The Postal Service is failing to meet its break-even goals under a 10-year reform plan. But House Republicans are drafting their own efficiency proposals for the agency.

GOP members of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee oppose the USPS’s plans to purchase mostly electric vehicles in the coming years, and some are calling on the incoming Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to approve additional avenues for the agency Find savings costs.

Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) praised Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for putting forward the 10-year “Delivering for America” ​​plan but said the agency was “bleeding red ink.”

“I appreciate the fact that you have a plan and are trying to implement that plan. This is what we want with DOGE. This is what the American people want with DOGE,” Comer said.

USPS posted a net loss of $9.5 billion in fiscal 2024 as it pursues cost-cutting initiatives that faced bipartisan opposition from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last week.

“This year’s loss was almost $10 billion. Next year’s loss is expected to be $6.5 billion. And with every loss comes an explanation of how much it was out of your control,” Comer told DeJoy.

Comer recommended, among other things, that USPS privatize its mail processing operations. Nearly 50,000 USPS employees work in mail processing facilities nationwide and are represented by the National Postal Mail Handlers Union.

“There are private companies that are interested, and that’s where I think most of the problems lie,” Comer said.

However, Comer declined to support a plan to privatize the entire agency. The Trump administration considered privatizing USPS as part of a 2018 government restructuring plan.

“When we talk about efficiency, especially members on this side of the aisle, we think about privatization, and people will say, ‘We should privatize the post office.’ The problem is that no one wants to deliver mail to every home in America six days a week and run all of these retail postal facilities. “There is no private company in the world that wants this,” Comer said.

Comer also questioned why USPS converted 190,000 entry-level workers into career positions with better pay and benefits under DeJoy’s tenure. Comer said the agency’s personnel and retirement costs are “tremendous burdens.”

“There are things that Mr. DeJoy is trying to do internally that are better left to the private sector,” Comer said. “This won’t work if we don’t look for ways to do more with fewer people. I think the theme of this new administration will be how to make government more efficient.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), chairwoman of a new DOGE subcommittee in the next session of Congress, wrote on

“This is a prime example of what DOGE means and my Delivering on Government Efficiency Committee will work to fix the problem,” Greene wrote.

USPS is generally self-funded but received $10 billion in emergency funding in 2020 to offset losses at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lawmakers also gave the USPS more than $3 billion as part of the Inflation Reduction Act to buy more electric vehicles and chargers than it could afford on its own.

Instead of privatizing operations, USPS under DeJoy has begun outsourcing some of the trucking and logistics work previously outsourced to private contractors.

However, DeJoy told Comer he was open to feedback from the new Congress and the Trump administration.

“I will work with you to understand what you expect from us. And I’m going to work very hard to either recognize that we can do it or say it’s just not going to work for us,” DeJoy said.

USPS projected under DeJoy’s 10-year reform plan that it would break even by fiscal 2023 or 2024, reversing a string of annual net losses that stretched back to the 2008 recession.

But DeJoy said USPS is falling short of those goals because of rising inflation and the fact that the agency pays more than its share into a federal pension fund that some postal service retirees are eligible for.

USPS has more retirees than current employees. DeJoy told lawmakers that USPS will have about 600,000 employees and about 720,000 retirees next year.

“That’s a problem,” he said.

In a “Delivering for America 2.0” plan released in October, USPS called on Congress to increase its current $15 billion borrowing limit from the Treasury Department. It also ordered the Office of Personnel Management to reassess its payments to the Civil Service Retirement System, the retirement system for federal employees who began public service before 1987.

However, DeJoy said the new plan does not include an updated break-even target because it requires some action from Congress and the White House.

“That’s why we haven’t given a forecast as to when break-even will be reached because we can’t do that ourselves,” he said.

“I have a date, a time and a forecast, but when I say that, that becomes the whole discussion – what we didn’t achieve, not what we did achieve. So I’ve become a little wiser since I’ve been here in Washington for four years now,” DeJoy added.

Government Operations Subcommittee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas), one of the three co-chairs of the DOGE Caucus in Congress, called on DeJoy to name a contact at the USPS to work with the new caucus.

The DOGE Caucus, which includes both the House and Senate, will support the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory council outside the federal government led by billionaire businessmen Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

“I have found in the past that the Post Office does not always make saving money its highest priority,” Sessions told DeJoy. “I have had several conversations in which we have pointed out possible savings and I am not sure we have received a response. They will prepare for these things to become public.”

Sessions told Federal News Network that the DOGE Caucus intends to take a closer look at USPS operations and find ways to make the agency more efficient.

“Government efficiency is important. Workforce and personnel issues are important, and money is important,” Sessions said. “I told (DeJoy) that essentially what I would like to see him create is a point of contact where we can take these ideas, rather than a more bureaucratic response system that doesn’t give us answers today.”

Sessions said lawmakers who support DOGE are skeptical of the Postal Service’s plans for a next-generation, predominantly electric delivery vehicle fleet, among other things.

“If you just look at people’s fleets, cars specifically, they are assumed to be significantly more expensive. Not only to keep up, but the life cycle is different,” Sessions said.

Republican committee members spent much of the three-hour hearing examining the agency’s plans for electric vehicles.

According to Reuters, President-elect Donald Trump is considering terminating the Postal Service’s electric vehicle contracts as part of an upcoming executive order.

“I want him to be able to respond to a business model and give us answers. He doesn’t struggle with this question. He probably had five questions about electric vehicles, but the answers aren’t readily available, and they have to be, because in a new world where we’re getting into DOGE as one of his co-chairs, I’m going to ask them those questions and expect them an answer,” Sessions said.

DeJoy said he wouldn’t have invested in electric vehicles “as aggressively and deliberately as we did” if USPS hadn’t received $3 billion in funding from Congress.

Before Congress passed the bill, DeJoy said USPS would make 10% of its next-generation delivery vehicle fleet electric vehicles. The Biden administration criticized those plans, and USPS faced multiple federal lawsuits over plans to purchase a predominantly gasoline-powered fleet.

“I was in the crossfire of a whole host of issues and didn’t agree to add electric vehicles to our fleet until we had the appropriate cost benefits for the company,” DeJoy said.

USPS is spending about $10 billion of its own funds on a new fleet of more than 100,000 customized and commercial vehicles. About 66,000 of these will be electric vehicles.

“I feel good about where we are,” DeJoy said. “We couldn’t put electric vehicles everywhere and we couldn’t deploy electric vehicles overnight. But once it’s installed and you factor in the capital costs that we have, it’s a pretty decent thing. It’s a beautiful vehicle.”

USPS expects its next-generation customized delivery vehicles to operate for approximately 20 to 25 years. DeJoy said some of the agency’s electric vehicles can run for about three days on a single charge, and he is looking at ways to “expand the ratio between the vehicles and the chargers.”

DeJoy said USPS will see lower maintenance costs and save on fuel costs with electric vehicles. But he said it remains unclear what return on investment USPS will realize over the lifecycle of its electric vehicles.

“Let’s say a battery lasts 10 years. For us, it’s a cost-benefit ratio over the 10 years on maintenance, fuel, etc. “If you buy a new battery using today’s battery costs, that could result in us getting a higher return on investment,” he said .

Most USPS delivery routes are approximately 15-20 miles.

Regardless of what’s under the hood of these new vehicles, DeJoy says USPS desperately needs a new fleet. Many of the iconic Grumman Long Life Vehicles that USPS retires are 30 years old and lack modern features such as airbags, air conditioning and backup cameras.

“Congress gave us $3 billion, and we are using it wisely,” DeJoy said. “I wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t think it was financially feasible and good for the ministry. We needed vehicles. That’s how we’ve been able to move forward and I think we’ve developed a good strategy in that regard.”

But Republican lawmakers remain cautious about USPS moving forward with its electric fleet.

“I worry about the EV money sitting around and potentially being reclaimed,” Comer said. “I think there are many areas where there will be significant reforms in the next four years.”

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