What a difference a year makes.
Last March, the Postal Service published our Delivering for America (DFA) plan. This roadmap out of a decade-long financial and service crisis defines the path of our 10-year transformation and sets ambitious but achievable goals. I am thrilled to report that the energy and pace of implementation has been excellent, and we are very much on track with all we have set out to accomplish.
We recently published a DFA First-Year Progress Report, which describes milestones reached and plan elements implemented to date. The breadth of activity is impressive. We reworked our organizational structure, stabilized our workforce through career conversions, implemented new pricing strategies; adopted new service standards; pursued major changes to our processing and transportation operations; began $40 billion in investments in our people, technology and infrastructure; and launched growth initiatives to capture more package delivery volume. All of which will help drive the organization to higher performance, more reliable on-time delivery, greater efficiency, and provide greater value for our business and residential customers.
I am pleased to say that we can see a clear road to achieving our financial objective of break-even results for the 10-year period, and positive net income beginning in 2024 – rather than the $160 billion loss which had previously been forecasted. The recent enactment of the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 helps this effort, and I am grateful for the bi-partisan support in Congress and for the leadership that made it possible.
One of the pleasures of my job is that I get to talk about our people and the successes they are achieving, as I did recently in our Mailin’ It! podcast. I am especially grateful for the many management teams that have been working so hard over the past year to implement major changes across our large enterprise. Driving organizational change is difficult under the best of circumstances; it is even more so against the backdrop of urgency and crisis.
Our 650,000 employees are on the front lines of change and delivering great results across the board. Our on-time performance during the recent holiday and in the delivery of the nation’s COVID-19 test kits is a testament to their commitment and dedication.
We are one strong year into a 10-year transformation and moving forward with a lot of momentum. The road ahead to financial sustainability and service excellence is difficult but not too long. Our customers, employees and the American public can all be confident that we will make a lot of progress in the very busy next year ahead.
Louis DeJoy
Postmaster General & Chief Executive Officer