USA TODAY International Edition
Our View: Politicization and slow mail delivering no joy
As much as the U. S. Postal Service has struggled with profitability and ontime package delivery in recent years, most Americans could expect that a check in the mail to pay, say, a heating bill or the mortgage would arrive on time. No more.
“Got a bill back — my mortgage payment — and it said it was late last month,” Detroit resident Lucy Johnson complained to NPR. “I know I mailed it 10 days in advance, and they still charged me a late charge.”
The Postal Service has gone from bad to worse to awful under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, an acolyte of Donald Trump and a Republican megadonor. “Americans are fed up,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell, D- N. J., in urging President Joe Biden to take action. “It’s time to clean house, and top leadership should be replaced.”
Which might not be a bad idea. DeJoy was mired in controversy from the start, brought on last summer by the Postal Service Board of Governors acting under pressure imposed by a Trump administration controlling the purse strings for a badly needed $ 10 billion loan ( if only a Band- Aid for what the debt- ridden agency needs for solvency).
DeJoy immediately launched a series of cost- cutting strategies without any impact analysis or much guidance for field offices.
Utter confusion followed, “result ( ing) in a significant drop in the quality and timeliness of mail delivery,” an inspector general later found.
Under court order and immense public pressure, the Postal Service managed — to its credit — to process record numbers of mail- in ballots during the November election.
After that, however, mail delivery went over a cliff. A busier- than- usual holiday season loomed. The workforce was exhausted and depleted by coronavirus exposures and infections, and backlogs mounted.
Through the end of the year, only a quarter of first- class mail was processed on time in some areas of the country, and periodicals and marketing deliveries were even worse.
Nationally, only 64% of first- class mail was delivered on time around Christmas. Letters were taking weeks to cross the country. Americans received late- notices and penalties for absent bill payments — and had to fork over stop- payment fees for missing checks. Coupons arrived after windowof- use closed, and nonprofit fundraising pleas showed up after the tax year ended, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
“It’s been genuinely awful,” Dave Lewis, president ot Snailworks, which tracks mail delivery for businesses and nonprofit groups, said of the Postal Service. “They are slowly digging out. They’re better than they were in December. But still, in a lot of areas, delivery is badly delayed.”
Critics complained that the Postal Service was prioritizing package delivery over mail to fend off FedEx and UPS competition. But that’s misguided if true. Frustrated consumers of firstclass mail always have other choices.
“I’m probably going to start paying ( bills) over the phone, possibly paying them online,” Anna Benson, of Plain Township, Ohio, told the The ( Canton) Repository news outlet. “I’m going to try to use the post office as little as possible.”
The result is that the centuries of affection most Americans have had for the U. S. Postal Service is tarnishing quickly, if not irreparably. The agency has suffered financially for years from declining mail usage and, more recently, from unwarranted federal requirements to prefund pension obligations. The House has passed legislation to eliminate that, and the Senate must do the same.
In the meantime, the politicization and poor leadership of the Postal Service have grown intolerable. Beyond the hiring of DeJoy, the Board of Governors is led by a former Republican National Committee chairman tapped by Trump.
Biden can fix this.
While the president can’t legally replace DeJoy, he can fire the board members, all appointees of a president who maligned the Postal Service by calling it a joke. The board members Trump named certainly sat idle while DeJoy’s incompetence dragged down agency performance in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.
By statute, board members are pledged to “represent the public interest.” That hasn’t happened. Moving them out, and DeJoy thereafter, would truly serve the public interest.