Here we are on our nation’s 250th birthday with the government still delivering the mail – though thankfully not our emails.

The US Postal Service is now about as relevant to everyday commerce as the telegraph office of old. A new report by the Postal Regulatory Commission finds that over the past 20 years, USPS has lost $120 billion.

See below chart on Postal Service net income:

This is despite the fact that the price for a first class stamp is up 90% to 78 cents.

Meanwhile, USPS’s mail volume is down by half over the past two decades and daily door-to-door mail delivery will be extinct within 10 years.

What do you do with an enterprise with rising costs and losses, falling productivity, reduced sales, and an outlook for further and mounting losses for as far as the eye can see?

USPS should declare bankruptcy, sell off whatever money-making operations it has left to private package delivery services, and auction the valuable real estate it owns across the country to cover its losses.  Urgent packages will still be delivered overnight by companies like FedEx.

The “private express statutes” that give monopoly noncompete status for letter delivery to USPS should be repealed. Anyone or any business or any drone should be able to deliver letters and packages at whatever price they wish, which will be lower every day due to AI.