The Postal Service is Changing Delivery Times - But Postmaster DeJoy's Days in Charge Appear Numbered
Just in time for the presidential election. Coincidence, perhaps?
One month ago, the Associated Press (AP) published a warning from state election officials across the country about the US Postal Service (USPS)’s inability to handle the anticipated glut of mail-in ballots for the upcoming November election.
Newsweek just published a story confirming the postal service is in fact planning on changing delivery times.
The poor timing is the point.
Postmaster, businessman (and republican mega-donor) Louis DeJoy received from the agency he was tapped to head during the Trump administration a $5 million highway-shipping contract for the trucking company, XPO, he used to lead before leaving its board in 2018.
However, according to CBS News:
XPO still pays DeJoy about $2.3 million a year in rent and expenses for 220,000 square feet of office space he controls in his home state of North Carolina. XPO’s lease agreements for DeJoy’s properties run through 2025.
He received that lucrative shipping contract in October 2020, one month before the most contested general election in modern history and the month early voting starts in most states.
Two months before, then-president Donald Trump said the quiet part aloud when he admitted to Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo he was blocking Postal Service funding in a coronavirus relief bill to hamper Democrats’ mail-in voting efforts.
Earlier that year, DeJoy warned about “major operational changes” in the postal service, like mail sorting machines being removed, overtime being curtailed, and carriers being ordered to leave behind undelivered first-class mail.
During a global pandemic, when mail-in voting was the preferred method to cast ballots, this was particularly insidious, and disenfranchised millions of voters.
While we aren’t in the grips of the pandemic anymore, we are facing the same threat as Vice President Kamala Harris faces off against the convicted felon vying for his old job responsible for appointing DeJoy.
The USPS said in a statement last week it is holding a conference to discuss “plans to improve mail processing and transportation” across the country. Newsweek reported, “While some customers will see improved delivery times — specifically those that live within 50 miles of its largest processing facilities, others who live more rurally won’t be so lucky.”
Delivery from some of those areas, according to a USPS spokesperson, could take an additional 12 to 24 hours. Some delivery that now takes three days could now take four.
According to the USPS fact sheet, this would have no impact on 75 percent of first-class mail, and is not expected to be put into effect until following the November election and peak season, Thanksgiving through New Year’s Eve.
Three years ago, the USPS announced its plans to slow down some first-class deliveries in its efforts to “slash spending,” a move some say will disproportionately effect small businesses, middle- and low-income Americans, and senior citizens. That 10-year reform plan was expected to also cut post office hours and increase prices for customers, a move former Postmaster General Ronald Stroman asserted is “strategically-ill conceived, creates dangerous risks that are not justified by the relatively low financial return, and doesn’t meet our responsibility as an essential part of America’s critical infrastructure.”
But the damage inflicted years ago persists, and the changes will impact future elections.
In April, the USPS announced rerouting Reno, NV-area mail processing to Sacramento, Calif., which raised pressing questions about “the rate at which mail ballots can be processed in a populous part of a crucial swing state,” according to the AP.
Although this is a way to rig the election in a certain party’s favor, it is capitalizing on decades-old GOP legislation designed to knee-cap the industry for which Benjamin Franklin served as the first Postmaster General.
In 2006, the Republican-led Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), which required the postal service to calculate all its anticipated pension costs for 75 years and set aside five billion dollars per year to cover future employees.
That’s five billion dollars each year for employees who haven’t even been born yet.
Writing for The Week, Jeff Spross explained:
Consider your average 30-year mortgage. What if you had to set aside a few hundred thousand dollars right now, enough to pay the whole thing, even if you were still going to make payments over 30 years? No one would ever take out a mortgage. That’s the whole point: the costs only come in over time, and the income you use to pay them comes in over time as well. It works exactly the same for retiree pensions and benefit funds. Which is why, as economist Dean Baker pointed out to Congress, pretty much no one else does what the PAEA demanded of the Postal Service.
Some ask, “If Trump appointed DeJoy, why doesn’t President Biden just fire him and appoint someone else?”
It isn’t that easy.
As Aaron Mak and Mark Joseph Stern explained three years ago in Salon:
Biden’s hands are tied: While the president can fire other high-ranking executive officials at will, federal law bars the president from terminating the postmaster general under any circumstances. Biden can attempt to oust DeJoy indirectly, but that option is fraught with legal uncertainties, and certain to trigger Republican complaints of norm busting. Unless the president is willing to take a significant legal risk, DeJoy will remain in control for months or years to come.
That time, though, may have come, as Biden’s tenure is winding down.
Last month, Politico reported President Biden nominated former Florida Rep. Val Demings to fill the last remaining vacancy on the USPS Board of Governors, the only entity that can oust DeJoy.
Demings now awaits Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee confirmation along with former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh.
The Senate has a one-person Democratic majority. Should it confirm Walsh and Demings, President Biden would have seven appointees on the nine-member board, and DeJoy could be replaced by the time the new president takes office in January.