The U.S. postal disservice
Imagine if Saratoga Race Course announced that this summer, the horses won’t be fast, but they’ll be a lot cheaper. The goal for races will be not so much getting around the track quickly as, well, eventually. And the price of admission will go up. Exciting, huh?
That would be ridiculous, of course. But it’s fundamentally what Postmaster General Louis Dejoy is trying to pass off as a reform plan for the U.S. Postal Service, which he and former President Donald Trump spent the better part of last year decimating.
Slower service, higher prices. Mr. Dejoy seems determined to make the Postal Service the embodiment of the phrase “broken government.”
No, it wasn’t perfect before he took office, but its performance on his watch has been increasingly abysmal. Postal Service data shows on-time delivery rates for three- to five-day mail stood at less than 55 percent in the first quarter of the current fiscal year, and below 50 percent in the eastern part of the country. It was at about 79 percent before Mr. Dejoy assumed his post, and 85 percent before Mr. Trump took office.
Mr. Dejoy’s solution? Like with the cheap, slow (but reliable!) nags in the fictional horseracing scenario, he proposes to focus less on speed of delivery and more on reliability and cost efficiency. And to make that look like progress, he audaciously proposes to lower the goal for ontime delivery — from within three days for first-class mail to within five days. But wait, there’s more: He also wants to raise prices.
The only thing perhaps more bewildering than Mr. Dejoy’s strategy of diminished expectations is the fact that he has kept his job this long. Or that he got it at all.
Where a generous campaign contributor like Mr. Dejoy might have been rewarded with a minor ambassadorship in which he could do relatively little harm, Mr. Trump had the Postal Service’s board of governors, made up entirely of his own appointees, put him in charge of an institution that has been vital to the nation’s commerce since its creation and the appointment of its first postmaster general, Ben Franklin.
With Mr. Trump trying to depress mail-in voting during the pandemic — a trend he and other Republicans feared would benefit Democrats — Mr. Dejoy took conspicuous steps to gum up the works last year. He ordered automation equipment taken off line, cut overtime, ended deliveries late in the day and directed that undelivered mail at the end of a shift be held for the next day. And he even denied to Congress in some cases that he had a role in some of those steps. It took court intervention to put a halt to this open sabotage and this naked attempt to disenfranchise voters.
For the moment, America appears to be stuck with Mr. Dejoy, but not necessarily for long. President Joe Biden has four openings to fill on the Postal Service’s nine-member board of governors, and has already nominated three. Another seat will become vacant at the end of this year, which means there could soon be a majority to oust Mr. Dejoy, and put in place someone competent and committed to the agency’s mission — not Mr. Dejoy’s agenda, whatever it is.