INa month ago, a U.S. Postal Service (USPS) mail carrier named Mark arrived at his post office in central Pennsylvania and received some shocking news from his station manager. Mark and his colleagues were told they had to leave the office a few hours earlier each day, even if that meant leaving much of the day’s mail behind.
In the weeks that followed, higher ups at the station instructed carriers to leave hundreds of posts to leave just 10 or 20 minutes earlier. As the days passed, the surplus mail began to pile up, and now Mark estimates that there were thousands of undelivered letters and parcels in his station.
“The supervisors cut the whip, and made sure we left,” Mark told the Guardian. “Meanwhile, carriers walk by and say, ‘Look at all these nice posts we pass, it’s just sitting there.'”
When Mark and his colleagues confronted the station manager, he said he was only following orders from the new USPS postmaster general, Louis DeJoy. Since taking office in June, DeJoy has made sweeping changes in the wrestling of the U.S. Postal Service, shaking up agencies and cracking down on policies that have led to delays in mail delivery. These changes, DeJoy said, are designed to cut labor costs, angering lawyers and Democratic politicians, who accused him of trying to win the election just weeks before millions of Americans began throwing their ballots through the mail.
Now, Trump’s controversial executive logistics and mega-donor probably have more power than any other official in the country to influence the outcome of this year’s presidential election.
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Donald Trump has kept a public obsession with the USPS, which he called “a joke”. In particular, he has blundered against the agency’s business relationship with Amazon: despite investigations showing that the USPS is making a profit by sending packages to the e-commerce giant, Trump has repeatedly insisted that the agency Amazon higher rates should charge.
USPS reported a loss of more than $ 2bn in the last three months and projected losses of up to $ 20bn over the next two years. Although the agency’s largest albatross has had a unique mandate to fund decades of retirement benefits, it has also lost revenue through a decline in first-class mail. The coronavirus has only made this pattern faster because email volumes dropped during the first months of the pandemic.
To stink the bleeding, congressional Democrats have proposed giving the agency up to $ 25 billion in aid as part of its second coronavirus relief package, but Trump again on Thursday opposed the proposal on the grounds that it would help the USPS get postal ballots , which he mistakenly believes would lead to voter fraud.
“They need that money to run the post office so it can take all those millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. ‘If they don’t get it [funding], which means they can not have universal mail-in-voice. ”
Without a support package, the USPS faces unusual challenges with staffing and planning due to the impact of the coronavirus on its already extensive thin workforce. Customers in more than a dozen states have reported delays of days or even weeks in mail delivery, including for essences such as prescription medications. And a number of recent primary elections have been marred by postal failures: countless voters in Wisconsin and Michigan have never received absentee ballots they requested weeks in advance, while New York postal workers unintentionally disqualified thousands of ballot papers for not having good postage stamps.
Amid this unrest, DeJoy’s appointment marks the culmination of a years-long attempt by the Trump administration to gain control of the USPS: earlier this year, the president also filled two vacancies on the agency’s board of directors with outsiders. of agencies, giving him full control over the regulatory body.
DeJoy is only the fifth postmaster general in history to come from the private sector. He has never worked for the USPS, but he benefited as CEO of New Breed Logistics from a long business relationship with the agency. In the late 1980s, the shipping company signed a hardware contract with the USPS and over the next 20 years, the agency became one of the company’s largest customers in addition to private companies such as Sony and Estee Lauder. A newspaper in North Carolina later referred to the USPS contract as the “big break” of the New Breed.
But DeJoy’s term at New Breed was marked by controversy: the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the company’s interactions with its workers were “motivated by anti-union animus”, and the company paid more than $ 1.7 million in fines for violations of labor law between 2001 and 2015, according to the Intercept. In early 2000, DeJoy’s younger brother, Dominick, prosecuted Louis and a third brother, Michael, accusing them of fraudulent one-third stake in the company, according to a news release at the time.
As he grew his logistics empire, DeJoy also made a name for himself as a prolific Republican fundraiser, hosting hearty lavish dinners from his home in Greensboro, a $ 5 million mansion compound. Former President George W Bush held a $ 1,000-a-plate event at the House ahead of that year’s midterm elections in 2006, while former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin held another closed-door event two years later.
DeJoy, meanwhile, is not the only member of his family to enter politics: his wife, Aldona Wos, served as ambassador to Estonia under Bush and was later head of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. , where she criticized for hiring a number of aid workers from Republicans and former New Breed employees. In 2014, the USDA discovered a pattern of sloppy accounting and an enormous backlog in the state database of recipients of food stamps in its agency. This year, Trump nominated Wos to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Canada.
It took about 30 years, but leading New Breed eventually paid off. In 2014, he sold the company to logistics conglomerate XPO for a reported $ 615 million, and became CEO of XPO. When DeJoy retired in 2015, he told local newspapers that he had spent some time at his beach house, had dinner with his two children, and ‘actually’ read ‘his Wall Street Journal. He also launched a holding company, LDJ Strategies, which he planned to use to invest his money in real estate and private equity investments.
According to financial revelations received by CNN, DeJoy still manages a large stake in XPO Logistics, and owns large amounts of Amazon stock, which is why two glorious interests are of interest to a man who runs a government agency that competes with both companies in some areas. Outside ethics experts called the revelations ‘shocking’.
But the main activity of DeJoy during his short retirement turned out to be fundraising for the GOP, especially Donald Trump. In early 2016, DeJoy donated more than $ 1.2 million to pro-Trump Pacss, making him one of the president’s largest single donors. He held a $ 15,000 cash prize for Trump at his home in late 2017, noting in the invitation that although “the president and his team have made some mistakes … it’s hard to deny the extreme and unreasonable challenges they face.” t he of the political establishment “.
Last year, Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Ronna McDaniel named DeJoy a fundraiser for the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, and he hosted Mike Pence to steal his money. In an interview prior to the event, DeJoy said he planned to raise $ 70 million using a “nationwide begging” strategy.
The RNC decided last month to scale down the Charlotte Convention due to concerns about the coronavirus, but DeJoy’s ample fundraising for the event paid off, however, in the form of his appointment to the post of postmaster general.
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In his short term at USPS, DeJoy has already orchestrated risky changes to the agency. In interviews with the Guardian, postal workers said that DeJoy’s new policy introduced further confusion to an agency already hampered by the coronavirus pandemic. They argued that the inconsistent and sporadic changes could cause serious harm to people and businesses and prevent the agency from causing any vote to be counted in the upcoming elections.
Sasha, a Massachusetts mail carrier, said USPS leadership has spent hours slinging for the clerks who sort the mail. This has resulted in a delay of several days for remaining mail including heavier packages from Amazon and other delivery services, a delay that has already affected a small business owner along its route.
“This kind of delay in service is voter oppression, simple and straightforward,” Sasha said. “Not one person in my station of about 50 employees is of the opinion that this is anything other than active sabotage, and that includes supporters of the president.”
Another carrier in rural North Carolina said his station began receiving mail from the sorting plant a few hours earlier than usual. According to the carrier, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, this change almost certainly means that some letters and packages are left at the plant every day, causing some of its most distant customers to pick up supplies or medicines.
These problems reflect backlogs that are accumulating across the country: even small post offices report backlogs of up to 10,000 mail pieces, while some postal union officials have also reported that senior leadership is taking their mail sorting equipment.
DeJoy has also enrolled about 400 post offices in a pilot program that prohibits post offices from manually sorting the mail of the morning before postmen leave the station to deliver it. Letters that were not automatically sorted by the station’s machinery are simply left at the station and delivered on one future day, when the carriers arrive. The union representing letter carriers has filed a national-level grievance against the program, saying the program unreasonably restricts carriers’ ability to retrieve e-mail.
In response to a request for comment, a USPS spokesman referred the Guardian to a set of comments released by DeJoy last week, in which he said he “strongly concentrated on the complex inefficiencies in our operations” and promised “aggressively control and quickly address service issues”.
But for employees like Mark, the postal carrier in Pennsylvania, whose station shares the pilot program, the changes have only led to the massive build-up of mail and week-long delays. He said he now doubts the USPS can provide security in the upcoming elections, especially in his home state, which Trump led by about 40,000 votes in the 2016 election.
“If you asked me a month ago, can the postal service handle a stream of post-in-votes, then I would have said, ‘We’ve had two world wars and one depression, we’ve been doing this for over 200 years,’ ‘ ” he said.
“Well, I’m not so sure.”
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