Audit Reports

Our Perspective

In March 2021, the Postal Service released a 10-year strategic plan to address continuing annual financial losses, unmet service performance goals, and diminishing market relevancy as consumer behaviors have changed. On September 30, 2024, the Postal Service released Delivering for America (DFA) 2.0: Fulfilling the Promise, to revisit and re-examine the factors contributing to the development of the plan and detail the evolution of its strategies, focusing on service excellence and financial stability.

The Postal Service is statutorily required to fulfill its Universal Service mission by delivering mail and packages through an integrated network that, importantly, is financially self-sustaining. Characteristics of this organization would include best-in-class mail and package processing and a fully optimized surface and air transportation network. In support of this vision, as of November 30, 2024, the Postal Service has significantly or partially completed 11 Regional Processing and Distribution Centers (RPDC), with two more upcoming in fiscal year (FY) 2025; 14 local processing centers (LPC); and 83 sorting and delivery centers (S&DC) with another 41 planned to be opened by the end of FY 2025.

We, the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General (OIG), have provided essential oversight of the Postal Service for nearly 30 years, and since the release of the DFA plan, we have worked to integrate an independent and objective review of the plan into our work. This is the second in a series of reports, which will be issued every six months, that discusses our oversight work of the DFA plan and the Postal Service’s progress toward meeting the essential goal of being a high performing organization through service excellence and financial stability.

This six-month update, in particular, highlights the successes and challenges the Postal Service experienced with a key strategy of the DFA, which is to fully optimize its surface and air transportation network.