(CNN) — The head of the US Postal Service has warned lawmakers that the storied 250-year-old agency is at a “critical juncture” and will run out of cash in less than a year unless Congress allows it to borrow more money and charge more for postage.

“At our current rate, we’ll be out of cash in less than 12 months. So in about a year from now, the postal service would be unable to deliver the mail,” Postmaster General David Steiner said at a Tuesday hearing before the House Oversight Subcommittee on Government Operations.

Steiner, a former FedEx board member who became postmaster last year, pointed to the yearslong decline in the use of traditional mail and regulations weighing down the Postal Service’s finances, such as legal obligations for universal service and a limit on how much the agency can borrow.

The Postal Service has historically relied on revenue from its sales to stay afloat and does not receive tax dollars for operating expenses, though it has received some federal relief. A 10-year plan put in place in 2021 by Steiner’s predecessor to address its financial struggles has failed so far to reverse its losses.

USPS said it incurred net losses of $9 billion last fiscal year and $9.5 billion in 2024. It also lost $1.3 billion in the first quarter of 2026, it said in February.

The postmaster urged Congress Tuesday to increase USPS’s borrowing authority, which would buy time “that we can use to best determine what the Postal Service should do to best serve the American public” and whether all of the agency’s services should be maintained.

He emphasized the cost of its universal service obligation, which legally requires it provide mail services to all Americans and deliver mail all across the United States at the same price. That includes rural, far-flung or hard-to-reach destinations, expensive places for mail carriers to get to.

“I’m here to tell America that we can do anything you want … If you want the same number of delivery days and post offices, we can do that. But someone has to pay for it,” Steiner said.

Steiner noted the cost of USPS postage is significantly less than other industrialized nations and said raising the price of a first-class stamp from the current 75 cents to about 95 cents “would largely solve our controllable loss.”

Despite being one of the most popular parts of the federal government, according to 2024 data from the Pew Research Center, the agency has struggled with losing money for years alongside the decline in volume of mail – as emails, texts and other electronic communications replace letters, and online payments replace the sending of checks to pay bills.

Citing its financial challenges, President Donald Trump has previously suggested disbanding the US Postal Service’s Board of Governors and placing the agency under direct control of the Commerce Department – a move critics say could be a first step towards privatization and upend how Americans get critical deliveries like prescription drugs, checks and vote-by-mail ballots.

While lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed Tuesday it is in the best interest of Americans to address the agency’s funding woes, they disagreed on how much Congress should play a role.

“It does us no good in my opinion to go to a dollar stamp,” the subcommittee’s chairman, Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas said, pushing back on Steiner’s proposals. “It does us no good to find that in one year from now, the postal service failed,” he later added.

Rep. Kweisi Mfume of Maryland, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, agreed, saying: “One thing that is clear about all of this is we cannot let the United States Postal Service die.” He said addressing the agency’s debt limit seems inevitable, but details still need to be worked out.

The two lawmakers “have great confidence in the workers, the supervisors, the post masters, the management of the organization,” Sessions said. “But we’re going to have to make tough decisions.”

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