The U.S. Postal Service just announced a projected loss of $1.95 billion for the second quarter of 2026 — its fifth quarterly loss in a row after 19 consecutive years in the red. Postmaster General David Steiner has warned that USPS could run out of cash by early 2027 without help from Congress. But no matter what lawmakers decide to do, any legislation should also enforce accountability, accessibility and affordability requirements to keep USPS from squandering yet another effort by Congress to financially stabilize the agency.

The instinct in Washington will be all too familiar: Raise the USPS borrowing authority, tolerate yet another round of steep price increases and call it a rescue. While it’s clear that Congress must take action soon to keep USPS from going broke, now is not the time for another blank check. That’s because USPS doesn’t have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem. Without holding USPS accountable, any financial relief from Congress will just be a band-aid on a gaping wound, setting the stage for a massive taxpayer bailout.

When former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy unveiled the 10-year Delivering for America plan in 2021, he projected USPS would break even by fiscal year 2023 thanks to aggressive, frequent rate increases, operational cost cuts and a pivot to packages over mail. Yet instead of breaking even, USPS has lost more than $30 billion since the Delivering for America plan was launched — even after the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 eliminated $120 billion in liabilities. And although the stated intent of the reform law was to prevent the need for large rate increases, DeJoy plowed ahead with frequent stamp hikes, raising prices seven times in five years at rates above inflation — a move that the Postal Regulatory Commission has said reduced mail volume and revenue.

DeJoy’s Delivering for America plan has only produced higher prices for consumers and has done scarcely nothing to control spending. And despite the Delivering for America plan’s failures, the USPS Board of Governors and Postmaster General Steiner are continuing down the same path, even though the Postal Service is hemorrhaging cash and customers.

Cuts should, and could, be made without compromising universal service and affordability. USPS operating costs increased by nearly 10 percent between 2021 and 2025. Lower-cost, part-time positions declined, but full-time staffing increased by 37,783 from 2020 to 2024, and only fell by about 2,000 since then. Meanwhile, USPS total factor and labor productivity has fallen to the lowest levels in the modern agency’s history, as the one-to-three-day service standard for First Class mail increased to five days.