Snail Mail - Conflicts of Interest of the New Postmaster General and the Forced Delays of the Postal Service

By: Catherine Daleo
Reading time: 4-5 minutes

*UPDATE!!!* – Louis DeJoy has announced that he will be suspended his procedural changes to the USPS until after the November election! Keep the pressure on him and our politicians to do more to protect the USPS. (And keep buying stamps!). – 8/18/2020

In May of this year, the Postal Service’s Board of Governors appointed Louis DeJoy as the Postmaster General. There is some cause for concern with this appointment in terms of conflicts of interest.

For one, DeJoy is a businessman and a Republican Party fundraiser, and most notably a top Trump campaign contributor. Since 2016, DeJoy has donated over $1.2 million to Trump’s Victory Fund.

That on its own makes this appointment unsurprising in a day and age where friends and donors of the president are given high ranking positions and are allowed to exert their newfound power and control over these institutions to their benefit or interest. *cough* Betsy DeVos *cough*

Which leads to the next concern of this appointment – DeJoy and his wife, Aldona Wos (who has worked with previous administrations, but is notably also a Trump appointee) both have interests in the private mailing service industry.

Donald K. Sherman, deputy director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Sylvia Albert, and director of voting and elections at Common Cause wrote an op-ed article for NBC discussing these conflicts of interests.

In it, he wrote that DeJoy and Wos “own $30.1 million to $75.3 million in assets in Postal Service competitors or contractors, like UPS and the trucking company J.B. Hunt.”

Sherman goes on to clarify that, “Although DeJoy likely had to divest these conflicting assets, his ethics agreement and personal financial disclosure statement are not yet available on the Office of Government Ethics’ website for the public to confirm,” (NBC, 2020).

The concern here, of course, is that with this conflict of interest, it is expected that DeJoy will use his position to undermine the postal service, which has already been subject to defunding for years now, and force the privatization of the service or cause it to disband and open the market for only private mailing services, like the UPS which DeJoy and Wos have some interest in.

This has already been seen as reports of purposeful slowing down of postal services has caused a mass disruption of service, resulting from actions by DeJoy such as cutting hours of operation at post offices across the country, ending overtime pay for postal service workers, and instructing them to leave mail at distribution centers for the next day if it would slow down their route.

There are now reports of mail-sorting machines being removed from facilities and even reports that mailboxes are being removed as well – although a USPS spokesperson stated that the mailboxes being removed are in areas where there are multiples close together. [5, 6]

And a major concern about these service slowdowns is that with the current global pandemic, the upcoming election, and the discussion of mail-in voting to protect people who are voting, there is speculation that Trump is using DeJoy to disrupt the postal service in order to prevent people from being able to submit their ballots or to have them received back in time.

Trump has claimed multiple times, without evidence and having been debunked multiple times, that voting by mail will cause widespread election fraud, despite the fact that he himself, along with many others in his family and circle, all vote by mail.

And after Trump’s statement today, (Aug. 13th, 2020) there leaves little room left to guess his motives. He is actively working to defund the USPS in order to stop mail-in voting because he sees it as a threat to his reelection.

Specifically, he is quoted saying: “They need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said on Fox Business Thursday morning of the states that are implementing universal mail-in voting ahead of the November election. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it,” [VICE News]

There was much speculation, now seemingly confirmed from Trump himself, that through disparaging the idea of voting by mail and the actions being taken at by DeJoy, the president is purposefully working to suppress votes by resisting vote-by-mail initiatives in states (including suing our home state of Nevada for passing such an initiative) and by undermining the efficiency of the postal service.

In defense of this, DeJoy claimed that he is not intentionally slowing down the service, and that he and the postal service are committed to “fulfilling our role in the electoral process”, which he said in a meeting to the Postal Service Board of Governors on Friday, August 7th.

In that meeting, DeJoy also stated, “We will do everything that we can to deliver election mail in a timely manner consistent with our operational standards, and despite any assertions to the contrary, we are not slowing down election mail or any other mail,” (Postal Employee Network, 2020).

Despite this assertion, many have seen a negative impact as a result of DeJoy’s changes, especially small businesses.

In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Mitch Goldstone, co-founder of ScanMyPhotos, shared how these procedural changes have caused massive delays and are largely hurting small businesses who rely on the USPS to conduct their business.

“They are the reason we have this business”, Goldstone said, sharing how important the relationship is that his company and the USPS have and have built over the years. Many other companies and small businesses are in the same boat and will be affected by these actions. Some businesses won’t make it as a result, as private mailing services are largely more expensive than the intentionally affordable USPS.

Goldstone also shared how the company has put out an open letter to the president and the postal service, calling out the delays in service and expressing how these delays are and will continue to have, devastating impacts on millions of small businesses.

Despite this important relationship between the USPS and small businesses, there are some who argue that the postal service isn’t profitable and that the free market should dictate its survival. Except for the problem with that notion is this: The USPS is supposed to be a postal service, not a postal business.

And the postal service has survived much since it’s creation and appointment of the first Postmaster General – Benjamin Franklin. It’s lived through the country’s revolutionary war, the Civil War, two world wars, the Great Depression, and everything else since then and in between. There is no reason to be losing this historic service now, just because the President feels threatened by it.

A major problem with blaming the USPS for its financial woes, however, is that it ignores the fact that back in 2006, Congress mandated that the USPS pre-fund 75 years of its retiree health benefits over the span of 10 years at an estimated cost of $5.5 billion per year between – something that is not normally forced upon entities, public or private, [12].

It is speculated that, were it not for this decision, the USPS would not be suffering the financial problems it faces today, and likely would be much more profitable.

Despite popular assumption, the USPS is self-funded and receives no tax-payer money. Instead, they are funded largely by the purchase of stamps for regular letter-mail, as well as revenue from other services and products they offer, (USPS Postal Facts, Fact #1).

Unfortunately, despite being hit hard by the pandemic, the USPS was denied bailout funding as the president threatened to veto a bailout package for the USPS, resulting in the Senate removing the funding for the USPS from their CARES Act package, [10]

As it appears, the odds are stacked against the USPS, and their future is threatened on many fronts. This is why, if our elected officials will not act to save this vital service, we ourselves must collectively do all we can to protect the USPS, if only for our own benefit.

And the easiest way to do this is by buying stamps directly from the USPS. For as little as $11 for a sheet of 20 stamps (55 cents per Forever Stamp) you can help support this important service which in turn will help small businesses, veterans and disabled folks who rely on the USPS for medications, people in the prison system, postal workers, and more.

Stay tuned for my next article outlining the specific reasons for why we should be supporting the USPS and more ways in which we can help them stay funded.

You can also learn more about the Postal Service and the threats it faces through these breakdowns by John Oliver on his episodes from Last Week Tonight on both the postal service and the topic of voting by mail.

And, please check out Restore the USPS, a group created by concerned citizens (not affiliated with USPS) who are working to keep the USPS a public service, resisting the push to privatize it. They have multiple initiatives and ways that you can use to help protect this vital service.

Resources