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On February 24, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States decided United States Postal Service v. Konan, No. 24-351, and held that postal workers with the United States Postal Service (USPS) are immune from tort claims over their alleged intentional failure to deliver mail.
USPS is the federal agency that delivers mail nationwide. It and its employees have sovereign immunity, except where Congress has expressly waived that immunity. Through the Federal Tort Claims Act, Congress has waived federal agencies’ and their employees’ sovereign immunity under certain circumstances, including as to claims asserting that a federal employee caused injury or loss through negligent or wrongful conduct within the scope of his office or employment. But Congress retained the Government’s and its employees’ immunity for claims “arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter.” 28 U.S.C. § 2680(b).
In 2020, a dispute arose between a Texas landlord and USPS after USPS stopped delivering mail to the landlord’s properties. After attempts to resolve the dispute with USPS failed, the landlord sued USPS in 2022. She asserted, among others, state-law tort claims against USPS for its alleged intentional and wrongful withholding of the mail and sought monetary damages for her losses.
The United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas held that the postal immunity exception in the Federal Tort Claims Act barred the landlord’s state-law claims and dismissed them. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed. It reasoned that the postal immunity exception did not cover USPS employees’ intentional refusal to deliver mail at all.
The Supreme Court reversed. It reasoned that Congress included the postal immunity exception in the Act to ensure that USPS and its employees were not subject to tort suits for redress of the sort of harms primarily identified with USPS’s function of transporting mail. And it found that the exception’s application to claims arising out of “miscarriage” and “loss” of mail cover any failure of mail to reach its intended destination, even if a result of intentional conduct. It held that the postal immunity exception therefore bars suits against the federal government “for the intentional nondelivery of mail,” and it remanded the case for further proceedings consistent with that holding.
Justice Thomas delivered the Court’s opinion. Justice Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion, in which Justices Kagan, Gorsuch, and Jackson joined.
