The Postmaster General is still wrecking the Post Office.
This article first appeared in our weekly Hackwatch newsletter on media accountability. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox every week, and check out our Hackwatch website.
The past two weeks have been newsworthy, to say the least. You’d be forgiven if you missed a July 8th op-ed in The Washington Post entitled “We’re fixing the Postal Service. We can’t stop now,” written by none other than the embattled Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy.
The op-ed is DeJoy’s latest effort to rehabilitate his image, which has been (deservedly) defined by his numerous conflicts of interest and the destructive 2020 mail slowdowns. Despite this, DeJoy has recently been the subject of glowing profiles in Politico (see our rebuttal) and TIME, the latter of which claimed he had embarked on a “Surprising Second Act” with his 10-year strategic plan for the agency. DeJoy devotes the bulk of his own column space to this plan, touting his “agenda to improve our efficiency and accuracy, reduce costs, improve service, grow revenue and create appropriate work environments for our employees.”
It’s a rosy picture, but one that is starkly contradicted by reality. DeJoy’s scheme (which is advancing with almost no opportunities for public input) would put the agency on the glide path to privatization. Postal experts from Take On Wall Street’s Save The Post Office coalition have warned that DeJoy’s 10-year plan would increase delivery times, slash tens of thousands of jobs through attrition, and cut operations at more than 200 post offices and sorting facilities – which could devastate rural and Indigenous communities. The rollout of the plan’s facility consolidations has been a disaster, resulting in chronic mail delays that prevented passports, wedding dresses, utility bills, important legal documents, and life-saving medications from arriving on time. After being grilled about these delays in a recent Senate hearing, DeJoy reluctantly agreed to pause consolidations until next January.
Alongside these service cuts, DeJoy has relied on aggressive stamp and package rate increases to boost agency revenue – hiking First Class stamp prices an unprecedented six times in three years. Public interest groups and mailing industry advocates have warned that these postage rate hikes will raise costs for postal customers, driving business and volume away from USPS. House Democrats have echoed these concerns in letters to Postal Board Chairman Roman Martinez and the Postal Regulatory Commission calling for an immediate pause on rate hikes. DeJoy has largely ignored calls from postal advocates to explore new revenue sources, such as postal banking.
DeJoy also mentions “acquiring new vehicles” as one of his successes, a reference that omits crucial context. DeJoy, as I wrote last August, has consistently opposed giving the Postal Service a fully-electric and union-built fleet. Though he’s been pressured by lawsuits into increasing the share of electric vehicles in the fleet to 62% (up from a paltry 10% in DeJoy’s initial proposal), DeJoy’s current plans fall far short of the near-100% target that environmental advocates have urged and that the Postal Service’s own inspector general has said is feasible. The backbone of the next-gen fleet, the Oshkosh NGDV, is currently being built by manufacturer Oshkosh Defense at a non-union factory in South Carolina, which UAW workers and Congressional Democrats have blasted as a “scab facility” and “bait and switch”. DeJoy has resisted calls from UAW workers to renegotiate the contract to be union-built.
Notably absent from DeJoy’s op-ed is any mention of worker safety, a year after postal carrier Eugene Gates died of heat stroke while completing his Dallas route in the scorching summer sun. An investigative report by E&E News following Gates’ death found that thousands of postal workers have failed to receive heat safety training in accordance with agency policies, and that managers across USPS have falsified official records to hide the lack of training. In January, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined USPS for failing to protect its workers from high outdoor heat. Though Postal Governor Ron Stroman and more than a dozen members of Congress have urged DeJoy to improve USPS’ heat illness prevention program, DeJoy has remained silent on the issue. His inaction is yielding tragic results: two days before DeJoy published his op-ed, postal worker Wendy Johnson died from heat stroke in the back of a postal truck.
Throughout his op-ed, DeJoy expresses a desire to run the Postal Service like a private business – a destructive mindset that has come to dominate USPS since its Nixon-era demotion from a Cabinet department to a corporation-like independent agency. This view was recently taken to its logical endpoint by neoliberal pundit Matt Yglesias, who proudly declared on Substack that he was “all for postal privatization” and “selling off some of USPS’ extensive real estate assets, many of which are probably very valuable.” The problem with this approach (as made gleefully explicit by Yglesias, who laments the “subsidization of low-productivity rural areas”) is that it would subject large swathes of the country to the mercy of private couriers, who have no universal service obligation to keep postal rates affordable or uniform, and can deny delivery service altogether to “unprofitable” remote and rural areas. Though DeJoy and Yglesias may not like it, the United States Postal Service is the only carrier obligated to provide universal service at affordable prices to every American, regardless of their geographic location. As the LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik has put it:
“Government’s role is to assume tasks that the private business won’t take on, typically because they won’t turn an immediate profit. That includes building public works such as Hoover Dam and the interstate highways and funding primary education. No one expects K-12 schools, or indeed public universities, to turn a profit. Americans travel much of our extensive interstate highway system for free — or at least free of out-of-pocket charges.
It’s true that private enterprise has stepped in to provide some of these services, but in almost every case they’ve created the antithesis of universal service. Private primary schools charge fees that make them largely havens for the elite. As states have withdrawn their financial support of public universities, those have increasingly resembled private institutions, narrowing access for working-class families and burdening more students with debt.
Universal mail delivery is a quintessential public good, more so as its core responsibility becomes less profitable.”
All this raises the question – why does DeJoy still have his job? As I’ve written previously, the blame lies with the Postal Board of Governors, who retain the sole power to hire and fire the Postmaster General by a majority vote of the nine Senate-confirmed Governors. With the exception of Governor Stroman, the board’s current members have supported DeJoy’s agenda and ignored public backlash – going so far as to eliminate the public comment period from the majority of its quarterly open sessions.
For his part, Biden has squandered key opportunities to give the Board an anti-DeJoy majority. In December 2021, he filled two tipping-point Board seats with ex-GSA head Dan Tangherlini (who approved Trump’s lease of D.C.’s Old Post Office Building) and Republican Derek Kan (a former Mitch McConnell/Elaine Chao advisor). In December 2022, he declined to replace Trump nominees Lee Moak and William Zollars when their terms expired – allowing both to serve an extra holdover year despite calls from postal advocates to replace them with reformers Brenda Lawrence and Sarah Anderson. Biden’s delay has been costly: though he nominated former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh to fill Moak’s seat this March, Walsh’s confirmation has been halted by an election-year Republican blockade of over 40 Biden nominees. As of this writing, Biden has not nominated anyone to replace Zollars.
If DeJoy is indeed likely to (as he once threatened) be in office for a long time, the press must stop falling for his lies. They must be more skeptical of his sweeping claims about the 10-year plan, especially given its failure to deliver on its own promises and the Postmaster General’s vested financial interest in making USPS less reliable. And instead of taking DeJoy’s word as gospel (or wish-casting to excuse Biden’s missteps), the media should speak to the postal workers directly affected by his policies and longtime independent postal experts like Steve Hutkins (who has done a better job than any news outlet meticulously documenting the 10-year plan’s rollout).
Kudos are in order to one reporter who has done both of these things: The Guardian’s Michael Sainato. More journalists should follow his lead when reporting on one of the most dishonest and unethical public officials in recent memory.