Postmaster General David Steiner Has Told Confidants the Job Is 'Thankless' and He Wants to Resign, Reuters Reports. The Postal Service Says the Story Has 'Absolutely Zero Validity.'

The head of the U.S. Postal Service has told people close to him that he is deeply discouraged by the job and wants to resign, according to four people familiar with his thinking who spoke to Reuters. Postmaster General David Steiner took office in July 2025 after the White House forced out his predecessor, Louis DeJoy, and he has spent the 14 months since asking Washington for help with the agency's long-running financial losses while being pulled into President Trump's effort to tighten the rules on mail-in voting. The people said he has found little of the former and a great deal of the latter.

"The message was, this isn't what he signed up for, and he didn't come on board to get beat up like this," one of the people said. The Postal Service disputed the account, saying it had "absolutely zero validity," but it did not address specific incidents and did not make Steiner available for an interview. The postmaster general runs an independent agency of 630,000 employees and is hired and evaluated by a bipartisan board of governors, a structure designed to keep the mail out of politics.

The breaking point, according to the sources, was a contentious Senate hearing in June. Committee Chair Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, pressed Steiner over years of losses. Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, accused him of being a "pawn" in Trump's plan to restrict voting access. Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, said Steiner should refuse his bonus because of the agency's delivery problems; Steiner earns $346,780 a year, according to postal financial disclosures, and drew a 2025 relocation bonus worth half his salary. When Senator Gary Peters asked whether the Postal Service would still mail a state's ballots if that state refused to hand over its absentee voter list, Steiner answered, "Under our proposed regulation, no." He defended the plan at the time: "I would think the states would want the information to ensure that the ballots that they think they're sending out are the ballots that are actually being sent out." Afterward, the people said, he described the job as thankless, warned that the agency's finances were increasingly dire without federal aid, and said he wanted out.

That mail-ballot plan is now largely dead. Trump directed the Postal Service in March to act as a clearinghouse for mail ballots, and on Monday the Supreme Court blocked the agency from implementing key elements of the scheme, a significant setback for the White House seven weeks before the midterms. The four sources said it was unclear how much the congressional fight over the ballot rules contributed to Steiner's frustration, and noted that he had already considered stepping down in late 2025 over the agency's financial position. In an effort to lift his morale and enlist White House backing for his restructuring plans, Trump donors in the mailing industry organized a December 2025 trip for Steiner to golf with the president at one of his Florida resorts.

Steiner, a former FedEx board member and former chief executive of Waste Management, told the board during the hiring process that he planned to serve roughly two years. Since arriving, he has repeatedly warned lawmakers that without new funding the Postal Service would have to cut delivery days and close unprofitable post offices, most of them in rural, Republican-leaning areas. Lawmakers largely rejected those proposals, and mailers and package companies have chafed at steep rate increases meant to close the gap.

Trump has been more involved with the Postal Service than any recent president, in both terms: pushing the agency to raise parcel rates, intervening in the selection of the postmaster general, and attempting to impose mail-voting restrictions through an agency that was never built to police elections. That involvement is what keeps putting the postmaster general in front of hostile Senate committees, and it is the reason the reported departure of a second postal chief in 18 months would be read as a political story rather than a personnel one.