PUSHING THE ENVELOPE BLOG

We want to wish all workers a very happy Labor Day, but especially the employees of the Postal Service! The Postal Service is a huge organization with a workforce of more than 635,000 employees as of the end of last year. The vast majority of postal employees — 98 percent — work in field positions around the country.

Any organization with a computer network is concerned about cybersecurity, and the U.S. Postal Service has one of the world’s largest IT networks. It connects 1.1 million devices and includes 92.5 petabytes of storage. (A petabyte is a million gigabytes.) As cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructure continue to increase in frequency and sophistication, keeping networks and data safe from...

Inflation has reached record levels this year, and just about everything from the effects of the pandemic to the war in Ukraine have been cited as contributing factors. For a lot of people, the impacts of inflation are usually quick and direct — the price of that gallon of gas you bought this week compared to last week — but it’s a more complex story when it comes to the U.S. Postal Service. As we...

The U.S. Postal Service has approximately 300 mail processing facilities. Some of these facilities perform better than others, some perform worse, and some struggle to reach even average performance. Our auditors examined 10 historically low performing facilities to find out why. When selecting the 10 facilities, the audit team looked for facilities that handled at least 1 billion mail pieces in...

Did you know the U.S. Postal Service has a legally mandated program that allows blind or other physically handicapped people to send and receive certain types of mail at no charge? Established more than a century ago — well before the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 — the program is known as Free Matter for the Blind. What qualifies as Free Matter? Large-type (14-point or larger) documents...