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.

The post Postal regulator limits USPS to once-a-year price hikes for mail through 2030 first appeared on Federal News Network.

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.

The post Lawmakers call for more federal workforce details in latest spending ‘minibus’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Office of Personnel Management is addressing what have become growing concerns in Congress over the significant delays in federal retirement processing this year.

In a letter sent Tuesday to a group of House Democrats, OPM Director Scott Kupor touted the benefits of the new online retirement application (ORA) in helping to streamline processing, while at the same time arguing that outdated systems — not staffing levels — are to blame for the current challenges HR employees are facing.

“The main issues with federal HR, we have found, are not low staffing levels, but inefficient and outdated technology and antiquated, cumbersome regulations and processes,” Kupor wrote in the Dec. 30 letter, obtained by Federal News Network. “OPM under the Trump administration has done in a matter of months what the government failed to do for multiple generations: modernize the paper-based federal retirement system.”

Kupor’s comments are a response to a Dec. 22 letter from Democrats on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which raised concerns about the significant delays retiring federal employees are currently experiencing. Those delays are largely due to a surge of retirement applications from employees who opted into the deferred resignation program (DRP) earlier this year.

Now two months after thousands of federal employees separated from government on Sept. 30, some retirees have told Federal News Network they are still awaiting any retirement-related payments. Some also expressed frustrations about limited information from their agencies on the status of their applications.

In light of the challenges, a group of Democratic lawmakers last week pressed OPM for more details on retirement processing, and how OPM is helping other agencies manage the high volumes of applications. The Democrats’ letter criticized the DRP-inflicted surge of retirements as a “foreseeable and avoidable administrative failure.”

Kupor, in response, pushed back against the lawmakers’ criticisms that the DRP was not a truly voluntary program for federal employees. He also said OPM is “rapidly fixing” the manual, paper-based processes involved in federal retirement — namely through the launch of the ORA earlier this year. Over the last few months, Kupor said ORA helped expedite the retirement process at agencies where applications had been stalled.

“For example, just recently we were able to fast track 1,500 ORA applications that had been backlogged in the HR department of an executive branch agency to bypass the HR organization and transmit the applications electronically to payroll and then to OPM,” Kupor wrote. “These applications had been sitting for months — and were likely to be sitting for months longer; ORA enabled us to address this challenge.”

This year, OPM has also managed to improve its ability to provide interim annuities to more retirees immediately after their applications reach OPM, according to Kupor.

“This is a massive benefit to our retirees that we designed specifically to address the significant volume of applications we anticipated receiving in the wake of DRP,” Kupor wrote.

Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.), who led the Democrats’ letter to OPM last week, said he appreciated Kupor’s response to their concerns, but added that “the facts remain and are stubborn.”

“First, the Trump administration fired or drove out hundreds of thousands of qualified civil servants. Now they’re facing a historic backlog of retirement applications managed by understaffed HR departments in the midst of a rocky rollout of a new IT system,” Walkinshaw said in a statement to Federal News Network. “I very much hope that Mr. Kupor can succeed in ensuring timely processing of federal retirement applications. But right now, he is failing.”

Due to the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce, HR staffing decreased by about 5%, with agencies losing a cumulative total of about 2,600 employees, according to fiscal 2025 data. That does not include HR employees who took the DRP offer themselves and separated after September.

Despite the reductions, Kupor said federal HR is “hardly understaffed,” and that the main challenge is not with workforce size, but rather with outdated systems. With fully digital retirement applications in the ORA, he said processing times become much faster.

“As of today, ORA applications are being completed in approximately 40 days, compared with 90 days for paper-based applications,” Kupor wrote. “I am fully confident that this 40-day time period will continue to be reduced as we are able to get the payroll providers fully integrated into the new system.”

Kupor said OPM has also been meeting regularly with agency HR offices, payroll providers and the CHCO Council to “provide information about digitalization of the retirement process and offer support on an ongoing basis.”

“Any delays that annuitants are experiencing from HR-related activities should be directed toward these individual agencies,” he added.

Many retiring federal employees have told Federal News Network their applications are stuck in the earlier steps of the retirement process, with progress lagging in their agency HR offices and payroll providers. Some employees who retired in September said their applications have not yet made it to the later part of the process at OPM, where annuity finalization occurs.

Federal retirement experts have also said more issues appear to be occurring in individual agency HR offices, rather than at OPM — but that both entities are seeing delays. At the IRS, for instance, several retirees told Federal News Network they are still awaiting payments, or any information on the status of their retirement applications, and that phone calls to the HR office often go unanswered.

“It’s all dead ends,” one retiring IRS employee, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation, told Federal News Network. “As a government employee, and after all the service that I gave, this is how we’re getting treated. People are sitting here with nothing because of the decisions they made. We can’t afford it.”

Still, Kupor pointed again to significant progress with the rollout of ORA earlier this year. The government’s major payroll providers — the National Finance Center (NFC), Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) and Interior Business Center (IBC) — have been onboarded to the new platform. Additionally, all CFO Act agencies, aside from the State Department, are currently using ORA, according to Kupor.

Smaller payroll providers including those at the General Services Administration and Postal Service are in an “interim adoption status,” Kupor said. OPM expects those providers to be fully onboarded to ORA in early 2026.

The largest remaining challenge with retirement processing delays, according to Kupor, is payroll providers who have not managed to fully automate their processes.

“We will be prevented from full automation until they free up the required resources to integrate with ORA,” Kupor wrote. “This integration will enable us to receive employee payroll information electronically, which will vastly accelerate processing times.”

The post OPM touts digitization efforts, blames outdated tech for retirement delays first appeared on Federal News Network.

A few thoughts on the year about to close.

Driving on the Donald J. Trump George Washington Memorial Parkway the other day, I was impressed by the progress in the reconstruction of this vital artery. The contractors and the Trump National Park Service planned well, and the road has remained reasonably passable over the past couple of years. Now the trip to the Donald J. Trump John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has gotten easier. Ditto for trips to the Donald J. Trump Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

I’ve always liked where the Parkway runs close to the Trump Potomac River. You can see across to Trump Washington Monument and the Trump Tidal Basin. But, stately as the nation’s capital appears, change and lots of chaos have marked the calendar year about to end.

But seriously, looking at the D.C. skyline, one wonders about the real state of the republic.

If you search “trump timeline,” you’ll find timelines from many interest groups, most of whom feel aggrieved by the second Trump administration. The release of the Epstein files, “undermining elections,” deportation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity, reversing energy policies, legal tangling with Harvard University, military activity against Venezuela — Trump activities make for compelling observation. A lot of this is press-induced, and the Trump style eggs it on. Yet norms have stretched.

I would add that only some of what Trump has done is completely original. But he does things, let’s say, in highly original ways. The result is we have two branches of government in contention with one another. The third branch, and the one detailed first in the Constitution, has rendered itself into an observant chorus with no say over the score.

For federal employees, 2025 will rank as the oddest year many have ever endured. It started with the DOGE swarms, slashing their way to and fro. Then came the deferred resignation program and layoffs. Mass return to the office. Cancellation of collective bargaining agreements at several agencies. Difficulties in settling retirement benefits.

So much news, it almost made me regret retiring. The workforce reductions and changes of conditions may all fall within an administration’s discretionary powers. But rough treatment of persons falls outside of decency. Let’s hope it stops in 2026. I remember a time when a new president of a company I worked for brought in a gaggle of MBAs to do cost cutting. The attitudes felt worse than the cuts, and the company eventually disappeared anyhow.

One thing 2025 has taught me: Keep things in perspective. The worst job situations I remember? I can chuckle about them now. That’s what time does. I once secretly flew to New Jersey and back for a job interview — all in a really extended lunch hour. To be honest, the new job seemed dull, and I never got the offer. Luckily, the situation I was seeking to leave changed overnight for the better, the way better. While you are going through cavalier and high-handed treatment, it’s no fun.

And what about the nation you serve? The absence of any serious debate about what the Government Accountability Office politely calls fiscal unsustainability strikes me as the worst quality in Congress and executive branch policy makers.

It’s not as if no one knows that next year alone the federal deficit will add $2 trillion to the $30 trillion national debt. That Social Security outlays increasingly surpass revenues for as far as the eye can see. That healthcare programs exceed the $3 trillion mark. That interest payments on public debt have passed the $1 trillion mark. The absolute numbers are big, and they are worsening when expressed as a percentage of the nation’s economic output.

So my wish for the nation in the year ahead is fact-facing and rationality, especially on the part of so-called lawmakers.

Beyond thinking of any possible policy and programmatic fixes, the government must resolve to become a better steward of the money it does print and spend.

I’m thinking of Minnesota. The federal prosecutor on the Minnesota Medicare fraud scheme described it as “staggering industrial-scale fraud.” As Trump would say, and McDonald’s used to say, billions and billions. The theft — and it is simple, naked theft — is both heartbreaking and maddening. At an estimated $9 billion, it makes the worst armed robbery seem like child’s play. One almost thinks the perpetrators deserve hanging, such is the extent and callous shrewdness of the crimes. But it also evidences a near total breakdown in program planning, execution and oversight — mainly at the state level, but there’s federal responsibility too. Did anyone notice or care that this was going on?

The staff cuts and turmoil have affected constituent service. People I speak to seem amusedly resigned to how places like the IRS, Social Security and the Postal Service operate. Line employees mostly want to serve effectively, but what kind of backing do they get?

The week before Christmas, I stopped in at my local Postal Service office. It’s busy, a beehive of a facility. I recently became president of a very small non-profit foundation, and we needed to move the P.O. box from Virginia to Maryland so I could easily get the incoming donation checks.

On a Thursday morning, only one employee manned the four-bay counter. Efficiently as she worked, still the line kept stretching to nine, then a dozen, people deep. For a reason I only dimly comprehended, I couldn’t complete the transfer because of a mismatch in phone numbers. I straightened it out a couple of days later, when I had the right information. Two clerks were then on duty, and they kept the lines short.

The post My wish for 2026: Rationality in the Trump era first appeared on Federal News Network.

A cyberattack knocked France’s national postal service offline, blocking and delaying package deliveries and online payments.

The post Cyberattack Disrupts France’s Postal Service and Banking During Christmas Rush appeared first on SecurityWeek.