USPS is missing its own lowered delivery targets — and mail ballots are next test

The U.S. Postal Service has deliberately slowed its mail — and it still can't keep up. A new report from the Government Accountability Office, Congress's independent watchdog, finds that USPS has lowered its own delivery-time targets and is failing to meet even those reduced goals. The findings land just weeks before the midterm elections, when millions of Americans will depend on the mail to return their ballots.

The GAO report details a cascade of service changes made in the name of cost-cutting. In 2021, USPS shifted some mail transportation from air to ground, adding one to two days to expected delivery times for certain first-class mail. The agency has ended afternoon mail collection at more than 24,000 post offices located more than 50 miles from a regional processing and delivery center — a change that falls disproportionately on rural communities.

First-class mail is not an abstraction. It is the channel through which Americans receive prescription medications, paychecks, bills, financial documents, government notices, and mail-in ballots. When that channel slows, the effects ripple across everyday life — and, in an election year, into the mechanics of voting itself.

Election officials in multiple states have responded to service concerns by urging voters to drop off ballots earlier or vote in person ahead of November.

The legal environment around mail-in voting has grown more complicated at the same time. Several federal lawsuits are challenging a Trump administration executive order that imposes new rules on mail-in voting. Under the final rule, any state using mail-in or absentee ballots must provide USPS with a list of participating voters, and USPS is tasked with launching a Federal Mail Ballot Portal for states to upload those lists. The Supreme Court allowed USPS to proceed with implementing the rule, but a federal judge in Massachusetts then issued a temporary restraining order blocking it — a ruling that has already been appealed and may return to the Supreme Court.

We deliver the mail. Someone else makes the rules. We deliver the mail, and so we deliver the mail under the rules that are put on us, and that's exactly what we'll do. People can fight over whether the rules are valid or not. Once that fight is finished, we'll do whatever the courts say we can do. That's not our decision.— David Steiner, Postmaster General

Steiner told Government Executive that USPS 'is not a political organization' and is prepared to comply with whatever the courts ultimately decide — either implementing the executive order or standing down if it is permanently blocked.

The financial pressure underlying all of this is severe. Mail volume has fallen sharply from its 2006 peak. Yet the agency is legally required to serve nearly every U.S. address, including many where doing so is not profitable, and has been expected to fund itself largely through postage and other revenue since 1971, when it stopped functioning as a Cabinet-level agency supported by appropriations.

Steiner is now asking Congress to choose between two paths: provide modest annual appropriations to keep service levels intact, or approve a cost-cutting package that could include closing post offices, reducing delivery days, and shrinking the workforce. He says the agency cannot make those structural changes without congressional approval — and that doing nothing is not an option.

All I'm asking Congress to do is pick one of the policies. You just can't do nothing, because if you do nothing, we're out of business.— David Steiner, Postmaster General

USPS has stated it remains committed to election mail and is implementing extra measures for ballots. But the GAO's finding that the agency is missing even its own lowered benchmarks raises pointed questions about whether those commitments can be met at scale — particularly in rural areas where afternoon collections have already been cut and the nearest processing center may be more than 50 miles away.

The midterms will serve as a live test. State-specific ballot deadlines vary, and a ballot postmarked on Election Day may still be rejected if it arrives too late. For voters in communities that have lost afternoon collections, the margin for error has narrowed.

Why it matters — Slower mail and lost rural collections mean ballots, medications, and financial documents take longer to arrive — and with the midterms weeks away, delays that were once an inconvenience could now determine whether a vote is counted.

Reported by axios.com, gao.gov, about.usps.com, nytimes.com, uspsoig.gov, govexec.com, pbs.org, forbes.com