Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, has been slowly strangling our revered U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to death and smiling all the while. When DeJoy came on board, he tore out the million-dollar rapid sorting machines and left them to rust. Can President Joe Biden do anything about him?
The answer is a resounding “yes.” Now, he cannot directly fire DeJoy, because a board of governors must make that decision. And up until now, the Donald Trump-appointed people would not remove the USPS postmaster general. But change is in the air.
Friday POTUS announced that he will not renominate the Board’s of Governor’s chair Ron Bloom when his term ends in December. As it stands now, the nine-member board has four Democrats, four Republicans, and one independent. President Biden has only been able to appoint three of them, and one of the Democrats on the board has been very pro-Trump.
Still, DeJoy has some more time in which to wreak havoc. The USPS has already announced it is going to charge more for slower service. Republican legislators have long wished to privatize the USPS, The Forbes Magazine reported. One step in that plan was to force the organization to pay all of its employees’ retirement fees upfront.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki addressed the DeJoy problem early this year, according to The Washington Post:
‘I think we can all agree, most Americans would agree, that the Postal Service needs leadership that can and will do a better job.’
That attitude was outrageous, because the post office was never meant to be a profit center. In addition, no other part of our government has had to manage its retirement program in that way.
A Center for Public Integrity investigated DeJoy’s USPS and found:
‘hundreds of managers at post offices across the country have been caught illegally changing mail carriers’ time cards to show them working fewer hours than they did, resulting in lost pay.’
There have been sharp rebukes on Bloom’s pro-DeJoy stance from Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Kirstin Gillibrand (D-Y), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT). They stated that this alone was enough call to pull Bloom from the Board.
Senator Gillibrand indicated that she planned to “vigorously oppose” any effort to renominate Bloom:
‘During a time when Americans have relied on the Postal Service for prescriptions, benefits and voting, DeJoy has slashed service hours, arbitrarily removed mail processing equipment and caused unprecedented and widespread delays.’
Prior to the 2020 presidential elections, DeJoy tried to circumvent a Biden win by slowing down mail-in ballots. He even loaded up trucks with the familiar blue neighborhood drop boxes and hauled them away.
Sanders said:
‘We need a Postal Service board of governors that is committed to replacing Mr. DeJoy with a postmaster general who will protect and strengthen the Postal Service, not undermine and sabotage it.’
In another very unethical move, DeJoy bought $305,000 “in bonds from the asset management firm where Bloom is a senior executive.”
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