Lawmakers want Postal Service bonuses tied to delivery performance

A bipartisan bill barring U. S. Postal Service executives from receiving bonuses until on-time mail delivery levels reach 95% was approved by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last week and could be considered by the full chamber when it returns to work next month.

Before the vote, Postmaster General David Steiner urged senators to reject the bill, saying in a private letter to the committee that freezing bonuses would be counterproductive.

The entire Alabama delegation in the House in late July introduced legislation that ties the postmaster general’s compensation to the Postal Service’s mail delivery and financial performance. The No Bonuses for Bad Service Act, sponsored by Sens.

Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, and Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, would prohibit the USPS Board of Governors from approving any additional compensation for the postmaster general and his deputy for a fiscal year in which the Postal Service doesn’t meet or exceed the an on-time delivery rate of 95% for all First-class and standard mail.

The Postal Service says it has seen steady improvement in service since aligning staffing to workflow, addressing process improvements and retraining at the facility level, and taking other measures in 2025.

A renewed focus on reliability coincided with a reorganization of the regional transportation network, which required loosening of some delivery standards in rural areas and led some to complain of slower mail delivery.

Postmaster General David Steiner said Friday, during a board of governors’ meeting, his organization has increased service performance by better leveraging the network. On-time mail performance continues to slip.

The Postal Service missed its on-time target for all eight mail delivery categories, none of which hit the 95% threshold, in fiscal year 2025, according to the agency’s annual report. It delivered 72. 7% of single-piece First-class mail, scheduled for three-to-five day delivery on-time.

Marketing mail and periodicals, as well as pre-sort First-Class overnight mail had a 93% score. In fiscal year 2022, the USPS delivered 91% of First-class mail on time and delivered 93. 3% of marketing mail on time, according to a progress report on the agency’s 10-year restructuring and modernization plan.

Frustration with late deliveries has mounted along with negative cash flow. The Postal Service has lost $25 billion over the last three years. On Friday, the mail carrier reported a $2. 5 billion loss for the third quarter, down from a $3. 1 billion loss the prior year. Sen.

Hawley has been especially aggressive complaining about late mail, taking up the cause for rural citizens who say years of delays and missing mail are creating a financial burden when they don’t receive their bills or paychecks, and jeopardizing their health when prescription medicines are late.

In April, a large pile of undelivered mail was discovered in a vacant lot near St. Louis, with many postmarks indicating letters were only going across town, not cross country.

Hawley challenged Steiner at a June 24 hearing to explain why postmaster generals have received more than $2 million in bonuses over the past 10 years, as delivery and financial performance declined. Steiner, who took office a year ago, has already received a $170,000 bonus.

“Your targets for on time delivery in my state, which were not good to begin with, are just in the 90s, meaning you could miss it 10% of the time and give yourself an A grade. But start looking there in 2024, 2025. You’re hitting your on time delivery targets 76% of the time — maybe.

That means fully a quarter of the time, best case scenario, people’s mail in my state is not being delivered to them on time,” Hawley said. Steiner said those metrics are unacceptable, but countered that the postal operator is producing better service results nationwide.

Hawley has launched an investigation into the systemic delivery failures and abandoned mail in Missouri, suggesting some of the problems could be the result of criminal activity. An audit last year by the U. S. Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General found more than 2. 5 million delayed mailpieces at the St.

Louis Processing and Distribution Center — the largest delayed mail volume ever recorded since it began conducting field operations reviews in 2021.

The report blamed systemic issues affecting package scanning, inadequate reporting of delayed mail incidents, and understaffing that caused mail from commercial mailers to not be sorted to the correct route at two processing plants and seven delivery units in the St. Louis area.

Another recent audit for Kansas City found that there were nearly 100,000 delayed pieces of mail over a three-day inspection. An October analysis by Postal, a virtual mailbox and compliance service, showed more than 542,000 pieces of mail were reported lost or missing between 2022 and 2024.

More than 150,000 reports involved mail going missing “after delivery, nearly 350 incidents