Parcels make up over 40% of USPS revenues, but account for just 6% of what the agency actually sends
The Postmaster General is stepping away as the (mostly) mail service tries to work out where it stands in 2025.
After being appointed by President Trump in 2020, at the height of the agency’s financial and logistical chaos, America’s 75th postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, declared his immediate resignation from the top role at the United States Postal Service on Monday.
The move follows DeJoy first announcing his retirement in February, when he asked the USPS Board of Governors to start searching for his successor. That same month, Trump contemplated privatizing the service.
Package deal
DeJoy’s five-year tenure has been eventful. Besides overseeing two elections where mail-in voting took an unprecedented role, DeJoy rolled out a modernization plan in 2021 to reverse USPS’s losses — amounting to a cumulative ~$87 billion across the 14 years to August — in the hopes of saving the agency from insolvency.
However, since then, the plan has hit several obstacles, causing delays, backlogs, and mounting expenses. In FY24, revenues reached $79.5 billion, up 2% year over year, but net losses still clocked in at $9.5 billion, up 47% from 2023, as inflation weighed on operating costs.
As mail’s fallen out of favor — the volume of mail handled by the service has almost halved since 2008 — USPS has become more dependent on its lucrative package business. Indeed, packages accounted for over 40% of its revenue last year, despite making up only 6% of total volumes.
Trying to gain ground in the package space by competing with big names like UPS, FedEx, and Amazon, the latter of which delivered over 9 billion parcels the same or next day alone last year, was always going to be tricky for USPS to deliver. Now, though, it’ll be someone else’s problem.
