Every independent nation on Earth delivers its own mail. It is one of the most basic functions of a sovereign state—right up there with defending borders, minting currency, and collecting taxes. Barbados delivers its own mail. Slovenia delivers its own mail. Iceland, with an economy smaller than Lubbock’s, delivers its own mail.
Texas does not.
Texas—with a $2.9 trillion economy, 23 seaports, three stock exchanges, and a growth rate that a Federal Reserve economist recently called “almost kind of embarrassing for the rest of the U.S.”—cannot move a letter from Houston to Dallas without the permission of the United States Congress. And this week, Congress admitted it cannot handle the job.
Washington Admits the System Is Broken
Postmaster General David Steiner told lawmakers on Tuesday that the U.S. Postal Service will run out of cash in less than 12 months. Without action from Congress, USPS may not be able to pay employees or vendors by February 2027—meaning mail delivery across the entire country, including Texas, could simply stop.
The numbers are catastrophic. USPS lost $9 billion in fiscal year 2025. It lost $9.5 billion the year before that. Another $1.3 billion vanished in the first quarter of 2026. Mail volume has collapsed from 220 billion pieces annually to roughly 110 billion—a decline Steiner says has cost the agency $81 billion in revenue.
The agency has maxed out its $15 billion borrowing cap with the Treasury Department—a ceiling Congress has not raised since 1992. It has been delaying pension payments just to keep trucks on the road. Steiner wants to raise first-class stamps from 78 cents to 95 cents, but the Postal Regulatory Commission—an independent body Congress itself created—will not approve it.
Congress built the agency. Congress imposed the mandates. Congress created the regulator. Congress capped the borrowing. And now Congress cannot agree on how to fix what Congress broke.
“I like to say we sort of got thrown overboard on a ship into the cold water, right?” Steiner told reporters. “And instead of throwing us a life preserver, we get thrown an anchor.”
This is not new. Multiple postmaster generals over two decades have made the same plea. Congress passed a reform act in 2022 that wiped out $57 billion in obligations. It produced exactly one year without a shortfall. Then the bleeding resumed.
This Is What Dependency Looks Like
Here is what Texans need to understand about this story. It is not just about stamps and budgets. It is about what it means to depend on a government that cannot perform basic functions—and to have no alternative.
Texas has led the nation in exports since 2001, moving over $440 billion in goods in 2023. The Port of Brownsville alone generated $11.9 billion in GDP last year and supported more than 100,000 jobs. We move steel, petroleum, and manufactured goods across the globe every single day. Our logistics infrastructure is world-class.
But we cannot deliver a birthday card to Grandma without federal authorization.
That is not a quirk of the system. That is the system working exactly as designed. Dependency is the point. Washington does not want Texas handling its own mail for the same reason it does not want Texas handling its own border, its own trade policy, or its own energy grid without federal strings attached. The moment Texas can do these things for itself is the moment Texas does not need Washington at all.
Republican Pete Sessions of Texas told this week’s hearing that they cannot let the postal service fail. His Democratic counterpart agreed. The bipartisan consensus is that someone has to pay—they just cannot agree who. The answer, as it always is, will be you. Higher prices, a taxpayer bailout, or reduced service. Pick your poison.
The Question Texans Should Be Asking
The question is not whether Congress will save the Postal Service. It probably will—with your money, on its timeline, under its terms. The question is why 30 million Texans who built an economy that outperforms most nations on Earth are sitting around waiting for a dysfunctional Congress to decide whether their mail gets delivered.
Texas has the infrastructure. Texas has the workforce. Texas has the economic engine. What Texas does not have is the authority—because that authority was never given back after it was taken.
The USPS is not going to be the thing that breaks the federal system. It is just one more crack in a foundation that has been crumbling for decades. But it is a useful crack, because it strips away the abstraction. This is not a debate about constitutional theory or political philosophy. This is about whether your mail shows up. And the federal government just told you, under oath, that it might not.
Texas can do better. Texas should do better. But first, Texas has to be free to try.
