Tom Williams/Sipa via AP Images
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testifies during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing at the U.S. Capitol, August 2020, in Washington, D.C.
After a chaotic mail-in ballot election season, the U.S. Postal Service followed up by delivering an avalanche of packages, cards, and letters—in the new year. Unfortunately, most people expected to receive their holiday greeting cards and packages in December, not after Groundhog Day.
Mostly reliable mail delivery had been one of the lifesaving features of the pandemic dystopia. But last July, newly installed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy led a regime change that featured late prescriptions and bills, which, of course, produced late-payment charges from utilities and credit card companies. In one instance, residents of a Chicago condo building received a directive to collect their mail at the post office.
On Tuesday, Postmaster General DeJoy apologized for the delivery inconveniences at a USPS Board of Governors meeting. The embattled postmaster general struck a more conciliatory tone than the one he exhibited at a congressional hearing last August, when he had to explain his decision to implement a raft of draconian cost-cutting measures that happened to coincide with preparations for early voting in some locales.
The Postal Service meltdown led much of the country to rage at DeJoy’s overreach, forcing him to backtrack on removing blue boxes and sorting machines. Inheriting this Trump calamity, the Biden administration now faces demands to fix the USPS. What happens next at USPS and how fast could hinge on the ten-year plan for the agency that DeJoy intends to unveil in the coming weeks—even though his short tenure and fealty to Trump’s design to wreck mail-in voting just in time for the 2020 election tend to make his departure more likely.
Biden can’t fire DeJoy. That authority rests with the Board of Governors. What he can do is fill three empty seats on the board, which could then fire the postmaster for cause—a termination that Democrats like Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey have demanded.
After months of staggering ineptitude, DeJoy apparently believes he can work in the Biden administration.
In his remarks to the board, DeJoy pointed to successes like the record number (1.1 billion) of packages delivered in the first quarter of the USPS 2021 fiscal year that began in October. However, this data point suggests that COVID-hampered USPS employees were overmatched for the deluge, especially after DeJoy cut back on truck trips designed to keep up with incoming mail, and private carriers stopped accepting packages in December.
USPS posted $21.5 billion in revenues for the first quarter of fiscal 2021, an increase of about $2.1 billion, or 11.1 percent, over same quarter last year. But Mark Dimondstein, the American Postal Workers Union president, is less than impressed. The first quarter of fiscal 2021 included both the presidential election and the holiday rush, both typically high-volume periods (more so when they coincide) made more high-volume by pandemic-driven online shopping. The rest of the year sees a considerable drop-off in volume, according to Dimondstein.
With COVID-19 continuing to reduce the number of workers available in facilities across the country, the Postal Workers Union and the USPS agreed to add nearly 11,000 full-time employees in mail-processing centers and kept on seasonal workers to deal with the backlog. Mail times in some areas are creeping back to pre-pandemic expectations.
Even so, major stumbling blocks still obstruct the road back to acceptable service levels. DeJoy has intimated that he may tinker with another sacrosanct feature of the USPS mission, delivering mail to diverse locales across the country, ranging from tiny rural hamlets in isolated regions to big-city business districts, at affordable and uniform prices—a concept known as the USPS “universal service obligation.”
“If our service, reliability, and costs do not improve,” DeJoy told the board, “and improve soon, our ability to meet our universal service obligation will be threatened, and our relevancy diminished.” The uniform service obligation is why there’s a post office in Death Valley, California, and another in Utqiagvik, Alaska, home to the country’s northernmost post office.
DeJoy has been here before. In August, testifying to a Senate committee, he suggested implementing service cuts and raising service costs in Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. “Take the Alaska bypass plan discussion,” DeJoy told senators. “That’s an item on the table. That’s an unfunded mandate. It costs us like $500 million a year.” Threats to rural Alaska mail service predictably raised the hackles of the Alaska state lawmakers and members of Congress. DeJoy had to walk back those comments.
“What’s the next area?” asks Dimondstein. “Wyoming or Montana? Yes, it does cost more to move mail around the rural areas, let’s say, than the urban centers. But anything that undermines or changes the universality of the system is a slippery slope.”
The USPS carries tens of billions of dollars in debt and it’s on track for net losses of nearly $10 billion in 2021. Congress has converted a $10 billion loan for COVID relief into a grant, a bandage on a gaping wound. But this dismal fiscal picture is primarily the result of the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which mandated that USPS prefund its health benefits for future retirees. No other public or private employer in the U.S. must meet this requirement. No other public or private employer does it.
Another factor, of course, is the internet revolution, which has caused mail volume to collapse.
For Dimondstein, the solution to the first problem is the USPS Fairness Act, which passed the House last year with bipartisan support only to languish in the Senate once the pandemic took hold. The act would remove the prefunding requirement and forgive all defaulted prefunding payments. It was reintroduced last week.
After months of staggering ineptitude, DeJoy apparently believes he can work in the Biden administration. But when people standing in lines at post offices can single out the postmaster general as the cause of their delivery problems, that does not bode well for his continued employment.
Dimondstein points out that the Board of Governors needs a fresh injection of talent. The six white men on the board come from the worlds of private finance, government, and military affairs. None of them have roots in the Postal Service or comparable logistics services, or are steeped in issues like rural affairs. Filling the board’s vacant seats is probably not high on the president’s first hundred days to-do list, but there is little downside to moving it up a few notches, especially for anyone waxing nostalgic about on-time deliveries.
