The Postal Service’s regulator is setting limits on how often the agency can set higher prices for its monopoly mail products.

The Postal Regulatory Commission ruled on Tuesday that the USPS, starting in March, can only raise mail prices once a year. This limit will remain in place through Sept. 30, 2030.

The commission eased restrictions on USPS mail prices in December 2020, when the agency was reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, and was months away from running out of cash.

Since then, USPS has generally raised mail prices every January and July. Despite setting higher prices, the mail agency is seeing deeper net losses each year, and is far from achieving the “break-even” goal of its 10-year reform plan. In July 2025, USPS raised the price of a first-class stamp to 78 cents.

Members of the commission wrote in their order that the Postal Service’s long-term financial problems “cannot be resolved by using pricing authority alone.”

Regulators said they gave USPS this pricing flexibility largely because it’s delivering less mail to households — but still going to 163 million addresses at least six days a week — and because the agency, up until recently, was required to prefund health benefits for its retirees well into the future. Congress eliminated this prefunding mandate in April 2022, as part of the Postal Service Reform Act, a long-awaited reform package that helped USPS avoid $107 billion in costs.

As the bill made its way through Congress, Pete Sessions (R-Texas), the current chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s government operations subcommittee and co-chairman of the Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency (DOGE) Caucus, warned USPS not to keep raising prices.

“We’ve got to make sure stamps don’t go to 60 cents, don’t go to 70 cents, don’t go to 80 cents,” Sessions said during a committee hearing in May 2021. At the time of the hearing, the price of a first-class stamp was 55 cents.

Even with congressional intervention and new pricing flexibility, the Postal Regulatory Commission found “things did not go well” for USPS.

“Declines in the Postal Service’s financial situation, volume, and service performance have remained significant, if not worsened,” the PRC wrote.

USPS ended fiscal 2025 with a $9 billion net loss. The regulator said limiting USPS to a single rate increase each year is unlikely to have a significant impact on its revenue.

USPS did not attempt to provide its own estimate of how much additional revenue it received from the second rate each year. But PRC estimates that it brought in, at most, $700 million in additional revenue each year — about one-to-three days of USPS operating costs.

The PRC said that revenue is “nowhere near enough” to make up for $25 billion in net losses over the past three years, and would “likely not be sufficient to resolve the Postal Service’s medium-term or long-term financial issues.”

USPS declined to raise mail prices in January 2025 or January 2026. The regulator said those decisions suggest that the revenue from these rate increases “is not essential to the Postal Service’s short-term financial stability.”

Last summer, the USPS Board of Governors urged its regulator not to put limits on its ability to set higher mail prices. Governor Ron Stroman, a former deputy postmaster general, said it “would be a mistake” for the commission to override the board’s pricing decisions.

Stroman said the USPS board is in the “best position to determine how to best utilize the pricing authority and make decisions about specific price increases for market-dominant products.”

“Based on the data I have reviewed, I have concluded that twice-a-year price increases have maximized the Postal Service’s revenue during the post-pandemic period of high inflation,” he said. “However, I can certainly envision future scenarios where we conclude that the factors we consider in exercising our business judgment weigh against a twice-a-year price increase.”

Governor Dan Tangherlini, a former head of the General Services Administration, agreed that USPS should “maintain authority over pricing.”

Ann Fisher, one of the PRC’s commissioners, dissented with the majority. She wrote that limiting higher mail prices “leaves only the Postal Service worse off.”

“While this order provides to mailers long-sought relief, it limits the Postal Service’s ability to respond to rising costs such as inflation, labor, delivery, network costs, etc.,” Fisher wrote.

USPS spokeswoman Marti Johnson said in a statement that the agency is “very disappointed” by the regulator’s decision.

“It is hard for the Postal Service to consider a holistic review of the rate-setting system to be one that begins with a modification that leaves only the Postal Service worse off,” Johnson said.

Mike Plunkett, a former USPS manager for pricing strategy and innovation and manager of retail alliances, now the president of PostCom, a national association of companies that rely on the mail to conduct business, said the mailing industry has repeatedly warned USPS that it “would not be able to price its way out of its predicament.”

“Prices have been going up faster than ever, at the same time that overall service quality has been reduced,” Plunkett said.

USPS set lower targets for on-time mail delivery in 2025. In 2021, it implemented slower delivery standards for nearly 40% of first-class mail. USPS saw persistent regional delays in mail delivery as a result of a major restructuring of its mail processing infrastructure. It’s also running trucks less often between its mail processing plants and post offices to transport mail.

Last month, USPS clarified that postmarks on mail and packages reflect when they arrive at processing facilities, not when they are dropped off in a mailbox or post office. The final rule is likely to affect some time-sensitive mail, including mail-in ballots.

In a recent press release, USPS touted improved delivery metrics during the holiday season. The agency said it delivered mail and packages within 2.5 days on average between mid-November and early January — an improvement from 2.8 days on average the previous year. It also saw a 23% reduction in calls to its customer help line and a 44% decrease in package-related customer service inquiries.

An industry report from March 2024 found that these twice-a-year price increases drove away more mail volume than USPS anticipated.

“Every year, I lose members. Every year, I have members that have to close facilities and lay people off. And if that’s being done, just so you can keep the Postal Service’s doors open for an extra couple of days, I don’t think that’s an appropriate tradeoff,” Plunkett said.

The commission wrote that it “strongly encourages the Postal Service to consider and analyze the effect of previous rate increases upon the general public, business mail users, and private delivery enterprises before proposing new rate increases.”

Kathy Siviter, executive director of Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers, said the twice-a-year price hikes were “driving mail volume out of the system at a faster rate” for nonprofits than the COVID-19 pandemic or the 2008 recession.

“As people leave the system, they find other ways to handle their communications. Some of those are not necessarily as effective, but particularly for nonprofits, it comes down to the cost,” Siviter said.

Postmaster General David Steiner told Reuters in an interview last month that USPS could run out of cash by early 2027. Siviter said Steiner repeated that warning during a meeting with industry members this week.

“I don’t know how many times he said it — ‘We’re running out of money in 14 months. We’re running out of money in 14 months,’” Siviter said. “They’ve done this before. We see it as a bit of a scare tactic. It’s never happened. They’ve been this close many times before, and something will happen. Either they’ll make some money somewhere, or Congress will step in.”

According to Siviter, Steiner told mailers that one of his top priorities is to convince Congress to raise its borrowing limit with the Treasury Department in order for the mail agency to proceed with its network modernization initiatives. USPS has currently maxed out its $15 billion borrowing limit with the Treasury.

In a bid to bring in added revenue, USPS is looking to open up its last-mile delivery network to more shippers.

USPS already has agreements with shipping giants like Amazon and UPS to get their packages to their final destination, but it’s giving other delivery companies an opportunity to strike similar deals. Last-mile delivery is the most expensive leg of deliveries, and USPS goes to more addresses than its private-sector competitors. USPS will accept bids from companies in late January or early February.

The agency plans to hold an invite-only symposium next week at the International Spy Museum — across the street from USPS headquarters —for shippers to learn more about how to place bids.

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Congress is seeking more in-depth information on staffing numbers, federal contracts, remote work agreements and other federal workforce details, according to several provisions of the two spending bills Senate and House appropriators released over the weekend.

The latest two-bill “minibus,” which has bipartisan, bicameral support, includes appropriations for Financial Services and General Government, as well as National Security and the State Department. The package tees up fiscal 2026 spending levels for the State Department, Treasury Department, Office of Personnel Management, General Services Administration and Small Business Administration, along with many other agencies.

For OPM, lawmakers are now eyeing $167.5 million in appropriations for 2026. That’s about $51.5 million short of OPM’s enacted $219 million appropriation for fiscal 2025. But along with the topline numbers, appropriators also appear to be looking for more details on federal workforce numbers and programs, according to a joint explanatory statement released Sunday alongside the legislation.

For one, the spending minibus includes a provision seeking further data on changes to the federal workforce size over the last year. No later than 60 days after the bill is enacted, OPM would have to publish specific data points on the number of civilian federal employees. That includes the numbers prior to the start of President Donald Trump’s term, as well as the numbers as of Sept. 30, 2025 — the final date of the deferred resignation program (DRP) — and finally, the current federal workforce levels.

The legislation additionally calls for a report from OPM of how many employees opted into the DRP, as well as the agencies, occupations, locations and pay rates for those now-former federal employees.

OPM already recently released some further information on federal workforce numbers. The updated “Federal Workforce Data” website details employee data by geographic location, agency, age, education level, bargaining unit status — and much more. The new platform also reaffirms the significant reshaping the federal workforce experienced over the last year, showing that the current federal workforce size is the lowest it’s been in at least a decade.

In addition to details on federal workforce size, congressional appropriators are also seeking more information about agencies’ use of remote work agreements for federal employees. Within 90 days of enactment, OPM would have to detail how and when employees are deemed eligible for remote work, how often those agreements are reviewed, and how remote work agreements influence locality pay adjustments, according to the legislation.

The policy provision comes shortly after OPM released updated telework and remote work guidance, which now aligns with the Trump administration’s significant curtailing of telework and remote work across the federal workforce. While emphasizing as much on-site presence as possible, OPM’s revised guidance also defined limited exceptions to return-to-office requirements for certain federal employees.

A separate provision of the spending bill would require OPM to report to Congress at least two days before signing any potential sole-source contracts, as well as any contracts worth $2 million or more.

The new provision comes as OPM is working out the details of a federal contract and action plan to modernize and centralize the more than 100 current federal HR systems used across government. During May 2025, OPM initially announced a sole-source contract award to that end, but then quickly canceled the award. OPM later issued a request for proposals (RFP), and agency officials have said they expect to soon award a contract that will eventually result in one cohesive, governmentwide HR system.

Separately, congressional appropriators are also planning to direct OPM to provide quarterly updates on the Postal Service Health Benefits program, “including any gaps in OPM’s capacity to successfully implement the program.”

The provision comes a few years after OPM first established the PSHB program for Postal Service employees. In July 2025, OPM’s inspector general office then reported that the agency’s enrollment platform for PSHB was at risk of an “operational failure” due to staffing reductions within OPM.

Bipartisan, bicameral appropriators agreed to the latest appropriations minibus on Sunday, looking to generally lower spending levels in comparison with enacted appropriations for fiscal 2025. Subcommittee leaders said the agencies that fall under those two bills would see a cumulative total of $9 billion less in spending than last fiscal year.

The proposed budget cuts are more modest than many of the steeper spending reductions the Trump administration requested for fiscal 2026, which now appear to be off the table. The new legislation marks further progress toward Congress reaching a government spending agreement, just weeks away from the Jan. 30 funding deadline.

The latest minibus comes after congressional appropriators teed up a three-bill minibus early last week. The House later passed those three bills, which are now under consideration in the Senate. In total, three of the 12 appropriations bills for 2026 have completely cleared Congress.

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The IRS is weeks away from the start of a busier-than-usual filing season. But a group of senators is warning that the agency may be stretched too thin after losing more than a quarter of its employees.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) led 15 other senators in a Dec. 21 letter raising concerns about the start of the IRS filing season.

The letter, addressed to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — who is also serving as acting IRS commissioner — and IRS Chief of Taxpayer Services Ken Corbin, states the 2026 tax filing season “will present a huge test for the IRS.”

“We write with serious concerns that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is not prepared for the upcoming tax filing season and that American taxpayers may face delays and difficulties in filing their tax returns and receiving their tax refunds,” the senators wrote.

All senators on the list are Democrats, except for King and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — both of whom caucus with Senate Democrats.

The IRS lost about 25% of its workforce last year through voluntary separations and retirements.

A recent report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found these staffing cuts will make it more difficult for the IRS to detect fraud, process tax returns, and provide tax help over the phone and in-person at its Taxpayer Assistance Centers.

The TIGTA report also raises concerns that staffing cuts in the IRS’s IT department are delaying the agency’s ability to modernize its systems, including an initiative to digitize much of its paper-based workload.

“Taxpayers deserve to have the information and assistance they need to file their taxes and receive their refunds in a timely manner,” the senators wrote. “The Trump administration’s relentless attacks on the IRS threaten its ability to serve the public and undercut its mission to provide taxpayers with top-quality service and ensure that our tax laws are enforced with integrity and fairness.”

The IRS paused its IT modernization efforts in March. But internal documents show the agency is planning to modernize a more than 50-year-old IT system that’s critical to its work every filing season.

Internal documents obtained by Federal News Network show the agency is working on a “future state” of its Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS), a massive clearinghouse of taxpayer data.

IDRS allows IRS employees to review an individual’s tax information when they call asking for help, or send tax notices to individuals. The system also makes it possible for taxpayers to track the status of their federal tax return refund check.

The IRS expects that this modernization project, once complete, will make it much easier for employees to retrieve a taxpayer’s records when they contact the agency asking for help.

The internal documents show the IRS is working with several tech companies on this project, including Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and Palantir.

IRS employees were told last summer that layoffs were off the table. But during the recent government shutdown, the Treasury Department sent reduction-in-force notices to nearly 1,400 IRS employees.

Employees affected included those working in tax enforcement, IT and human resources. Those RIFs were rescinded, but layoff protections contained in a stopgap spending bill are set to expire on Jan. 30.

The agency lacks a permanent commissioner. Seven acting commissioners led the agency last year. Former congressman Billy Long, President Donald Trump’s first permanent pick to lead the agency, stepped down last August.

During his two-month tenure at the IRS, Long fell out of step with senior Treasury officials on several decisions. Those included rescinding RIFs within its Office of Civil Rights and Compliance, announcing that Direct File was “gone” months ahead of the agency’s official announcement, and stating the 2026 filing season would begin in mid-February, later than usual, to give the IRS workforce more time to prepare.

The IRS has not yet announced the start date of this year’s filing season. Federal News Network has reached out to the Treasury Department and the IRS for comment.

National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins, in her mid-year report to Congress last summer, said this year’s filing season was “largely successful.” But taxpayers may see delays during the 2026 filing season, given major staffing cuts.

This year’s filing season will be busier than usual. The IRS must update dozens of federal tax forms to reflect changes made under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The IRS, as part of its fiscal 2026 budget request, said it needs to hire 11,000 call center representatives to “maintain” its current level of phone service. Without those hires, the agency warned it would only be able to answer about 16% of phone calls during next year’s filing season.

The IRS in July put out hiring notices to fill 4,500 full-time contact service representative jobs, but quickly pulled down those notices from USAJobs.

Months later, the IRS announced it would fill more than 2,150 frontline customer service positions. More than 70% of those job posts are for seasonal hires that can’t stay on the job for more than four years.

Term appointments generally don’t count toward career tenure, making it harder for employees to qualify for certain competitive service rights or transfer opportunities.

The Trump administration proposed giving the IRS more than $850 million to help the IRS hire those employees and roll out new automation tools to assist taxpayers.

But the House Appropriations Committee advanced its fiscal 2026 spending bill without these funds — and deeper overall IRS budget cuts than what the administration proposed.

The IRS recently moved about 1,000 IT employees out of its tech shop as part of a reorganization plan that’s been underway for months.

Impacted employees say they have few details about what work they’ll be doing, reportedly advised by the agency to instead “focus on completing an orderly transition of your current work.” The notice they received states that they will no longer be working on IRS IT projects.

According to the notice, obtained by Federal News Network, the reassignments went into effect on Dec. 28.

Employees who received the email have until Jan. 9 to complete an “orderly transition.” That includes wrapping up current work, offloading assignments and supporting project handoffs.

Employees in question have been told that their reassignment is “permanent realignment out of the CIO organization,” but the move to the Office of the Chief Operating Officer is temporary. The agency’s HR office is looking to reassign the employees to jobs across the IRS and Treasury.

Reassigned employees are being asked to upload their resumes no later than Jan. 23, 2026.

The IRS stayed open on Dec. 24 and Dec. 26, even though President Donald Trump gave most federal employees those days off. The agency sought volunteers to work those days, offering holiday pay to those who signed up.

The agency’s acting chief human capital officer told staff in a memo that keeping the IRS open would allow employees to “continue to work mission-critical efforts.”

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As a tumultuous year for the federal workforce comes to a close, many employees are in a much different position now than they were at the start of 2025.

The Trump administration’s efforts to reduce staffing across agencies resulted in the loss of more than 317,000 federal employees governmentwide. It’s a 13.7% decrease compared with September 2024 workforce numbers, Office of Personnel Management data shows.

At the same time, 68,000 new federal employees joined the civil service during 2025, according to OPM Director Scott Kupor. Combining both attrition and hiring data, the administration’s changes over the course of 2025 amounted to a net staffing decrease of about 10.8%.

Kupor touted the results as exceeding the administration’s goals, saying relatively few losses were due to reductions in force (RIFs) and firings of probationary employees. Out of all employees who left their jobs in the last year, “over 92% did so voluntarily,” he said, mainly via the deferred resignation program (DRP).

“None of this is to minimize the impact of anyone losing a job, but the ‘mass firing’ headlines do not in fact tell the full story,” Kupor wrote in a Dec. 10 post on X.

But some federal workforce experts argue that the administration’s reductions in 2025 amounted to a “forced exodus.” Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, pointed to what he said have become “dangerous gaps” in key federal services, like food safety inspection, Social Security processing, veterans’ healthcare and disaster response.

“This loss of expertise directly harms Americans’ access to critical services and will take decades to repair,” Stier told Federal News Network.

Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.) also pushed back against the idea of the administration’s DRP being “voluntary.” He said many feds who left government felt they had no choice — they felt threatened they would be fired anyway, if they did not leave through the DRP.

“Federal workers were hit with DOGE, watched agencies shutter, were threatened with imminent reductions in force, demagogued and bombarded with those mindless ‘5 things’ emails,” Walkinshaw said Dec. 11. “Nothing about that was voluntary — the ‘fork in the road’ was coercion.”

Still, the workforce cuts so far align with the Trump administration’s overall goal to “downsize the federal workforce,” as the Office of Management and Budget recently laid out in the new President’s Management Agenda. Specifically, the administration said it is targeting cuts of “unnecessary positions” and “poor performers,” while emphasizing more efficiency.

“We’ve seen significant success in right-sizing the federal workforce and addressing performance issues,” Eric Ueland, OMB’s deputy director for management, said during a Dec. 9 Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council meeting.

The workforce reductions hit some agencies harder than others. The top three agencies facing staffing reductions are the departments of Defense, Agriculture and Treasury — with Treasury’s reductions mostly concentrated within the IRS, according to research from the Partnership for Public Service.

By scale, DoD has seen the largest staffing reduction across government. The department lost over 61,600 employees during 2025 — a total of about 8% of its total workforce.

Following just behind DoD, the Treasury Department lost more than 31,600 employees, yielding a staffing reduction of nearly 28%.

And at USDA, the loss of more than 21,600 employees over the last year amounted to a roughly 22% staffing decrease overall.

But other agencies, such as USAID and the Education Department, saw even deeper cuts to their workforces, despite being smaller agencies by volume.

Governmentwide, the loss of more than 300,000 federal employees has shown up in a multitude of ways. At the IRS, for instance, an agency watchdog warned there will likely be issues with the 2026 tax filing season, as a direct result of the 25% cut to the IRS workforce. And at USDA, the staffing reductions are affecting the work of some of the department’s underlying agencies.

The Partnership for Public Service said the cuts are harming communities as well. An analysis of more than 530 stories on the federal government throughout 2025 shows the impacts of the federal workforce reductions across the country.

“Notably, more than 45% of these stories involve harms to science-related sectors, including agricultural research, healthcare and public land management,” the Partnership said. “Together, they show the direct, tangible consequences these changes are having on individuals, organizations and communities.”

Over the course of 2025, the impacts also continued to spread. In a survey the Partnership conducted in September, 46% of respondents said they or someone they know had been impacted by the government cuts. That’s up from 29% of respondents who said the same in March.

Still, there are many who view the Trump administration’s changes positively. About 80% of those who are supportive of the federal workforce overhauls said they believe the changes will make their communities and lives better, the Partnership’s September survey found. But even among those who were supportive of the changes, 41% still expressed concerns about a loss of experience and knowledge in the federal workforce in the short term.

The changes are impacting many who have stayed in their jobs as well. Federal employees are experiencing disruptions in the workplace at a rate far higher than the national average, according to a recent Gallup survey.

Close to one-third — about 29% — of federal employees say their workplace has been disrupted “to a very large extent.” That’s nearly triple the 10% of U.S. employees who say the same, Gallup found. Across the federal workforce, it’s leading to increases in stress and loneliness, as well as a decline in employee engagement.

Robert Shea, a federal workforce policy expert and former OMB official from the George W. Bush administration, said the workforce changes have had a “chilling effect” on leaders across the career civil service — something he believes will continue into 2026 and beyond.

“Many career officials are now more cautious about how, when and whether they offer professional advice,” Shea told Federal News Network. “That’s particularly when that advice could be perceived as resistance rather than implementation.”

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