Adds comments by U.S. postmaster general from previous interview, no immediate comment from Amazon, paragraphs 3, 5 and 8-9

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON, Jan 20 (Reuters) - The U.S. Postal Service said on Tuesday it is launching an online bidding platform to take proposals for access to its last‑mile delivery network, opening more than 18,000 destination delivery units and local processing centers nationwide to a broader range of customers that could raise badly needed funds.

Reuters first reported the plan in December as USPS warned it could run out of cash as soon as early 2027. U.S. Postmaster General David Steiner told Reuters last month that he hoped Amazon.com AMZN.O and other major retailers would participate in the bidding. This could potentially add billions of dollars in revenue to USPS, Steiner said.

Amazon did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Tuesday.

The Postal Service delivers to more than 170 million U.S. addresses six days a week, with the last mile the most expensive part of deliveries. The last mile is also hugely expensive for companies like FedEx FDX.N, UPS UPS.N and Amazon.

"We certainly have a precarious cash position. You know, within probably 12 to 24 months, we are out of cash," Steiner said in December.

USPS is currently selling about 1.7 billion units of capacity from its last-mile distribution, but has capacity for 3.5 billion to 4 billion and generates $5.5 billion to $6 billion in annual revenue from those deliveries.

In February of last year, Republican President Donald Trump called USPS a "tremendous loser for this country," and said he was considering merging the Postal Service with the U.S. Commerce Department, a move Democrats said would violate federal law.

Steiner, who took over in July after the White House pushed out the prior postal leader, told Reuters last month it was "never even feasible" to privatize USPS. "There's nobody in the private sector that would want the Postal Service ... The delivery of the mail is an unbelievably costly endeavor."

He added that the idea of merging USPS with Commerce "never made a lot of sense from a business point of view."

The Government Accountability Office said USPS net losses have totaled $118 billion since 2007 as first-class mail - its most profitable product - has fallen to its lowest volume since 1967. The U.S. Congress in 2022 approved legislation providing USPS with about $57 billion in financial relief.

(Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington and Abhinav Parmar in Bengaluru; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

((Abhinav.Parmar@thomsonreuters.com;))