Tag: Louis DeJoy

Postal Service didn’t examine service impacts before making cuts, IG report says

House panel investigation of postal changes is ongoing

The independent watchdog of the U.S. Postal Service has issued a report criticizing service reductions implemented in June and July under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, asserting that there was no consideration of the effects the cutbacks would have before they were put in place.

“No analysis of the service impacts of these various changes was conducted and documentation and guidance to the field for these strategies was very limited and almost exclusively oral,” the report, dated Monday, says. “The resulting confusion and inconsistency in operations at postal facilities compounded the significant negative service impacts across the country.”

The inspector general’s report said that the operational changes implemented by DeJoy soon after he landed the top postal job in June may have met legal requirements, but the execution was flawed and definitively resulted in delays to mail delivery. Continue reading.

Postmaster General DeJoy’s $700,000 donation to GOP convention aligns with Senate probe of wife

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Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, whose political contributions are the subject of multiple congressional investigations and a campaign finance complaint, donated nearly $700,000 to the host committee who put on the Republican National Convention, according to recent Federal Election Commission filings.

One $250,000 donation came the same day that DeJoy gave $210,600 to Trump Victory, a donation which is currently part of an inquiry led by Senate Democrats into a series of donations surrounding the nomination of his wife, Aldona Wos, to be the next U.S. ambassador to Canada.

DeJoy, a Republican mega-donor and logistics mogul, was the convention’s lead fundraiser before being appointed postmaster general last spring by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) Board of Governors. Congressional Democrats and secretaries of state have questioned a series of reforms made by DeJoy over the summer, which they allege appear to be part of a coordinated effort to leverage the USPS to aid the re-election of President Donald Trump. Continue reading.

Postal Service workers quietly resist DeJoy’s changes with eye on election

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Many USPS employees see recent cost-cutting changes that have slowed mail delivery as violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.

This summer, as controversial new procedures at the U.S. Postal Service snarled the nation’s mail delivery and stirred fears of how the agency would handle the election, rank-and-file workers quietly began to resist.

Mechanics in New York drew out the dismantling and removal of mail-sorting machines until their supervisor gave up on the order. In Michigan, a group of letter carriers did an end run around a supervisor’s directive to leave election mail behind, starting their routes late to sift through it. In Ohio, postal clerks culled prescriptions and benefit checks from bins of stalled mail to make sure they were delivered, while some carriers ran late items out on their own time. In Pennsylvania, some postal workers looked for any excuse — a missed turn, heavy traffic, a rowdy dog — to buy enough time to finish their daily rounds.

“I can’t see any postal worker not bending those rules,” one Philadelphia staffer said in an interview. Continue reading.

Poll: USPS should be run like a public service, not a business, Americans say 2-to-1

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The Postal Service continues to rate favorably despite recent delivery backlogs and President Trump’s ongoing attacks on mail voting

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was brought on, in part, to use his extensive private-sector experience to make the nation’s venerable mail service more efficient. 

But the net effect of DeJoy’s operational changes has been a slowdown in the pace of mail delivery. It may be no surprise, then, that a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll showed that Americans, by a more than 2-to-1 margin, reject the notion that the U.S. Postal Service should be “run like a business,” to use a phrase prevalent in conservative policymaking circles.

Instead, most said the USPS should be run as a “public service,” even if doing so would cost the government money. Continue reading.

Third U.S. judge bars Postal Service delivery cuts before November presidential election

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A third federal judge has ordered the U.S. Postal Service to halt changes that have delayed mail delivery nationwide, handing the latest judicial rebuke to unilateral service cuts that critics allege would suppress mail-in voting in November’s elections.

In a pair of injunctions, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of Washington, D.C., sided with the states of New York, Hawaii and New Jersey and the cities of New York and San Francisco. The judge also sided with 15 voters and voter registration groups in a separate suit. The voter suit argued that resulting mail delays would deny thousands of people the constitutional right to vote. The cities and states alleged that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy disrupted operations without first submitting changes to the Postal Regulatory Commission, and told Congress he had no intention of returning removed collection boxes or high-speed sorting equipment.

The opinions Sunday and Monday were the latest by a court to conclude that Postal Service changes were likely to risk the timely delivery of election mail and hinder state responses to the novel coronavirus pandemic. Continue reading.

Internal USPS documents link changes behind mail slowdowns to top executives

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Newly obtained records appear in conflict with months of Postal Service assertions that blamed lower-level managers for strategies tied to delivery delays

A senior executive at the U.S. Postal Service delivered a PowerPoint presentation in July that pressed officials across the organization to make the operational changes that led to mail backups across the country, seemingly counter to months of official statements about the origin of the plans, according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post.

David E. Williams, the agency’s chief of logistics and processing operations, listed the elimination of late and extra mail trips by postal workers as a primary agency goal during the July 10 teleconference. He also told the group that he wanted daily counts on such trips, which had become common practice to ensure the timely delivery of mail. Several top-tier executives — including Robert Cintron, vice president of logistics; Angela Curtis, vice president of retail and post office operations; and vice presidents from the agency’s seven geographic areas — sat in.

The presentation stands in contrast with agency accounts that lower-tier leaders outside USPS headquarters were mainly responsible for the controversial protocols, which tightened dispatch schedules on transport trucks and forced postal workers to leave mail behind. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told a House panel last month that he pressed his team to meet dispatch and mail-handling schedules but did not issue a blanket ban on such trips. Continue reading.

Trump And DeJoy Lose Again In Sweeping Decision By Federal Judge

A federal district judge in New York ruled Monday that the U.S. Postal Service has to treat election mail as a priority, another loss for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in the courts. The judge, Victor Marrero, also ordered that overtime and extra deliveries had to be permitted by the USPS as election mail demands. This came in a suit brought by several candidates for office and New York voters against Donald Trump and DeJoy.

Marrero blasted USPS leadership and Donald Trump in his ruling. “They have not provided trusted assurance and comfort that citizens will be able to cast ballots with full confidence that their votes would be timely collected and counted,” the 87-page opinion states. “Rather, as detailed below, their actions have given rise to management and operational confusion, to directives that tend to generate uncertainty as to who is in charge of policies that ultimately could affect the reliability of absentee ballots, thus potentially discouraging voting by mail.”

This comes as previous federal and state courts have slapped DeJoy over Postal Service sabotage. Another federal court in Washington state blocked DeJoy’s operational changes, ordering a halt to the transportation schedule he’s imposed that has resulted in delivery delays across the country. Marrero ordered that all election-related mail—including voter registration materials, absentee or mail-in ballot applications, polling place notifications, blank ballots, and completed ballots—has to be treated as first-class or priority express mail. The USPS has to file weekly, public reports informing the court and the public of its performance. Continue reading.

Federal judge temporarily blocks USPS operational changes amid concerns about mail slowdowns, election

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A federal judge in Washington state on Thursday granted a request from 14 states to temporarily block operational changes within the U.S. Postal Service that have been blamed for a slowdown in mail delivery, saying President Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy are “involved in a politically motivated attack” on the agency that could disrupt the 2020 election.

Stanley A. Bastian, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, said policies put in place under DeJoy “likely will slow down delivery of ballots” this fall, creating a “substantial possibility that many voters will be disenfranchised and the states may not be able to effectively, timely, accurately determine election outcomes.”

“The states have demonstrated that the defendants are involved in a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service,” Bastian said in brief remarks after a 2½-hour hearing in Yakima. “They have also demonstrated that this attack on the Postal Service is likely to irreparably harm the states’ ability to administer the 2020 general election.” Continue reading.

Suspicious Timeline Shows DeJoy’s Massive Donations Just Before Trump Made Him Postmaster

How did Louis DeJoy, the first Postmaster General to have never worked in the Postal Service to ever serve in the job, get that plum position? Could it have been, oh, I don’t know, buying his way in? DeJoy donated more than $600,000 to the Trump campaign and to the Republican National Committee from the time the job opened up and getting the nod. Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research, which investigates the influence of money on public policy, testified to Congress Monday detailing the depth of DeJoy’s spending with the GOP.

In just this 2020 cycle, he’s given more than $1.5 million to Republicans, most to Trump’s reelection and to Republican Senate races. He invested almost $80,000 in Republican Senate races since December, when the Postmaster job opened up. “This level of partisanship,” Graves said in written testimony, “undermines public trust in the Postal Service as an institution.” Why yes, yes it does. It also resurfaces all the questions that emerged about just why Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took a detour from his day job to get DeJoy this job. Whatever motivated him, it clearly wasn’t DeJoy’s qualifications.

Ahead of Monday’s hearing, Virginia Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly, chairman of the oversight subcommittee, stated the obvious. “We have a crony at the helm of our nation’s Postal Service, a man rife with conflicts of interest and potential violations of law.” The potential violations of the law are the alleged campaign finance violations in which he used a straw donor scheme to raise over $1 million for Republicans from 2000 to 2014 from his former employees. Allegedly. He faces potential criminal liability for that in the state of North Carolina, which does not have a statute of limitations on felonies and where his company was headquartered. Continue reading.

Postal police union sues USPS, DeJoy over limits to mail theft enforcement authority

The union argues that this unilateral change by USPS managers violates their collective bargaining agreement

The Postal Service last month abruptly ordered its police officers to stop investigating mail theft that occurs away from post office property, the Postal Police Officers Association alleged Monday, suing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to block a change they say could erode the safety of mail carriers and delivery.

“The Postal Service’s sudden change is unwarranted, impermissible, and contrary to the language of the statute and also to collective bargaining promises it has made to the officers’ union,” the association said in its lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Washington D.C.

Per the union, USPS implemented the change on Aug. 25, a day after DeJoy testified to Congress amid mounting concerns that policy changes he implemented were delaying mail service and could jeopardize record numbers of mail-in ballots expected in the presidential election. Continue reading.