The Postal Service’s own inspector general has published a white paper arguing that gig-economy delivery companies are eating into USPS’s package business. Postal management, invited to comment before release, replied that parts of it are misleading.
Those parts are still in the report. The objection sits in Appendix D, a place most readers will never reach.
The paper, Evolving Last-Mile Delivery in the United States, was released Oct. 16. It reports that Amazon passed USPS in parcel volume in 2025 and that alternative carriers now handle about 11 percent of parcels, up from about 4 percent in 2020. It concludes that consistent compliance enforcement across all carriers is essential to a fair market.
A Villain Is Identified, Evidence to Follow
The market numbers themselves are not the problem, and management’s letter does not challenge them. The OIG reports that USPS’s share of parcel volume fell from 38 percent in 2019 to about 28 percent in 2025. It also reports that inbound international postal volume fell 81 percent on the day the de minimis exemption ended, compared with the week before.
The paper then profiles 14 “alternative carriers,” a group that includes Walmart’s Spark, Target’s Shipt, OnTrac, Veho and Chinese-affiliated cross-border specialists such as GOFO, UniUni and SpeedX. It catalogs their alleged sins: worker misclassification lawsuits, wage disputes, a data breach at SpeedX and about 5,000 Better Business Bureau complaints over three years.
Then it says something worth reading twice. The OIG was able to speak with only one alternative carrier, and its research was not designed to determine how common any of these problems are.
The claim that rivals price below cost is sourced to industry experts who are not named. They say cross-border carriers charge as little as $2.00 to $2.50 for a lightweight local delivery, against $5.50 for USPS Ground Advantage commercial rates, and they believe those prices lose money.
That is a belief about someone else’s balance sheet, offered by people the reader cannot identify. The paper nonetheless closes by calling for consistent enforcement across the industry, and the conclusion arrives with more confidence than the method.
The Letter Nobody Was Meant to Read
Management’s response is dated Oct. 13, three days before publication. The paper says the OIG discussed its observations with management on Sept. 18.
The letter, signed by three Postal Service vice presidents, calls the paper informative and well presented. It then says a couple of areas are “either misleading, too broad, or not clearly tied to last-mile delivery.”
The first objection concerns discounts. The paper says USPS ended discounts for parcels under one pound between 2024 and early 2026, and that some of that volume likely moved to cheaper carriers. Management calls the characterization broad, says only July 2026 commercial price changes altered ounce-based rates for some products, and notes that negotiated agreements vary by customer.
The second concerns revenue. The OIG reports that domestic package revenue rose 3.5 percent in the first three quarters of fiscal 2026 while volume fell 6.2 percent, and suggests that may signal a shift toward higher-value shipments. Management says several factors raise revenue, not simply that one. It does not name them.
Having disputed both points, management closed by agreeing that consistent regulatory enforcement is important to fair competition. It objected to two supporting claims and endorsed the conclusion they support.
Both disputed passages remain in the published report as written.
Arithmetic Remains Undefeated
Appendix C lists “most recently reported” annual revenue for nine carriers, sourced to PitchBook and S&P Capital IQ. OnTrac leads at $488 million. GOFO is listed at $18 million and UniUni at $7 million.
The paper’s text describes the range as 2025 revenue. The nine figures together come to about $703 million.
Now consider GOFO. A May 2026 profile reported that it delivered more than 100 million packages in 2025. The Low Down reported that GOFO announced a record 2.5 million parcels in a single day that December. The OIG cites that same article in its own footnotes.
At the report’s own low-end price of $2 per parcel, 100 million packages comes to roughly $200 million, more than eleven times the $18 million in the table. This is arithmetic, not a finding about GOFO’s finances, and the volume figures are company claims rather than audited numbers.
But the gap is too wide to be rounding. Either the revenue table is wrong or the paper’s pricing claim is, and they cannot both be right.
The enforcement discussion leans on a May 19 letter from Sen. Tom Cotton. That letter asked the Justice Department to review Chinese-controlled last-mile delivery networks and named Gofo, SpeedX, UniUni and J&T Express. The paper describes the letter as asking whether “alternative carriers” are committing tariff evasion, receiving foreign subsidies and engaging in predatory pricing.
The paper discusses Chinese ties elsewhere, but its description of the letter does not say whom the senator targeted. J&T Express is not among the 14 carriers the OIG reviewed. Gofo has denied engaging in subsidized or predatory pricing.
There are smaller errors. Footnote 42 dates Postmaster General David Steiner’s House testimony to Sept. 22, 2026, but the hearing was held March 17.
The paper also says alternative carriers nearly tripled their market share. It uses a 2022 baseline in the executive summary, 2021 in the introduction and 2020 in the body.
The Customer in the Footnote
The paper mentions Amazon’s negotiations with USPS in a single clause. According to Reuters, Amazon accounted for more than $6 billion of Postal Service revenue in 2025, roughly 7.5 percent of the total.
The renewal reportedly cut Amazon’s volume by 20 percent, though USPS still delivers more than a billion Amazon packages a year. Amazon had reportedly floated a two-thirds reduction during the bidding. The paper gives neither the figures nor the outcome, and a customer that size gets one clause while the rivals get the section headings.
Then there is the timing. Steiner told a House subcommittee in March that the Postal Service would run out of cash within 12 months if the status quo continues.
Here is an inference, labeled as one. It rests on that testimony and on the paper’s conclusion.
A Postal Service in a cash crisis has reason to welcome a report that frames its losses as partly the work of rivals playing by different rules, and management endorsed the enforcement conclusion in Appendix D. Nothing in the report or the letter says this. The reasoning is only that both documents reach the same remedy at a moment when the agency is arguing for help.
What Remains Unanswered
Bureaucracy Times is directing questions to the OIG and to USPS. Several remain unanswered, including:
- Why do the passages management called misleading remain in the published report?
- How does the OIG reconcile the Appendix C revenue figures with the volumes the carriers report?
- What are the “several factors” behind the revenue increase that management says the paper did not account for?
This article will be updated as responses arrive.
