Postmaster General Makes $292,000 as Post Office Falls Apart

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 26, 9:39AM EST

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Postmaster General Makes $292,000 as Post Office Falls Apart — © RiverNorthPhotography / iStock Unreleased via Getty Images

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.

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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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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.