Heather Cox Richardson on the activities of new Postmaster General DeJoy:
The Friday night news dump was about the United States Postal Service. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump loyalist, has recently created new rules for the agency that have dramatically slowed the delivery of mail just as mail-in voting for 2020 has begun. Today, DeJoy overhauled the USPS, releasing a new organizational chart that displaces postal executives with decades of experience and concentrates power in DeJoy himself. Twenty-three executives have been reassigned or fired; five have been moved in from other roles. The seven regions of the nation will become four, and the USPS will have a hiring freeze. DeJoy says the new organization will create “clear lines of authority and accountability.”
There is reason to be suspicious of DeJoy’s motives. Not only have his new regulations slowed mail delivery, but also under him the USPS has told states that ballots will have to carry first-class 55-cent postage rather than the normal 20-cent bulk rate, almost tripling the cost of mailing ballots. This seems to speak to Trump’s wish to make mail-in ballots problematic for states. And DeJoy and his wife, Aldona Wos, whom Trump has nominated to become ambassador to Canada, own between $30.1 million and $75.3 million of assets in competitors to the USPS. This seems to speak to the report issued by the Trump administration shortly after the president took office, calling for the privatization of the USPS.
Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called out the policies that slowed the delivery of essential mail, “including medicines for seniors, paychecks for workers, and absentee ballots for voters.” They called for DeJoy’s recent changes to be reversed.
How this isn’t a conflict of interest, I don’t know. There are some notable points.
Popularity. The USPS is not an unpopular institution. In fact, according to Gallup, as of about a year ago, USPS was the most popular Federal agency.- Anti-democratic. Given its popularity, this approach – underhanded, if you need an appropriate adjective – to getting rid of USPS by replacing optimized processes and experienced personnel with sub-optimal processes and using political hacks like DeJoy in place of people who know their business, subverts the popular will, as well as betraying the legacy of the first Postmaster-General, Benjamin Franklin, who saw USPS not so much as a service, but as a national binder, a tie that related all of us to each other. By destroying it, Trump and DeJoy destroy another tendon holding this nation together. This is no way to run a government.
- Prices will rise. We’ve already seen price inflation from USPS. If USPS is completely subverted and destroyed, UPS, FedEx, and their competitors will have even less competition. Basic economic theory teaches that prices rise and fall for a particular product or service in relation to the number and intensity of competition, mitigated by collusive activities. Prices will rise and profits become further engorged – much to the benefit of stock holders like DeJoy and his wife. See the links to UPS and FedEx for information on profit growth in recent years.
- Endangerment. Seeing as many medicines are now delivered via USPS, citizens who cannot leave their abodes and, for whatever reason, are isolated from pharmacies, such as in rural areas, will now have their life-saving medicines delayed, as has already been documented. DeJoy should be arrested and criminally charged with malicious endangerment by one of the states. (I wonder what would happen if a Change.org petition calling for that action were to appear.)
I have little doubt that a Biden Administration, should that come to pass, would make rebuilding USPS a priority. But it shouldn’t be necessary; Trump should know better. The fact that he doesn’t is a measure of his dysfunctionality.
I hope Pelosi and Schumer can do more to stop this oaf.
