OUCH: USPS suspends contributions to employee pensions after warning of ‘cash crisis.’

The USPS contributes about $400 million a month to its employee pension plan, the agency said in a statement on Thursday. The postal service said it will continue to send worker contributions to the retirement plan and will also transmit employer automatic and matching contributions, as well as employee contributions to the Thrift Savings Plan, another retirement program for federal workers.

The temporary halt in contributions to the USPS program comes after Postmaster General David Steiner warned Congress last month that the postal agency is heading for a financial crisis without a course correction. Those changes could include raising the cost of a first-class stamp to 95 cents or reducing delivery from its current six days per week schedule to five or fewer, he said.

Without such changes, Steiner said, the USPS could run out of cash within 12 months, which could result in a stoppage of mail delivery.

There’s FedEx for important mail, UPS for packages, and USPS for junk, mostly.