The Post Office Is Going Broke Delivering Your Junk Mail
We banned spam calls, spam texts, and spam emails. So why are we subsidizing billions of pieces of spam sent through the U.S. Mail — and calling it a business model?
By Dominick Bianco | Editor-in-Chief, NexfinityNews | April 9, 2026
The United States Postal Service is in a death spiral.
It has lost more than $118 billion since 2007. It has hit its $15 billion borrowing cap. It has now suspended pension contributions to its own workers — $200 million every two weeks — just to keep the lights on. Postmaster General David Steiner stood before Congress last month and said, without equivocation, that without emergency intervention, the Postal Service could cease to exist as we know it within a year.
And yet, tomorrow morning, a mail carrier will load up a truck and drive through your neighborhood to deliver coupons you didn’t ask for, credit card offers you’ll never open, political mailers you’ll throw directly in the recycling bin, and a catalog from a furniture company you visited online one time in 2021.
Let that sink in.
We, as a society, have drawn very clear lines around unwanted communication. The CAN-SPAM Act governs commercial email. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act restricts unsolicited calls and texts. The FTC’s Do Not Call Registry exists for one reason: because Americans made it abundantly clear they did not want to be bombarded by strangers trying to sell them things. Violate those rules and you face federal penalties.
But stuff your neighbor’s mailbox with a pound of glossy advertisements they never requested? That’s not just legal — it’s a subsidized industry.
The Numbers Are Staggering
The direct mail industry sends somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 to 100 billion pieces of advertising mail every single year in the United States. That’s not a typo. Billions. The average American household receives roughly 850 pieces of unsolicited marketing mail annually — nearly 17 pounds of paper per home.
The environmental toll alone should end the debate. The production of junk mail in the U.S. consumes tens of millions of trees annually. It burns hundreds of millions of gallons of fuel — in printing plants, delivery vehicles, and sorting facilities. It generates millions of tons of greenhouse gases. And the overwhelming majority of it goes directly into the trash or recycling without ever being read by a single human being.
Now layer on the human cost. Postal workers — over 600,000 of them — spend a meaningful portion of their working hours handling, sorting, and physically delivering this material. Every carrier route is calculated by volume. And unsolicited advertising mail pads that volume enormously, distorting the true labor and fuel cost of running a mail system that is simultaneously going broke.
The Great Postal Contradiction
Here is the contradiction at the heart of this crisis that no one in Washington wants to say out loud: the Postal Service has propped up its revenue model on the back of bulk advertising mail while simultaneously watching that same revenue fail to cover operating costs — because bulk mail is priced below the cost of delivery.
That’s not a business model. That’s a slow bleed dressed up in a rate schedule.
The USPS offers bulk mailers dramatically discounted postage rates through programs like Marketing Mail — formerly known as Standard Mail — specifically to encourage high-volume commercial use. The logic was sound in a different era: volume subsidizes the network. But as first-class mail volume has collapsed to levels not seen since the late 1960s, and as operating costs have exploded, that calculus has completely inverted. The bulk mail discounts are now helping accelerate the institution’s insolvency, not prevent it.
We are literally going bankrupt delivering garbage. And we are paying postal workers — workers whose pension contributions are now being frozen — to do it.
Five Days Is Enough. And Junk Mail Should Pay Its True Cost.
Postmaster General Steiner has already floated the idea of reducing delivery from six days to five. That’s a reasonable start. Most industrialized nations have already moved in this direction. The volume of time-sensitive letter mail simply does not justify six-day-a-week delivery in 2026. It didn’t justify it in 2016 either, but Congress has lacked the political will to act.
But reducing delivery days without addressing the junk mail subsidy is like bailing out a sinking boat without plugging the hole.
If the direct mail industry wants access to America’s postal infrastructure — a network of 33,000 locations, 600,000 workers, and universal delivery to every address in the country — it should pay the actual cost of using it. Not a discounted rate designed for an era when the post office was flush. Full freight. If a piece of unsolicited advertising mail costs $0.58 to process and deliver, charge $0.58. If the true cost is $0.80, charge $0.80.
Watch how quickly the volume drops. Watch how fast marketers rediscover the email list.
The Moral Argument
Beyond the economics, there is something fundamentally inconsistent about a regulatory system that protects citizens from digital spam while treating physical spam as an entitled industry right.
You cannot robocall me. You cannot text me without my consent. You cannot flood my inbox without an unsubscribe mechanism. But you can absolutely hire a printer in Ohio, pay a discounted government rate, and make sure that every single Thursday I pull three pounds of credit card offers and grocery circulars out of a metal box attached to my house.
The postal system was created to bind a nation together — to move correspondence between citizens, to deliver medicines, legal documents, ballots, and packages across a continental country. It was never designed to be a subsidized distribution channel for Madison Avenue.
We are burning paper. We are burning fuel. We are burning the careers and retirement promises of 600,000 working Americans. And we are doing it, in no small part, to make sure Pottery Barn can send you a fall catalog.
The post office is going broke. Congress needs to act. But real reform means more than freezing pension payments and cutting Saturday delivery. It means having an honest conversation about what the mail is actually for — and making the industries that have profited most from cheap postal access pay the real price of the system they’ve been exploiting for decades.
The American people gave up junk phone calls. They gave up junk texts. They filter junk email.
It’s time to deal with junk mail.
Dominick Bianco is the Founder & CEO of Kubera Technology Holdings Corp and Editor-in-Chief of NexfinityNews.com. A U.S. Marine Corps veteran, he writes on government accountability, economic policy, and American enterprise.