Fund the postal service to protect American voters

There is an institution older than the United States itself that is now fighting for its survival, and too many people in power are watching it happen without lifting a finger.

The United States Postal Service was founded in 1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin was the first postmaster general. It has survived wars, depressions, and technological upheavals. It has never missed a day of service. Today, it is being quietly bled out, and the silence from Congress is its own kind of crisis.

Postmaster General David Steiner said before a House subcommittee that the agency is at a “critical juncture” and will run out of cash in less than a year unless Congress allows it to borrow more money. 

This is not hypothetical. USPS suspended employer pension contributions in April 2026, pausing roughly $200 million every two weeks to free $2.5 billion in cash just to keep the lights on.

This is the slow unraveling of an institution that helped build the American middle class.

The Postal Service was never just a place to buy stamps. It was infrastructure. It was connectivity before broadband. It built a path into the middle class for generations of Black Americans who could not access employment in the private sector. Postal work was union work, stable work, dignified work — one of the first federal employers to hire Black men and women at a meaningful scale. In city after city, the post office was not just a government building; it was a community anchor.

USPS continues to operate its universal delivery network, visiting 168 million addresses six days a week. It remains the largest mail service in the world, delivering nearly 40% of mail sent globally. And it does all of this while operating under congressional mandates that private competitors never face, including the requirement to serve every address in America at a uniform price, regardless of how remote or expensive that delivery is.

The financial crisis did not appear overnight. USPS has lost money almost every fiscal year since 2007, with net losses totaling approximately $109 billion from fiscal years 2007 through 2024. Much of that loss traces back to a 2006 law that forced the agency to pre-fund 75 years of retiree health benefits in just 10 years.

Privatizing USPS could mean the end of guaranteed mail service to every American address, leaving many rural customers without the deliveries they depend on. For communities of color, the elderly, people with disabilities and low-income families who depend on the Postal Service for medications, government benefits and financial correspondence, this is not an inconvenience. It is a rupture in the basic terms of citizenship.

We are having this discussion in an election year, with a Supreme Court case on the docket that could make the reliability of mail delivery a matter of life or death for American democracy.

The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in Watson v. Republican National Committee months before the November midterm elections. The case centers on the Republican Party’s challenge to Mississippi’s law allowing mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrive within five business days afterward. Twenty-nine states, plus Washington, D.C., count at least some timely cast ballots if received within a brief window after Election Day.

The National Urban League filed an amicus brief defending those grace periods. Black, Hispanic and Native American voters encounter the greatest barriers to in-person voting due to greater polling relocation and removal. Mail voting is not a convenience for these communities. It is often their most reliable path to the ballot. 

A weakened Postal Service cannot guarantee that a ballot mailed on Election Day will arrive within the shrinking window the courts may allow. The math is simple, and the intent is legible. 

Congress must act. Not eventually. Now.

Increase USPS’s borrowing authority. Stabilize its finances. Restore the workforce that has been cut. Protect the institution that has served this country since before it was a country.

In November, the people will have something to say about who chose to stand by while the mail stopped running.

Marc Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League.

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