A Brookings researcher told a House subcommittee last week that the U.S. Postal Service’s financial condition cannot be fixed by cutting costs alone — and that Congress, not postal management, is the only actor that can resolve it.

Congress created the universal service obligation — the requirement to deliver to all 170 million U.S. addresses at uniform, affordable rates, six days a week — but has never directly funded it. Instead, it relied on the letter-mail monopoly to pay for it. That monopoly revenue has collapsed, and no replacement financing mechanism exists.

The core finding is one Congress has avoided acting on for decades: the Postal Service’s universal service obligation is a public good that the market cannot sustain on its own, and the financing model Congress created to pay for it is gone. Patel’s statement frames the choice starkly — either fund the mandate explicitly, or let a liquidity crisis narrow the network by default, at the expense of the communities that depend on it most.

Congress Must Fund USPS Universal Service | Legis1 | Legis1