The U.S. Postal Service (USPS), shamed for its role in the slow delivery of ballots for the 2020 election and for staggering losses, paid its postmaster general $291,650 in 2019. In exchange, the public got one of the worst-run agencies of the government, one that cannot operate with its current strategy at all.

The compensation, from public records, covers Megan J. Brennan, who no longer holds the job. Other documents, not confirmed, show that replacement Louis DeJoy made $303,460.
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In the most recent fiscal year, USPS had revenue of $129.2 billion, down 9.4% from the previous year. It lost $9.2 billion, an increase in red ink of 4.1%. Current net liabilities total $117 billion. This figure stands as USPS revenue likely continues to fall and losses continue to mount.

At the core of the USPS’s comments about its year, the postmaster general wrote:

To best serve the public, we must strengthen our role as part of the nation’s economic infrastructure, enabling e-commerce and the delivery marketplace to continue to flourish, providing a robust and efficient marketing and communications channel to support America’s businesses, and serving as a strategic partner to companies in nearly every sector of the economy.

However, its role has been taken over, to an ever-larger degree, by UPS, FedEx, Amazon, email and the electronic transfer of documents and files.

The USPS continues to be immensely overstaffed. Currently, it has 496,934 career employees and a non-career employee count of 136,174. There are 31,322 USPS-managed retail post offices in the United States. Many are in small towns and rural areas and handle very little mail at all. The USPS also supports a fleet of over 228,000 vehicles.

While USPS management says it is burdened by financial liabilities that are made up largely by retirement and pension benefits of its workers, it has not gone through any major reduction of a system that should cut employees as revenue falls. That is what any business in the private sector facing such losses would do.

The postmaster general, among the federal government’s highest-paid workers, runs a vestige of America’s infrastructure of mail and package delivery.

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