When Chuck Klein gets his mail, he doesn’t walk. He drives down a long gravel driveway onto a narrow one-lane drive, which eventually widens into a rural road surrounded by rolling farm fields.
“The property is 130 acres, of which 100 is woods,” he said. “It's at the end of a dead-end road, very, very private. The only man-made lights visible at night are ours.”
Klein and his wife bought this Brown County property, about 50 miles east of Cincinnati, to retire on and they’ve lived here full time for just over a decade. Because they live in such a remote spot, they rely on the United States Postal Service.
“You pay bills by mail. I mean, I still write a lot of checks,” Klein said.
But he isn’t too happy with his service. In fact, Klein recently sued USPS after it moved his mailbox from the end of his gravel driveway to a site a quarter mile away. Since the switch, they no longer deliver packages to his door, so he has to trek to the post office to pick up big deliveries.
“That's a real hassle particularly now that I'm getting older,” he said. “My wife and I are 83 and a 10-mile trip, especially when it's cold in the wintertime, is more difficult for us.”
Klein has a fairly unique case. But rural residents like him all over the country could soon experience curtailed postal service because of a 10-year plan called “Delivering for America.”
USPS plans to modernize
USPS announced the plan four years ago, after the Postal Service had lost $90 billion over the course of two decades. Led by former postmaster general Louis DeJoy, who just stepped down in March, USPS says it’s meant to modernize the network as people’s mail habits shift.
Since 1998, for example, the volume of first-class mail sent through USPS has dropped 80%.
“Yet 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,” DeJoy wrote in a letter to the Board of Governors in February.
To rectify the situation, USPS has been implementing changes: It’s delivering less mail by plane and is instead investing $40 billion to upgrade infrastructure like processing facilities and mail trucks.
It also rolled out new service standards last month. USPS says they’re meant to streamline operations and deliver mail more efficiently.
But the changes entail eliminating afternoon mail pickups from post offices more than 50 miles away from USPS Regional Processing and Distribution Centers, which could add extra delivery time for mail sent from rural places.
“I am confident that as an organization, we now understand our path to profitability, meaning how we need to align our operating structure, our cost, our pricing and our products and services to squeeze profitability out of our operations as we did in the first quarter of 2025, so that we can be financially viable for decades to come,” DeJoy said in an all-employee video message earlier this year.
In response to a request for an interview, the USPS sent a statement stating it's mandated to be self-financing and that the Delivering for America plan will restore long-term financial sustainability and "dramatically improve service across all mail and shipping categories."
Impact on rural communities
USPS maintains these changes will not negatively affect service in rural communities.
“We do not anticipate that individual rural customers will experience a significant impact from these adjustments, and in fact are likely to notice positive impacts,” it said in a fact sheet about its recent service changes.
But the Postal Regulatory Commission — an independent agency with regulatory oversight over USPS — says otherwise.
In an opinion released in January, it said the Delivering for America plan isn’t ready to be implemented, that it relies on unfounded financial projections and would have “significant negative impacts on rural communities.”
“The Commission urges the Postal Service to reconsider whether the speculative, meager gains from this proposal outweigh the certain downgrade in service for a significant portion of the nation,” the opinion said.
Other proposals to transform USPS
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has floated other ideas to transform the Postal Service too — from merging it with the Commerce Department to privatizing it altogether.
Those ideas prompted rallies across the country to “Save USPS.” In Ohio, letter carriers took to the streets in Akron, Cleveland, Toledo, Cincinnati, Marion and Steubenville in March.
Ron Green was among them. He’s been a letter carrier for 25 years and is now the Vice President of the National Association of Letter Carriers’ Steubenville branch in eastern Ohio.
“Privatization of the Postal Service would hurt rural areas the most,” he said. “Right now, we go to 169 million locations every day to mailboxes all over the country. It's a service which has been mandated by the Constitution. It's actually older than the United States itself.
“What would happen if it gets privatized, whichever company would buy it would do what they want with it. So if they don't want to drive out 20 miles from Steubenville in the middle of the country because it's not going to make them any money, they won't do it. Or if they do it, they'll put a surcharge on that customer.”
Green is proud of the work he does delivering mail, and he cares about his customers, who rely on the service to receive their medications or pay their bills — like Chuck Klein back in Brown County.
Klein’s lawsuit is pending in the Ohio Southern District Court. But even if he wins, the Delivering for America plan could mean those packages – delivered right to his doorstep – take longer to arrive.
