WASHINGTON —11/14/25 – Below are the prepared remarks of Postmaster General and CEO David Steiner, delivered during the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors open session on Nov. 14, 2025.

Good morning. Thank you, Chairwoman McReynolds, for your introduction. I appreciate those in attendance and those listening today. Your interest in this treasured American institution is a testament to the important work we do and the impact that we have every day.

First, I want to echo the Chairwoman’s remarks honoring the dedicated service of Governor Roman Martinez. While our time together was short, I appreciate everything that you have done to help me get a better understanding of the Postal Service.

I also want to thank you for your significant contributions over the past six years. Your stewardship helped guide the Postal Service’s recent transformation and modernization, which improved our competitiveness. You have served the nation well.

We will carry on with your desire to enact common sense and rational reforms for our health care and retirement obligations as well as for our financing obligations.

Reflecting on my first 100 days as postmaster general, I’ve traveled the country speaking to thousands of employees, touring more than 20 facilities, engaging with our stakeholders and understanding the vast scale of our significant work. I admire the drive, dedication and diligence of our front-line employees, supervisors, managers, and our executive team.

These travels also reinforce for me that the progress made to our network has empowered our organization to reach new levels. We are at the dawn of a new commercial era for the Postal Service, one that will restore our prominence in the marketplace.

I also see a renewed push for the relevancy of our mail products and services. We are poised to draw from our growing market reach, vast infrastructure, steady workforce, transportation refinements, and of course our vibrant brand, to seize new commercial and public service opportunities that generate the revenue needed to sustain our universal service offering.

Turning to service performance, we have seen improvements across the country. Not long ago, on-time service performance in some categories fell below an acceptable range from our targets, with some stakeholders questioning whether the Postal Service could reliably deliver.

I am happy to say that our service performance is steadily improving, and we now regularly perform in the high 80s, and even into the mid-90s for some of our products.

Most importantly, our customers can expect delivery of their mail and packages in less than three days on average. Moreover, nearly half of the packages and mail we deliver are actually delivered earlier than the service standard.

So, while these improvements should be noted, service is still not where we expect it to be, nor is it what our customers deserve. We still have work to do to meet our targets, and for items that remain in our system over 7 days — the so-called tail of the mail.

That is why Doug Tulino, our deputy postmaster general and chief operating officer, is targeting subpar service areas and developing plans that accelerate improvement.

Looking ahead to this current quarter, like the rest of the industry, we are experiencing disruptions in our air transportation network, due to the cargo flight tragedy in Louisville, the grounding of the MD-11 planes, and the increased cancellation of commercial flights. This will have an impact on our First-Class Mail scores early this quarter. We are in close coordination with our air transportation partners, have mitigation plans in place, and expect the impact to be temporary.

Service is foundational to our success and enables a financially viable Postal Service. It drives business and revenue. I know that we can have both excellent service and lower costs, and Doug is just the person to lead those efforts. You may note that Doug’s chair is open today. Doug is visiting with his 100-year-old mother, and we wish them the best. But every execution error or service dip reflects broadly on the whole organization, and I encourage all employees — myself, the Executive Leadership Team, managers, supervisors and craft employees — to strive for excellence and precision.

By taking pride in your uniform, our interaction with customers and colleagues, and your everyday work, you bring pride to everyone that bleeds postal blue.

Of course, financial performance remains our most pressing challenge. We must and can do better. Despite gains in certain areas, we continue to face pressure from a variety of sources like inflation, balance sheet obligations unique to the Postal Service, and pricing limitations.

We will certainly be asking Congress and the Postal Regulatory Commission for more flexibility and common sense modifications in how we are regulated. I hope they will engage with us on these reforms that are necessary for our long-term financial viability.

But in the short term we are now heading into our peak season. I want to assure all that the Postal Service is more than ready to deliver for the 2025 holiday season. With more than $20 billion in investments over the past four years, the Postal Service has the capacity and infrastructure to process, transport and deliver for our customers.

Specifically, we increased our daily package processing capacity from 60 million to 88 million through the deployment of more than 600 package sorters — including 94 installed this year alone. In addition, due to our stabilized workforce, we plan to hire only a modest number of seasonal employees, roughly 14,000. And finally, our service standard refinement, facility modernization initiatives and vehicle investments are improving our reach and performance in every community.

What does this mean for our customers, the American public, and our employees? It means local consumers and businesses can send holiday greetings in a region more quickly and reliably. Our carriers are fostering commerce and using new, safer and cleaner vehicles — 24,000 new vehicles on routes this year, with more to come.

Furthermore, the nine regional processing and distribution centers, 19 regional transfer hubs, 17 local processing centers, and 133 sorting and delivery centers ensure we have the space needed to process volume and serve customers during peak season and year-round. In addition, our new Informed Delivery app allows customers to interact with us and with their mail and packages like never before.

Looking beyond peak season, I want to recognize the progress of our ongoing processing and logistics modernization efforts.

Without a doubt, the Postal Service is in a better place today than it would have been without these initiatives. They dramatically improved our middle-mile operations to transform the Postal Service into a logistics powerhouse.

While we may change specific initiatives as we move forward, and our execution needs improvement, I do not see the need for a fundamental reassessment of our processing and logistics modernization strategies at this time.

However, I do believe that we need to lean more heavily into our greatest asset — our first and last mile. We previously encouraged access to this valuable asset for only a few high-volume customers. I believe this undervalued our reach, limited business partnerships, and restricted revenue generation. We can, and will, better utilize and monetize our first- and last-mile assets.

We are open to working with customers, big and small, by offering expanded last-mile service to serve their customers, fulfill market demand, and maximize our revenue. That is why we recently began negotiating a deal with UPS to expand last-mile coverage. We are also in talks with similarly situated companies for expanded last-mile service.

Additionally, we want to open up the last mile for retailers, large and small, so we can offer same-day and next-day delivery to their customers. We have begun discussions with a number of retailers, and the desire for fast, reliable and affordable delivery is certainly strong among all retailers.

Our value resides in going to every address, six and often seven days a week, while offering a remarkable retail and processing footprint, as part of our universal service offering.

We have achieved impeccable service performance scores for our last mile — and the customers who have benefited from this service are enthusiastically appreciative.

But our last mile has been historically undervalued and underused. Simply put, we have the capacity to meet a much larger percentage of America’s shipping needs — we just need to utilize our assets efficiently and effectively.

We can also be doing much more in the returns market — the white whale of the package industry that no one has quite caught. With our huge first-mile footprint of over 33,000 facilities, we should be the most convenient returns facilitator across the United States. I will continue working with my management team to develop and refine these ideas and look forward to sharing more in the coming months.

I have taken to saying that we cannot cost cut our way to prosperity — we have to grow. When you look at our revenue, you see that compared to 18 years ago customers now send about 110 billion fewer pieces through our system every year.

If you took the current price of a First-Class stamp, that would be over $85 billion in annual lost revenue. No business could overcome that magnitude of a revenue drop. So, it is not surprising that the Postal Service has struggled.

We need to stop the revenue decline and grow volumes at a faster pace. Our last-mile offering will be a piece of that, but we should also be the carrier of choice for all businesses, and we should partner with online platforms and others to broaden our reach. And through strategic partnerships with companies like DHL, we can accelerate innovation, and they can open new doors to success across the largest market in the world.

But we also have to cut costs. We need to be more efficient. We need to look at innovative methods to reduce costs and bring artificial intelligence into our logistics network. To do all of this we need capital, and the ability to leverage our assets.

We should be able to borrow like our competitors, who are not limited by statute. In addition, we should look to expand the services we provide for the government. We are a natural partner to make many government services more readily available and efficient.

The United States Postal Service is an institution worth saving. The Postal Service was, and remains, an agent for innovation and exceptionalism. We predate the constitution and the nation itself. We were instrumental in advancing modes of transportation like rail and air. We have served this country well for the past 250 years. We need to put the Postal Service on sound footing to take on the next 250 years. The scope of our enterprise is equally as impressive as our history. We connect 170 million addresses to all of the other 170 million across the country — that’s 28.9 quadrillion connections. More than the number of stars in a galaxy, or the number of galaxies known to exist.

We also operate more retail locations than the five largest and world’s most iconic brands combined. We deliver in the immediate aftermath of nature’s worst. And we remain a critical part of our nation’s infrastructure.

We deliver at a uniform price, at a speed and reliability unmatched when compared to the world. The fact that you can mail a letter from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Fairbanks, Alaska — a distance of about 3,900 miles — for just 78 cents is astonishing.

Especially when in Italy for example, a country 33 times smaller than the United States, the price of a stamp is about $3. In France, the price is $1.60, and the longest distance that letter will travel in France is about 600 miles. That is about the distance between here in Washington, DC, and Charleston, South Carolina.

And in Estonia, a country 210 times smaller than the United States, the price of a stamp is over $2. One of the few countries closest to us in price is Portugal, at about 80 cents, and they are 100 times smaller than the United States.

We offer unparalleled value for the universal work we do. In return, we ask only for common sense business rules in the way we manage pricing, logistics, and our short-term and long-term obligations.

In closing, our goal is to meet market and customer expectations to ensure that we remain a financially viable and service-driven organization, as the law requires. We have to look at every possibility to make the Postal Service self-sufficient. But the best way to do that is to grow: grow our business, increase our relevancy with the American consumers and businesses, and continue to make the United States Postal Service a model for postal services all over the world.

This is an achievable goal — but like my predecessors before me noted, we do not have the luxury of a long runway to turn things around.

That is why I encourage all our stakeholders — Congress, the Administration, the Postal Regulatory Commission, the Inspector General, our mailers, our unions, our customers — to reengage with fresh ideas.

Let’s work together for a viable future and let go of self-motivated interests. Let’s solve our most pressing problems together, and let’s enable the renewal and long-term viability of one of our nation’s greatest assets, the United States Postal Service.

When I took this job, I took it out of a sense of duty to my country. Over the first three months, that has expanded to a sense of duty to our employees, our customers, our suppliers, and everyone who is touched by the reach of the Postal Service. I take that duty very seriously and it’s a duty that I expect to fulfill.

Our leadership team remains fully confident that we have what it takes to rise to the challenge, work together, and deliver for the American public. Now is the time when necessity and opportunity align to create the future success of the United States Postal Service.

Finally, I would ask all our employees to personally connect with those we serve, lead by example, share your optimism, focus on near-term actions that generate results, create deliberate space to think strategically, and celebrate every success. You are the face of the United States Postal Service. Let’s put on our best face every day, and in every interaction.

I also challenge our stakeholders to share in a similar ethos in the coming months and years. We understand the need to criticize when we fall short, but we equally deserve recognition when we excel and assistance when it makes sense.

I would like to thank the governors, the entire management team, our stakeholders, and the women and men of the United States Postal Service for their dedicated service to our customers and the American Public.

Now let’s have a successful peak season and confidently march into the future.

Thank you, Madame Chair.

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