Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is planning to step down from his role, and is calling on the Postal Service Board of Governors to start looking for his successor.

DeJoy, in a letter dated Monday, told the USPS Board of Governors to begin searching for a new postmaster general. DeJoy took office in June 2020.

“While there remains much critical work to be done to ensure that the Postal Service can be financially viable as we continue to serve the nation in our essential public service mission, I have decided it is time to start the process of identifying my successor and of preparing the Postal Service for this change,” DeJoy said in a statement.

USPS is about midway through DeJoy’s10-year reform plan. The agency has yet to reach its “break-even” financial targets, but reported a rare net profit for the first quarter of fiscal 2025.

DeJoy told the board in his letter that those recent financial results are a “strong indicator that the Postal Service is on the path to fulfilling its long-neglected legal duty to operate in a self-financing manner.” USPS, however, still anticipates ending FY 2025 with a $6.9 billion net loss.

“Postmaster General is a demanding role made more difficult by the devastating condition I found the Postal Service in when I arrived and the almost unceasing resistance to change — without offering any viable solutions — from stakeholders motivated by both parochial and political

purposes,” he wrote. “The simplest and most obvious ideas and solutions receive illogical and irrational scrutiny from those that have no responsibility for ensuring the financial viability of the Postal Service.”

DeJoy is urging the board to select a new postmaster general who’s committed to implementing the rest of his 10-year Delivering for America plan.

USPS, he added, is on course to cut $2 billion in annual transportation costs, $1.5 billion in annual mail processing costs, and grow revenue by $5 billion each year. DeJoy said these goals, and other unfinished tasks in the 10-year reform plan, will “take several years to accomplish and to perfect.”

To further cut costs, USPS is offering early retirement buyouts to mail handlers who work in the agency’s mail processing facilities and other USPS employees who work in a variety of support positions.

Eligible USPS employees have until March 7 to accept the early retirement offers, and would agree to retire from the agency effective April 30.

“As I look around the organization, I see many long-term retirement-eligible employees sticking around based upon their pride in, and commitment to, our Delivering for America plan. That said, it is time for us together, to think about and plan for the inevitable changing of the guard in many areas of our organization, to ensure that the new culture we have developed survives our tenure, including mine, and continues to thrive,” DeJoy wrote.

The Postal Regulatory Commission warned in an advisory opinion earlier this month that the next wave of USPS changes under its 10-year Delivering for America plan would slow mail for a “significant portion of the nation,” and would at best achieve “meager savings” that wouldn’t help the agency financially in the long run.

USPS recently told its regulator it plans to no longer count Sundays and federal holidays in tracking its on-time mail delivery metrics. While USPS doesn’t deliver mail on these days, its mail processing operations run every day. DeJoy said in a recent Board of Governors meeting that USPS is “burdened by the current framework” of measuring on-time mail.

DeJoy told the board that when he took the postmaster general job at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, USPS was on a “crash course” to run out of cash within 60 days. USPS made it through the near-term financial crisis, but DeJoy said the agency needs further reforms to a “broken” business model.

Single-piece First-Class Mail volume has declined by 80% since 1998, but DeJoy told the board that “we still deploy operating practices and adhere to archaic service performance standards as if mail

volume was as abundant as it was back in that time.”

Meanwhile, DeJoy is looking to grow USPS revenue by growing its package delivery business that competes with private-sector companies. He told the board “our new package shipping products are extremely popular and are overtaking the marketplace.”

“As you know, I have worked tirelessly to lead the 640,000 men and women of the Postal Service in accomplishing an extraordinary transformation,” DeJoy wrote. “We have served the American people through an unprecedented pandemic and through a period of high inflation and sensationalized politics.”

Amber McReynolds, chairwoman of the Board of Governors, thanked DeJoy for his “tireless efforts to modernize the Postal Service and reverse decades of neglect.”

“I commend Postmaster General DeJoy for inspiring the Postal Service with strategic direction, a competitive spirit, and a culture of achievement that comes from the successful implementation of large-scale change,” McReynolds said. “I have seen this spirit of purpose grow steadily during my time on the Board of Governors, and I am confident it will continue to grow as progress begets further progress, and the promise of a transformed and modernized Postal Service is fully realized.”

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