WASHINGTON – The U.S. Postal Service will tell Congress on Tuesday it faces a serious financial crisis and without significant reforms it will be out of cash in less than a year.
Postmaster General David Steiner will tell a House Oversight subcommittee that USPS needs higher stamp prices, the ability to borrow more money and other reforms.
Steiner laid out potential options to cut costs: ending six-day-a-week deliveries, closing post offices or raising first class mail stamp prices to $1 or more, up from the current $0.78.
“In order to ensure our survival beyond next year, we need to increase our borrowing capacity so that we don’t run out of cash,” Steiner’s written testimony seen by Reuters said. “The failure to do this could lead to the end of the Postal Service as we know it now.”
Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Reuters