On July 12, the price of a Forever stamp will jump from 78 cents to 82 cents. Domestic postcards will rise from 61 cents to 65 cents, and other mailing services will cost more too. The Postal Regulatory Commission has already approved the increase requested under Postmaster General David Steiner.
A stamp cost 55 cents when DeJoy took office in 2020. After 6 years of repeated increases, it will now cost 82 cents, an increase of nearly 50%. The Postal Service cannot price-hike and service-cut its way to stability. Every new increase makes sending mail less affordable, pushes customers away, and weakens the universal network USPS needs to preserve. Service delays make that damage even worse.
Steiner should have learned from DeJoy’s mistakes. Instead, he told Congress that raising the stamp price to 90 or 95 cents could largely cover USPS’s controllable losses. That would force families, seniors, nonprofits, local newspapers, and small businesses to carry the burden of another failed postal strategy.
Tell Postmaster General Steiner to stop raising prices, reverse DeJoy’s austerity approach, and focus on building new sources of revenue by expanding the products and public services available through the USPS, like postal banking.
Steiner must end DeJoy’s failed strategy of higher prices, slower mail, and weaker service. He should instead expand his vision to generate new revenue that strengthens the Postal Service and gives people access to needed public services — more reasons to visit and support their local post offices.
Post offices could sell bus and subway passes, hunting and fishing licenses, provide identity and benefits verification, offer Wi-Fi and office services, support senior check-in programs, and become one-stop public-service centers in communities that have lost other local institutions.
Steiner should exercise the authority to expand community services already given to USPS under a 2022 reform law and champion postal banking pilots to expand it nationwide. Affordable check cashing, bill payment, savings accounts, low-fee ATMs, and other basic financial services could bring revenue into USPS while serving rural communities and lower-income neighborhoods that have been abandoned by Wall Street banks leaving only the predatory check cashers in their wake.
These are the kinds of public service alternatives that the Save the Post Office Coalition has long demanded instead of endless price hikes, service slowdowns, and consolidations. The USPS needs leadership committed to expanding public service, not a corporate austerity plan that charges customers more for less.
Send your message demanding that Postmaster General Steiner stop the price hikes, improve mail service, and expand community services like postal banking, government services, transit-pass sales, and other products that can generate new revenue while serving the public.
Let’s keep fighting to expand and protect our public Postal Service.
- Annie and the Save the Post Office Coalition Team.
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