Changes are coming for your mail: Postal service faces challenges − digital and DOGE

As a teenager, Ellen Dare Burling had an unusual summer job: Jumping off a moving ferryboat onto wooden piers, her arms filled with letters and packages destined for summer residents in their southern Wisconsin lake houses.

She'd drop off the load, grab the outgoing mail and packages, race back along the pier and leap back aboard. The boat didn’t stop moving, and neither did she, unless she fell in the water.

Today, Burling, 61, is the general manager of the Lake Geneva Cruise Line and the tradition of the "mail jumpers" continues more than 100 years after the U.S. Postal Service first contracted with the company to deliver to homes without road access.

"There are still people who are on their pier every day to get their mail," said Burling. "It's 100% done because of the tradition. It was more of a necessity in the old days, but now it's people who want to keep up the tradition."

The emotional connection those Lake Geneva residents feel for their mail deliveries highlights the challenge in bringing changes to the U.S. Postal Service, which faces competing priorities to deliver to 165 million addresses six times a week while not losing money.

Last year it lost $9.5 billion.

Can DOGE make postal cuts? 'Good luck.'

Older than the United States itself, the postal service faces significant challenges as Americans send fewer letters, Christmas cards and wedding invitations. Now, President Donald Trump's federal cost-cutting efforts, led by billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, are targeting how to stop the service from losing money.

But change comes hard to an institution that counted Benjamin Franklin as the first postmaster general and uses an army of 635,000 union workers and contractors, a fleet of specialized trucks, boats, float planes and even mules to help deliver about 300 pieces of mail daily.

While news that Musk's DOGE team will be scouring the service for savings sparked recent protests and drew headlines, a reorganization was already well underway with a longstanding transformation called "Delivering for America."

Those changes include cutting 10,000 jobs through early retirements, a new fleet of electric delivery trucks to replace existing trucks that keep breaking down, and slowing delivery for many rural customers. More than 75% of the postal service's budget goes to paying its roughly 635,000 workers, and those 10,000 job cuts reflect only a 1.5% staffing reduction.

Some critics want to see even bigger changes, from closing post offices to merging the service with the Commerce Department, or even wholesale privatization like other countries have done.

Although the postal service is technically an independent agency, Congress maintains close control, and retired New York University Prof. Steve Hutkins, a longtime postal service champion, said he's skeptical DOGE will be able to make significant inroads. "I don't know what Musk can do to make those things happen because of the legal barriers to making to them happen," he said. "If Musk wants to go there, good luck."

Postal service helped form the American identity

Created by the Continental Congress in 1775, the post office helped foster a sense of national identity, creating post offices and helping maintain important road connections.

The Civil War also sparked rapid growth in the service, which struggled to deliver mail from deployed Union soldiers to their families back home, prompting officials to implement a national rural delivery system that later expanded to deliver parcels and freight.

For many years, the service even delivered newspapers for free on the grounds that a well-informed citizenry was key to success, the official postal service history says.

"The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people," Congress said in creating the modern USPS. "It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities."

But as the Internet grew in popularity, Americans sent fewer and fewer letters. In 2021, CBS News reported that 37% of Americans hadn't sent a letter in at least five years, and 15% of Americans had never sent a personal letter. While the service has raised prices to help compensate for the drop in first-class volume, it hasn't been enough.

Last year, the service handled more than 116 billion pieces of mail, with most of that being presorted mailers, solicitations or other items that many people would consider "junk" mail.  Overall mail volumes have been dropping since 2006, according to the postal service, but each year there are more and more addresses to deliver that to.

Private companies like FedEx and UPS are outcompeting the postal service for some parcel deliveries, in part because it's a lot easier for them to charge higher prices for harder deliveries in rural area ‒ or to simply not deliver.

In contrast, the USPS is required to deliver to virtually every address in the country, regardless of how much it costs. That's why it still uses mules or horses to deliver to Supai, Arizona, a remote Havasupai tribal village in the Grand Canyon of Arizona, or float planes to serve fishing villages off the Alaska coast.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy stepped down Monday amidst growing protests from postal workers and supporters about proposed changes and service reductions. Appointed during the first Trump presidency, DeJoy had grown frustrated that his efforts to transform the service were being stalled by Congress. He had been planning to retire at the end of his five-year term but instead stepped down shortly after inking a deal with DOGE.

"The simplest and most obvious ideas and solutions receive illogical and irrational scrutiny from those that have no responsibility for ensuring the financial viability of the Postal Service," DeJoy wrote in a Feb. 17 letter to the USPS governing board.

Although it's supposed to be an independent agency, the service is subject to Congressional mandates and whims, including down to whether a specific neighborhood will get door-to-door delivery or a centralized "cluster" box. Members of Congress of both parties push back fervently whenever the service proposes to close a local post office.

"In any other organization the disruptive accomplishments we have made to date would have created an easier path forward versus the Herculean one we still face today," DeJoy wrote. "This situation reflects how tragic our condition was when we started this journey, the negative consequences the past four years of a pandemic and historic inflation, the resistance we face to our initiatives for change, and to a certain extent, our failures in execution on what is otherwise a very solid business plan."

Cutting a 'vital public service' will require Congress

Unionized postal workers oppose many of the changes DeJoy had been pushing, and staged nationwide protests earlier this month after heading that Musk's DOGE would be helping cut costs further.

In a statement, APWU President Mark Dimondstein urged the service's Board of Governors to quickly replace DeJoy with someone committed to keeping the USPS accountable to the public. Union workers have argued that mail delivery is a vital public service that shouldn't necessarily turn a profit.

"...any attack on the Postal Service is part of the ongoing oligarchs' coup against the vital public services our members and other public servants provide the country. We know that privatized postal services will lead to higher postage prices, and lower service quality to the public," Dimondstein said. "No matter who leads the USPS, it is – and must remain – the People's Postal Service."

Hutkins, the retired NYT professor, runs a longstanding "Save the Post Office" website where he chronicled efforts by DeJoy and others to trim costs. Hutkins more than a decade ago got involved with efforts to keep his local post office open, and has emerged as one of the service's staunchest defenders.

He's skeptical any significant changes are coming quickly. Unlike the executive branch, the postal service isn't directly under Trump's control. That means elected lawmakers will have to explicitly change laws governing service rules about delivery frequency and pricing, he said.

"For any of this to happen, which requires Congress, I don't see the votes to do something major," Hutkins said. "I'm a little skeptical about anything radical happening."

Service may be less critical, but emotional connection endures

In Wisconsin, Burling and other Lake Geneva Cruise Line workers are gearing up for another summer season of delivering the mail via boat.

Burling's kids also served as mail runners, and she feels a close emotional connection to the service, even if it's not quite as critical as it once was.

"Because it has been such a long tradition, it's something people are attached to and really, really value," she said. "I felt guilty for years when I stopped sending out my bills with a check in the mail, and started paying online."