# USPS Gave Themselves 10 Years to Do an 18-Month Job **Author:** Eric Lobdell **Date:** 2026-05-14 **Description:** The Postal Service's 10-year turnaround plan is losing $9 billion a year with no accountability. Here's what private-sector urgency looks like by comparison. **URL:** https://thrive3pl.com/blog/usps-ten-year-plan-eighteen-month-job --- > **TL;DR:** The US Postal Service launched a 10-year turnaround plan in 2021 and has since lost over $25 billion. No private company would survive that timeline with those numbers. When you compare how Elon Musk restructured Twitter in weeks — cutting 80% of the workforce while keeping the service running — the contrast isn't political. It's operational. The Postal Service doesn't have a strategy problem. It has an accountability problem. And shippers are already voting with their volume. In March 2021, the United States Postal Service announced "Delivering for America" — a 10-year strategic plan to achieve financial sustainability. Ten years. I've been running a 3PL for long enough to know what a turnaround looks like. You identify the problem, you build a plan, you execute. If you're bleeding money, you move fast. You don't give yourself a decade. You give yourself a quarter — maybe two — and then you either fix it or you don't survive. USPS gave themselves until 2031. And the numbers since then tell you exactly how that's going. ## The Scorecard So Far Here's what's happened since the plan launched: - **FY 2023:** $6.5 billion net loss - **FY 2024:** $9.5 billion net loss - **FY 2025:** $9.0 billion net loss That's $25 billion in losses across three fiscal years — all occurring *during* the turnaround. We're now five years into a 10-year plan, and the annual deficit is larger than it was when the plan started. Zoom out further and the picture gets worse. From FY 2007 through FY 2024, USPS has accumulated approximately $109 billion in net losses. They hit their $15 billion borrowing limit in 2012. They hit it again in 2024. This is an organization with 640,000 employees that hasn't been financially self-sustaining in nearly two decades. And the response was a 10-year plan. ## What $40 Billion Buys You To be fair, the plan isn't nothing. USPS committed $40 billion in infrastructure investment over the decade. They've opened 96 new sorting and delivery centers since 2022, with plans for 300 more. They've cut $1.8 billion in annual transportation costs by eliminating redundant networks. They've reduced 45 million workhours — about $2.3 billion annually — by improving plant productivity. Those are real operational improvements. I don't dismiss them. They've also increased revenue by $3.5 billion annually and project $36 billion in total savings over the life of the plan. And they're still losing $9 billion a year. Spending $40 billion, saving $36 billion, losing $9 billion annually. The math isn't mathing. The individual initiatives aren't the problem. The timeline is. When you've got until 2031, nobody has to move fast. So nobody does. ## The Private Sector Comparison This comparison has nothing to do with politics. It's about tempo. On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk closed his acquisition of Twitter. The company had roughly 7,500 employees. It was losing money. The product had stagnated. Here's what happened: - **Day 1:** Musk fired the CEO, CFO, and head of legal. - **Day 8:** He laid off approximately 3,700 employees — half the company. - **Day 21:** He issued an ultimatum: commit to "extremely hardcore" work, or leave. Hundreds more walked. - **Within weeks:** The company went from 7,500 employees to roughly 1,500. An 80% reduction. The platform kept running. Not perfectly. There were bumps. But the lights stayed on, the service stayed up, and the company started moving toward profitability. You can have opinions about how Musk runs things. That's fine. But what you can't argue with is the tempo. He walked into a broken company and restructured it in weeks. Not months. Not years. Certainly not a decade. And that restructured entity — now merged with xAI at a combined $1.25 trillion valuation as part of SpaceX — is on track for what could be the largest IPO in history, targeting north of $1.75 trillion. That's the difference between "we have a plan" and "we fixed the problem." ## Why the Timeline Matters to Shippers If you ship products in the United States, USPS is probably part of your carrier mix. The question is whether an organization on a 10-year improvement plan is going to be a reliable partner for your business over the next three to five years. As we covered in [the first part of this series](/blog/parcel-pricing-broken-on-purpose), the legacy carriers — UPS and FedEx included — have their own problems with pricing opacity and surcharge complexity. But at least UPS and FedEx are publicly traded companies with boards, shareholders, and quarterly earnings calls that create some form of accountability. Their stock price moves when they underperform. USPS has none of that. No shareholders. No board that can fire the Postmaster General for missing targets. No competitive pressure that forces urgency. When you lose $9 billion and your response is to point at a 10-year plan and say you're on track, something is structurally broken beyond what any strategic plan can fix. ## The Market Is Already Responding The market isn't waiting for USPS to figure it out. In 2025, [Amazon delivered 6.7 billion packages](/blog/amazon-overtakes-usps-new-era-us-delivery), overtaking USPS's 6.6 billion to become the largest parcel carrier in the United States by volume. That's a sentence worth reading twice. The Postal Service — the organization with 640,000 employees, a government mandate, and 250 years of institutional history — got passed by a company that started delivering its own packages less than a decade ago. Before the pandemic, the Big Three — UPS, FedEx, and USPS — handled 85% of domestic parcel volume. By 2025, that number dropped to 61% of 23.9 billion annual deliveries, according to ShipMatrix data. The remaining 39% is going to Amazon, regional carriers, and delivery startups that are building the networks the incumbents should've built years ago. That shift isn't reversing. And USPS's plan doesn't account for how fast the ground is moving underneath them. ## What a Real Turnaround Looks Like I've seen turnarounds in this industry. Smaller scale, sure. But the principles are the same. When a 3PL is losing money, you don't write a 10-year plan. You sit down this week, figure out the three or four things that are bleeding cash, and you fix them. Renegotiate a lease. Cut a service line that doesn't generate margin. Restructure the labor model. You do it fast because you don't have the luxury of time. The businesses we work with at Thrive understand this. When [fulfillment costs](/blog/how-much-does-a-3pl-cost) don't make sense, they make a change. They don't publish a decade-long strategy document and then keep doing the same thing. They move. USPS has good people. Many of the individual projects are sound. But an organization that gives itself 10 years to stop losing money is telling you something about how fast it's willing to move. And the market isn't waiting. I don't think it is. ## What This Means for Your Business If you're an e-commerce brand or a company shipping products, here's what I'd think about: Diversify your carrier mix. Don't build your logistics around an organization that's losing $9 billion a year on a plan to maybe break even by 2031. Work with a partner that actively manages across [multiple carriers](/blog/fedex-ups-ecommerce-food-chain) and can shift volume when performance or pricing changes. Watch the service metrics, not the press releases. USPS claims they're closing in on 95% on-time delivery. Maybe. But service reliability during a turnaround is inconsistent by definition. Track your actual delivery performance. And plan for the world that's already forming. The Big Three's market share dropped from 85% to 61% in five years. The [carriers gaining share](/blog/the-last-mile-reckoning) are built around technology, speed, and transparent pricing. Your logistics strategy should account for that. The Postal Service had a choice in 2021. Move fast, make hard decisions, take the hit now. Instead, they wrote a 10-year plan and hoped the world would wait. It didn't. --- *Published by Thrive 3PL — Houston-based fulfillment for e-commerce brands. Learn more at [thrive3pl.com](https://thrive3pl.com).*