General David Steiner ran into a fiscal hawk wall on Wednesday as he pleaded for the Senate to help the U.S. Postal Service out of its dire financial situation.
The USPS head has been warning that the service would run out of funds by the end of 2026 since the start of the year, asking Congress to help the entity by increasing its borrowing cap, allowing it to raise the price of stamps, and restructuring its pension and retirement liability obligations. On Wednesday, Steiner tacked onto that list, asking the chamber to consider reviving public service reimbursement payment to the postal service.
“I’m here to tell America that we can do anything they desire, but we can’t afford to do everything they desire without more help,” Steiner said.
He made the request during testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is chaired by one of the most prominent fiscal hawks in the Senate, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). Paul lambasted the postal service’s financial decisions, calling on Steiner to ensure that USPS is instituting a complete hiring freeze.
“The gist of what I got from you today is ‘We just need to borrow more money,’ and that to me is, I think, defeatism, and not something I’m interested in doing — just loaning you more money when you lose 9 billion a year,” Paul said.
“What you’re ignoring is for every dollar you put into government, that dollar would have been spent much more effectively in the private marketplace,” Paul continued.
Steiner has been insistent that USPS cannot survive financially without congressional action. Since his March testimony and cry for help before the House, Steiner has made several changes within USPS to help its cash flow, including suspending the agency’s regular payments to the Federal Employees Retirement System pension fund and raising the price of First-Class Mail Forever stamps by 5%, if its regulator approves.
But Steiner said these actions have not been enough to resolve the fiscal woes, directly countering a testimony from the USPS regulator, the Postal Regulatory Commission, which said the recent actions have given USPS “at least another several years” before it would face financial collapse.
“I do want to clear up a misconception — because I think the PRC testified that we’ve got cash to last us a certain amount of time – let me be very, very, very, very clear: we are out of cash,” Steiner told the committee. “If we had to pay all of our bills today, we could not pay all of our bills today. We are out of cash. What we are doing right now is we’re basically borrowing money from our retirement plans to fund current operations.”
The tension between the USPS and its regulator was tangible throughout the hearing, with several lawmakers, including Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), questioning the need for the PRC’s existence at all. Often, to the frustration of the postal service, the PRC limits when USPS can raise stamp prices and ensures the service follows its universal service obligation, or the affordable delivery of mail to every U.S. address six days per week.
“If you combine the PRC with the [USPS] Board of Governors, make it one entity, they can make their prices what they need. If you go from 78 cents to 95 cents, that’s $1.6 billion. If you go from six days to four days, that’s $6 billion. You’ve almost wiped out your entire debt by going to four days and by allowing the price to go up. Just two changes would do it,” Paul argued.
POSTMASTER GENERAL SPARS WITH SENATE DEMOCRATS OVER MAIL-IN BALLOT RESTRICTIONS
Paul and the committee spurned the postmaster general’s request for more monetary aid, with their response less friendly than the House’s receipt of Steiner’s requests.
Members of the Senate committee also sparred with Steiner over USPS’s new mail-in voting rule and pay bonuses at the top of the organizational chart. The political questions over mail-in voting were largely new for Steiner, who has remained mainly apolitical since he took the helm of the agency in July 2025.