Sen. Josh Hawley is demanding USPS turn over pay records and delivery data after Postmaster General David Steiner kept a $305,781 bonus while mail piled up undelivered in Missouri.
Josh Hawley has had enough of polite letters. The Missouri Republican has opened a formal congressional investigation into the U.S. Postal Service, demanding internal records on dumped mail, executive compensation, and whether any postal workers should face criminal charges, according to a Hawley Senate press release and an exclusive report from Fox News. The trigger was simple: Postmaster General David Steiner took a $305,781 bonus last year and, when Hawley asked him to give it back, he said no.
That refusal came after an inspector general audit found what investigators called the worst case of failed on-time delivery seen anywhere in the agency's field operations reviews, centered on the St. Louis distribution facility. A separate audit of the Kansas City center found 100,000 pieces of mail delayed over just three days. In April, thousands of pieces of dumped mail turned up in North St. Louis. At a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, Hawley showed Steiner a photograph of the pile. Steiner's answer was that he was unaware of the specific incident but that the agency took service failures seriously, a response Hawley later called "an insult to every Missourian who never got their prescription, their check, or their ballot."
The senator's letter, sent this week to Steiner and to the USPS Board of Governors, lays out a specific set of demands. He wants a full accounting of executive bonuses paid out since 2023, broken down by facility performance in the same regions where delivery failures were documented. He wants copies of every inspector general report touching Missouri operations over the past two years, not just summaries. He wants internal communications between St. Louis-area postmasters and headquarters regarding staffing shortages, truck contracts, and sorting equipment breakdowns. And he wants USPS to say, in writing, whether any employee has been referred to the agency's Office of Inspector General for potential criminal handling of undelivered mail, a felony under federal law when done knowingly.
Hawley's office says the investigation grew out of a wave of constituent complaints dating back more than a year, long before the North St. Louis dump made headlines. Missourians reported missed Social Security checks, late medication shipments, and ballots that arrived after local election deadlines had passed. Several rural carriers, speaking to local Missouri outlets on condition of anonymity, have said understaffing and consolidated processing routes, part of Postmaster General Steiner's broader "Delivering for America" reorganization, are the real drivers of the delays, not isolated worker misconduct. That plan, launched under Steiner's predecessor and continued after his 2024 appointment, consolidated smaller sorting facilities into regional mega-centers, including the St. Louis hub now under scrutiny, in an effort to cut costs across a Postal Service that has lost more than $100 billion since 2007.
USPS has defended the reorganization publicly as necessary to keep the agency solvent without further taxpayer support, noting that the Postal Service operates as an independent establishment funded largely by postage revenue rather than direct appropriations. A spokesperson for the agency, responding to Fox News, said USPS "takes service performance seriously in every market" and is "reviewing operations in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas to identify corrective actions," without addressing Hawley's specific document requests or the bonus dispute directly.
Hawley is not alone in raising the issue. Missouri's junior senator and several members of the state's congressional delegation have signed on to related inquiries, and the House Oversight Committee has reportedly requested a briefing from USPS leadership on the same delivery failures. Hawley has also floated legislation that would tie future postmaster general bonuses to independently verified on-time delivery metrics in each region, rather than agency-wide performance averages that can mask localized breakdowns.
For now, USPS has not said whether it will comply with the document requests on Hawley's timeline, and Steiner has not publicly addressed calls to return the bonus. Hawley's letter gives the agency until the end of the month to begin producing records, and his office says it is prepared to pursue subpoenas through the Homeland Security Committee if USPS stalls. With mail delays already a flashpoint heading into next year's elections, the fight over St. Louis's undelivered letters looks likely to become a test case for how much scrutiny a semi-independent federal agency can withstand from an increasingly impatient Congress.
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