As nationwide outrage continues to mount over Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s handling of the U.S. Postal Service, a group of House Democrats banded together to stop him on Friday. They introduced the Delivering Envelopes Judiciously On-time Year-round Act, or DEJOY Act, which The Washington Post explains, would “prohibit the Postal Service from lengthening mail-delivery windows and require it to adhere to present service expectations.” Recently, DeJoy unveiled a 10-year plan for the Postal Service that would, among other shifts, extend delivery periods for certain pieces of mail.
As the Post summarizes, DeJoy “hopes to save the Postal Service $160 billion over the next decade through a combination of austerity measures, postage price increases and projected package volume growth.” Although at present, the Postal Service aims to deliver all first-class mail within three days, DeJoy would extend that timeframe to up to five days for some 30 percent of first-class mail. His plan also includes an assumption of an imminent repeal from Congress of the demand for the Postal Service to pre-fund pension benefits for retirees, which costs the agency billions of dollars a year. Instead, DeJoy is angling for Postal Service retirees to become Medicare beneficiaries.
Postal Service spokesman David Partenheimer defended DeJoy’s plans to the Post. As he put it:
‘The modifications we are proposing will enable us to improve reliability by shifting volume from unreliable air transportation to more reliable ground transportation and facilitate network improvements that will ensure that we can meet or exceed 95 percent on-time delivery across all of our mail and shipping product classes during all times of the year.’
DeJoy, whose team has already submitted proposed changes to the Postal Regulatory Commission for review, also chimed in, insisting that agency leaders on his side do “not believe that any of these changes that we are proposing or moving forward on are hugely impacting or changing the structure and the service of the Postal Service.”
After he unveiled his plan, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) called for his immediate removal by the Postal Service Board of Governors, which is tasked with handling the appointment of the Postmaster General. Although DeJoy was appointed by the postal board, he has been a clear political ally of ex-President Donald Trump. Every one of the postal board’s current members are Trump appointees, so the chaos that Trump enabled is continuing to spread.
