Virginia Jones loves her mail carrier. He delivers the mail faithfully to her Palermo home. He works hard, and even delivers mail on some Sunday nights, she says.
“He goes above and beyond,” she said.
But Jones is one of several midcoast residents who, despite the dedication of their local mail carriers, say that basic delivery is breaking down as the U.S. Postal Service struggles with staffing issues and changes intended to address its financial woes.
The USPS is self-funded, which means it doesn’t get money from taxpayers, and instead relies on customers — the number of which has plummeted as communication has moved online. The volume of first class mail fell by 50% between 2008 and 2023, according to the U.S. Postal Service Office of the Inspector General. The last time the postal service recorded a profit was in 2006.
And the future doesn’t look good: Last month, the U.S. postmaster general warned that the USPS is running out of money and could be forced to stop deliveries by early 2027 if nothing changes.
This decline has Mainers and people in other states worried that rural postal customers will be left empty-handed and forced to find pricier alternatives to get medications, pay their bills or cast their ballots. It’s one of several issues that are becoming more acute for rural Americans, who are finding it harder to get access to education, health care, emergency services and other basic needs.
For Jones, her tenuous connection to regular mail service becomes obvious when her carrier goes on vacation or gets sick. There’s often no one to take his place, so people in town can go for three days or even a week without getting any delivery.
“If you have a check or you have something that you’re expecting or a bill that’s going to be paid, I mean, it’s kind of frustrating not to get your mail,” Jones said.
Sian Evans, of Belfast, shares her frustration. Each month she writes and mails several checks to make payments for herself and her elderly mother. She never had a problem until last year, when her checks stopped arriving at their destinations. Occasionally, one would arrive six or eight weeks late. But most simply vanished.
Over seven months Evans racked up $500 in late fees and finally decided to set up online payments instead.
“I had to go, ‘OK, fine, I’ll do digital transfers, I’ll do it that way,’” Evans said. “But what’s the point of having a post office?”
Katrina Smith, who represents Palermo and surrounding rural towns in the Maine House of Representatives, hears frequent complaints about the mail.
“It’s just becoming worse and worse over time,” she said.
Postal service data supports that claim. One of the metrics the USPS’s inspector general uses to track its performance is the on time service percentage, or how often a piece of first class mail is delivered on time.
The USPS, which is required by law to provide service to the entire country, doesn’t keep data for Maine, but instead lumps it together with New Hampshire and Vermont. In the first quarter of 2026, 82% of that mail arrived on time, according to USPS data. That’s slightly worse than the national average of 84.7%.
And it’s much worse than it was in the third quarter of 2018, when the on-time service percentage was 90.8%. It dipped as low as 73.8 in the first quarter of 2025.
A spokesperson for the USPS did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Smith’s constituents have reported going without mail for days when a carrier had car trouble and the post office couldn’t come up with a backup vehicle, she said. When people have gone to their local post office to retrieve their mail themselves, the people working are often too overwhelmed to help.
“It’s just bedlam in there,” she said.
At first, Smith was hesitant to try to address her community’s concerns with the postal service. She’s a state legislator, not a federal lawmaker.
But as the complaints piled up, she started reaching out to members of Maine’s congressional delegation, the postmaster general of the U.S. and Maine’s postmaster general.
In March, Smith filed a formal complaint with the Postal Regulatory Commission, which oversees the postal service, highlighting “ongoing and worsening failures” in mail service throughout the state of Maine.
In the letter she described receiving hundreds of complaints from Mainers about going days and even weeks without delivery. The most urgent of these situations delayed items such as medicine, retirement checks and social security payments, she wrote.
“These disruptions have escalated to the point where they severely impact daily life, access to essential services and the well-being of rural residents,” she wrote.
Members of the congressional delegation said they have heard hundreds of such complaints from Mainers in the past year, and at times have weighed in on the service’s plans to reduce service in the state.
U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat, and U.S. Sen Susan Collins, a Republican, helped get the USPS to drop plans to move some mail processing operations from its Hampden facility over concerns that it would lead to delivery delays and job losses. Golden also fought to reopen rural post offices in Etna, which reopened in 2024, and West Paris, which reopened in April.
After Collins and U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat, requested an audit of the postal service’s operations in Maine, the agency’s inspector general found 150,000 pieces of mail were delayed in a single day in 2023 in southern Maine. The delays were attributed to inadequate staffing and managerial oversight.
Valerie Tyler, the only postal worker at the Lincolnville Center post office, said sometimes there is no replacement for her if she has to go to the doctor or take vacation.
“If I’m not here, the post office is closed,” she said.
Post office jobs used to be easier to fill than they are now. The idea that a postal service job is a ticket to the middle class is still true for many USPS employees, but about 20% of them now are what the postal service refers to as “pre-career” workers, who get fewer benefits, often work long hours and have little job security. These roles have had high rates of turnover, though USPS has made efforts in recent years to retain pre-career workers and convert them to long-term “career” employees.
Still, many pre-career positions go unfilled. In fiscal year 2023, nearly 60% of these jobs received zero applications, according to the USPS inspector general. It was even harder to fill pre-career carrier jobs in rural areas — two thirds of these received no applicants.
In addition to local staffing issues, Mainers likely are feeling the impact of changes the postal service has made at the national level in an effort to cut costs. Instead of mail being automatically postmarked at the post office, it is now sent to a processing center where it is postmarked, which can make things like bills or ballots appear to have been mailed later than they were.
Mail in and around Belfast used to be picked up from post offices twice daily, but that now only happens once a day. The change came about last year, as part of the USPS’s Regional Transportation Optimization initiative, which was intended to cut costs.
Before the changes were put into place, the Postal Regulatory Commission warned that the move would disproportionately affect rural communities and slow delivery, writing that the initiative “presents an overly optimistic — if not incomplete and misleading — description of how the proposed service standard changes will impact the American public.”
Evans never did find out where her checks ended up after she mailed them in Belfast. And her recent experiences with the postal service have left her worried about what will happen when it comes time to vote by mail.
“We have these things that we pay for, and they expect us to rely on it and then take it away from us,” she said. “We should all be outraged.”