Public Pressure Forces Louis DeJoy To Cave & Change USPS Policy

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The U.S. Postal Service is changing its plans for the procurement of new delivery vehicles after consistent push-back to its initial plans to rely on mostly gas-powered replacements. Now, at least 40 percent of the Postal Service’s new delivery vehicles will be electric. Just 10 percent of vehicles were going to be electric under previous plans.

The Postal Service’s overall fleet is large enough that whichever direction the agency goes with its vehicle specifications is poised to have a substantial impact. “Regulators estimated that 150,000 of the Oshkosh gas-powered trucks would emit roughly the same amount of Earth-warming carbon dioxide each year as 4.3 million passenger vehicles,” according to The Washington Post. Oshkosh Defense was originally set to provide the mostly gas-powered vehicles that were to be newly incorporated into the Postal Service’s large delivery fleet. The total number of vehicles from Oshkosh was set at up to 165,000, but now, the agency will only be obtaining the minimum amount specified in the original Oshkosh contract: 50,000. Half of those will be electric. Tens of thousands more will be procured elsewhere.

The agency seems to have technically opted to change its procurement plans of its own accord rather than in direct, formal response to a lawsuit from a coalition of interests including New York state Attorney General Letitia James. The total size of the Postal Service’s vehicle fleet is at over 217,000, so the newly procured vehicles won’t replace the entirety of what the agency already holds. The gas-powered vehicles available from Oshkosh are barely more fuel-efficient — to a basically negligible extent — than gas-powered vehicles already in the agency’s possession. With the A/C on, the Oshkosh internal combustion engine maintains 8.6 mpg — less than 0.5 mpg ahead of the gas-powered vehicles they’ll be replacing, which were procured decades ago. As for other factors leading into the decision by the Postal Service to change its original vehicle-procurement plans, Congress recently passed legislation allowing billions of dollars in additional funding for spending at the agency.

“The one thing that has changed is their fiscal condition is much improved… To be charitable, that could be some part of the explanation. But the truth is, you don’t need billions of dollars from Congress to do the smart thing,” Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Colo.), who led the sponsorship of the funding legislation, remarked. The pressure on Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to change the purchasing plans at the agency also came from the House Oversight Committee, which opened an investigation into the vehicle-procurement arrangement, and other interests in Congress.

A statement from the Postal Service about its change in plans indicated the agency was purposeful in bringing its overall procurement levels lower: “The Postal Service anticipates evaluating and procuring vehicles over shorter time periods to be more responsive to its evolving operational strategy, technology improvements, and changing market conditions, including the expected increased availability of [electric vehicle] options in the future.”

Oshkosh apparently never made electric vehicles before its arrangement with the Postal Service, underscoring the apparent lack of significant attention originally paid to electric vehicle options inside the federal agency. Although the substantial additions to the numbers of electric vehicles the Postal Service is obtaining are, well, substantial, there’s more that could be done: the Office of Inspector General overseeing the agency concluded almost all delivery routes could be served by electric vehicles. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), who leads the House oversight panel, indicated after these announcements she’d keep pushing to make the whole fleet electric.