Posted on 04/10/2026 4:43:47 AM PDT by Libloather
The United States Postal Service is suspending employer pension contributions for workers beginning Friday, citing a looming cash shortfall, the agency announced Thursday.
The move, which affects the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS), comes just weeks after the Postal Service warned Congress it could run out of cash in under a year without significant reforms, including changes to pension funding and stamp prices.
USPS emphasized that the pause will have no immediate impact on current or future retirees.
"There will not be any immediate detrimental impact to our current or future retirees if normal FERS cost payments are temporarily withheld," Postal Service Chief Financial Officer Luke Grossmann said.
USPS has previously reported mounting losses over the years, totaling $118 billion since 2007, as volumes of its most profitable product, first-class mail, fell to their lowest levels since the late 1960s.
The financial strain was further exacerbated by global tariffs, high inflation and recent spikes in gasoline prices, along with growing competition from private carriers such as Amazon, which now delivers many of its own packages.
USPS said it typically sends the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which oversees federal retirement accounts, about $200 million every two weeks to cover pension costs.
By suspending the payments, the agency expects to free up roughly $2.5 billion in the current fiscal year.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxbusiness.com ...
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Amazon, FedEx, etc.
My grandfather retired from the post office in the late 70’s and he warned me as a child how bad it was being managed.
If any other employer tried this, they would be shutdown and/or arrested.
The reality is that the post office can’t compete. It’s obligated to deliver to remote places that the other delivery services won’t deliver to because it’s not profitable.
Newman!
We have to protect our phoney baloney jobs here, gentlemen! We must do something about this immediately! Immediately! Immediately! How will the Democrats win elections without us?
They have recently made some spectacular screw-ups with my mail and packages. But to compensate, they have massively increased prices also. Let it fail. Private enterprise is chomping at the bit.
Email. Faxes. Telegrams. Holograms.
Just yesterday, I heard USPS was funding NPR. How about that?
Has anyone figured out how there can be no “detrimental impact to our current or future retirees if normal FERS cost payments are temporarily withheld”? I mean. it defies the laws of finance. if you stop paying into the pension system, there is an ever decreasing pension balance. If this were so, why wouldn’t every company just stop paying into their pension systems? You would think the article would’ve explored this a bit.
This is the point. The USPS is a federally chartered corporation that performs services within a market defined by law and a. Constitutional mandate. It does a horribly bad job of what it does, but much of what it does is in a defined monopoly space. What you are seeing here is the USPS exercising its leverage on Congress to extract taxpayer funds. By deliberately underfunding the pension program, they are threatening the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which would fail quite rapidly if the USPS pension payments were terminated in a bankruptcy. That threat is what the USPS exerts against Convress to get what they want.
It could be worse. The place where I worked contributed so little to their so-called pension that you could have taken your personal contribution home, put it in your mattress & done just about as well. That’s basically what I did & I think I fared just as well(better, actually) AFTER retiring w/o their “pension plan”.
With so many companies "going paperless," our mailbox is filled with bulk mailers' junk -- NOT paying first class rates -- as well as campaign junk -- franked by the politicians using public money and services to campaign -- as miscellaneous things. All in all, for us, something comes in the snail mail which we actually want perhaps once a week.
The business model is changed. Even next year's IRS filings will avoid using the post office. As does SSA now. When the government stops using the government mail....
When running low on ammunition, start shooting soldiers.
Deliver three days a week in two groups.
No more than a buggy whip.
At least they got all those shiny new electric delivery vehicles before they ran out of cash.
Time to cut residential mail delivery to 3 days a week. Some areas are M,W,F and others are T, Th,S. There is zero reason for the postal carrier to visit every house every day.
Ahhh, who am I kidding? This would only result in another useless congressional hearing with great videos for YouTube, then….nothing.
“Has anyone figured out how there can be no “detrimental impact to our current or future retirees if normal FERS cost payments are temporarily withheld”?”
Perhaps you should research how the pension benefits are calculated ...
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