Postmaster tells committee he won’t restore sorting gear

WASHINGTON — Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told lawmakers on Monday that the U.S. Postal Service would not undo the cost-cutting maneuvers he instituted this summer to restore mail processing capacity before the November election, sparring with Democrats in a heated hearing before the House Oversight Committee.

DeJoy in July mandated that trucks that transport mail from processing facilities to distribution centers adhere to stricter schedules, leaving mail behind if they are running late or if parcels had yet to be sorted. He also ordered that mail handlers depart for their routes sooner even if mail had not arrived.

Internal Postal Service documents circulated to midlevel managers and obtained by the Washington Post also show that DeJoy cracked down on overtime and additional delivery trips to ensure ontime mail service. DeJoy denied in sworn testimony that he issued any such guidance.

Those moves, according to agency employees and postal experts, caused multiday delays in localities across the country, ensnaring ballots in midsummer primary elections, causing food to rot inside packages in Los Angeles and depriving residents in parts of Philadelphia of mail delivery for weeks at a time, among other slowdowns.

DeJoy last week suspended some of the USPS’s cost-cutting agenda until after the election, but told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Friday that many other policies would remain in place, including the ban on extra mail trips and the early transportation schedule.

He also said the nearly 700 high-speed mail sorting machines that had been removed across the country in recent months would not be reinstalled; neither would dozens of blue collection boxes.

Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., scheduled the emergency hearing — and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the chamber back to order — after Trump on Aug. 12, said he’d withhold funding from the Postal Service to hobble its ability to distribute and collect mailed ballots.

Democrats over the weekend pushed Maloney’s Delivering For America Act through the House, which would provide the Postal Service with $25 billion in emergency funding, fulfilling a request from the agency’s bipartisan governing board, and bar DeJoy from making any service or operational changes until the end of the pandemic.

The GOP-controlled Senate is unlikely to take up the bill.