Postal chief retreats on service changes
What happened
Amid fierce public backlash, U.S. Postmaster General Louis
DeJoy announced this week that he was postponing cost-cutting measures that have slowed mail delivery and sparked fears about compromised mail-in balloting this fall. “To avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail,” he said, “I am suspending these initiatives until after the election.” Since assuming the job in June, DeJoy, a major donor to President Trump, has cut back overtime, reduced post office hours, and decommissioned scores of high-speed mail-sorting machines. The moves led to reports of weeks-long waits for paychecks and mail-order medications and stoked fears that service was intentionally being slowed to aid the president’s re-election effort. Some 47 percent of voters who back Joe Biden intend to vote by mail during the pandemic, compared with 11 percent of Trump supporters, according to a Wall Street Journal/ NBC News poll. Those fears were compounded last week when Trump declared he would veto any coronavirus relief bill that included emergency funding for the USPS. Without the fund ing, he said, “You can’t have universal mail-in voting.”
DeJoy’s reversal came days before he was set to testify to Congress, and hours after more than 20 states announced plans to file lawsuits over the policy changes, arguing that they will unlawfully impede state elections. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called on members to return from recess this week to vote on a bill that would boost USPS funding by $25 billion and undo the recent service changes. DeJoy’s announcement, said Pelosi, is “wholly insufficient and does not reverse damage already wreaked.”
What the columnists said
There are enough holes in DeJoy’s statement to “drive a full-size family minivan through,” said Charles Pierce in Esquire.com. Will the 671 sorting machines removed from USPS facilities be returned? Will overtime be approved for workers facing a November crush? Will DeJoy push ahead with plans to charge states first-class rates for ballots, more than double what they traditionally pay? Democrats must press hard for answers, while keeping in mind the crucial political fact of our era: that “nothing this administration says can be taken as the truth.”
Cut the “hysteria,” said Rich Lowry in NationalReview.com. DeJoy’s not trying to undermine democracy, he’s trying to save an agency that lost more than $2 billion last quarter and is headed for bankruptcy without meaningful change. That’s why he’s cutting overtime; meanwhile, plans to deactivate sorting machines were in the works long before his arrival. These needed reforms should be praised by those “caterwauling about how essential the post office is to the American way of life.”
DeJoy’s retreat is welcome, but much of the damage “may be impossible to undo,” said Michael McGough in the Los Angeles Times. For some Americans, Trump’s unfounded trashing of mailin voting has planted doubts about whether their mail ballots will be counted, or whether they might be canceled out by “fraudulently cast votes.” These voters “may be suspicious about the outcome.” That distrust may not fade “however heroically the post office conducts itself from now until the final votes are counted.”