The Postal Service Board of Governors met last week to discuss a wide range of accelerated cost cutting and revenue generating measures in the face of an unprecedented set of financial challenges, heightened by the inability of Congress to pass comprehensive postal legislation.  Citing the fact that the Postal Service cannot wait indefinitely for legislation, the USPS Board of Governors has directed management to accelerate the restructure of Postal Service operations to further reduce costs in order to strengthen Postal Service finances.  Specifically, the Board approved restructuring initiatives and also instructed the Postal Service to revise its 2012 five-year comprehensive plan to account for current financial and liquidity conditions.
The Postal Service is currently implementing major cost reduction efforts throughout its retail, delivery and mail processing operations. Since 2006, the Postal Service has reduced its annual cost base by approximately $15 billion and reduced the size of its career workforce by 168,000 or 24 percent.  During these unprecedented cost cutting initiatives, the Postal Service continued to deliver record levels of service to its customers.

Despite achieving record growth in its package business and stabilization of other revenues, the Postal Service continues to operate with an inflexible business model that hinders its ability to be self-sufficient.  In Fiscal Year 2012, the Postal Service was forced to default on $11.1 billion in mandated payments to the U.S. Treasury, which contributed to a recorded loss of $15.9 billion.  

The Postal Service continues to seek legislation to provide it with greater flexibility to control costs and generate new revenue, and encourages the 113th Congress to make postal reform legislation an urgent priority.

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A self-supporting government enterprise, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation — 151 million residences, businesses and Post Office™ Boxes. The Postal Service™ receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations. With 32,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, usps.com®, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $65 billion and delivers nearly 40 percent of the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 35th in the 2011 Fortune 500. In 2011, Oxford Strategic Consulting ranked the U.S. Postal Service number one in overall service performance of the posts in the top 20 wealthiest nations in the world. Black Enterprise and Hispanic Business magazines ranked the Postal Service as a leader in workforce diversity. The Postal Service has been named the Most Trusted Government Agency for six years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute.