BIG changes are being put in place soon by the USPS, and it could mean Americans will need to wait even longer for their packages. 

The USPS will begin to phase in its latest changes starting April 1.

Service standards for first-class mail, periodicals, marketing mail, and package services will all be adjusted to save the agency an expected $36 billion over ten years, Newsweek reported.

According to the USPS, the majority of first-class mail customers won’t notice a difference in delivery service.

However, 11% of customers will experience slower delivery times by a few days.

The agency promised that all delivery times would be within the one to five-day promised time frame.

Under the new changes, postal workers can leave facilities earlier to travel longer distances to deliver mail.

Allowing workers to leave early will help improve postal reliability for customers living in rural areas. 

The massive changes follow catastrophically bad financial years for the post office.

Despite generating $79 billion in revenue in 2023, the USPS lost $6.5 billion.

USPS’ significant losses have led Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to partner with the Department of Government Efficiency to work on his ten-year “Delivering for America” plan. 

DeJoy asked for help centering leases for USPS’s post offices, warning that “future difficulties we will face in their renewal because of ownership consolidation, urban development, and general increases in rental rates when decades-long leases expire.”

He also highlighted counterfeit postage costing the company $1 billion annually, and federal laws burdening the Postal Service.

Finally, DeJoy noted that regulatory restrictions have added $50 billion in losses. 

In conjunction with DOGE, the USPS announced it would be cutting around 10,000 jobs by using an early retirement program.

Select employees would be offered $15,000 for taking their retirement early–a move that’s expected to save the agency billions. 

In a letter to Congress, DeJoy wrote, “DOGE is the only other game in town that seems oriented toward helping us to achieve our efficiency and cost goals.”

The postmaster warned that the USPS is a “broken organization,” and a lot needs to be done to fix it.

“Fixing a broken organization that had experienced close to $100 billion in losses and was projected to lose another $200 billion, without a bankruptcy proceeding, is a daunting task,” he admitted.

“Fixing a heavily legislated and overly regulated organization as massive, important, cherished, misunderstood and debated as the United States Postal Service, with such a broken business model, is even more difficult.”

DeJoy, who was appointed Postmaster General in 2020, also announced that he would be leaving at an undisclosed date.

“It has been one of the pleasures of my life and a crowning achievement of my career to have been associated with this cherished institution,” he said.