Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has come under fire for the changes he has made in the United States Postal Service since taking office on June 15.
The changes – including eliminating employee overtime, removing mail sorting machines from postal facilities around the country, and reorganizing or eliminating postal service leadership – have slowed down postal services in some areas and raised concerns about whether the service is historically high can handle volumes of sent votes expected in the November elections.
Mr DeJoy argued that the changes were necessary to help the Post Office financially stable. The service has been struggling economically for years, and its financial problems have been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.
A Republican party and Trump campaign megadonor, Mr. DeJoy is one of just five postmasters generals to hold the post of private sector since 1971, when the Post Office ceased to be a cabinet department and became reorganized as the Postal Service, an independent federal agency.
How did he make his money?
Mr. DeJoy, 63, grew up in New York City. His father was a truck driver, and both of his parents had 8th grade education, he told The Triad Business Journal in 2016.
After graduating from Stetson University with a business degree, Mr. DeJoy pursued a career as a certified public accountant, but instead took over his failed trucking business on Long Island.
In the early 1980s, Mr. DeJoy built the company, which started with just ten employees, into New Breed Logistics, a national provider of logistics and supply chain services based in North Carolina that had contracts with Boeing, Verizon and the Postal Service, among others. By 2014, it had nearly 7,000 employees.
He sold the company that year for $ 615 million to XPO Logistics and founded LDJ Global Strategies, a company for real estate, investments and consulting.
Mr. DeJoy and his wife, Aldona Wos, have made significant investments in companies that do business with or compete with the Postal Service. According to revelations submitted to the Office of Government Ethics, the pair holds between $ 30.1 million and $ 75.3 million in such investments, mostly in XPO Logistics, where Mr. DeJoy was a director until 2018.
His supporters point to his success in building New Breed Logistics as proof that he has the business acumen to solve Postal Service financial problems. Critics say he is not qualified to oversee a large organization of more than half a million employees, whose mission is to provide a vital public service, not to make a profit.
What are his political connections?
Mr. DeJoy has long been a major financial supporter of the Republican Party. Before becoming postmaster general, he was an alternate national chairman for fundraising for the GOP. He has held events and fundraisers for Republican presidential candidates and presidents since 2006.
Since 2016, Mr. DeJoy has donated $ 1.2 million to President Trump’s campaign suitcases and nearly $ 1.3 million to the Republican Party.
Mr. Trump attended a high-dollar fundraiser in 2017 at Mr. DeJoy’s 15,000-square-foot home in Greensboro, NC, a home known locally as the Castle. The residence has a tower, a gilded staircase, a swimming pool and a swimming pool house.
Who is his wife, Aldona Wos?
Ms. Wos, a former doctor, is a Polish-American whose family immigrated to the United States. She has held a number of political positions, including as ambassador to Estonia during the George W. Bush administration. Following that appointment, she headed the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services from 2012 to 2015.
She is currently Vice President of the Presidential Commission on White House Fellowships, and has been nominated by Mr. Trump to serve as Ambassador to Canada.
What kind of track record did his companies have?
Admirers say Mr DeJoy is a driven, detail-oriented problem solver who puts results above charm. He told Post Service staff in a video message in June: ‘As you will soon discover, I am direct and decisive, and I do not understand words. And when I see problems, I work to solve them. ”
Over the years, his businesses have been the subject of complaints about sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions.
A Tennessee jury awarded the plaintiff $ 1.5 million in damages in 2013 in a sexual harassment and retaliation lawsuit against New Breed Logistics. The company had wrongly fired three workers who complained about “unwelcome sexual harassment and cowardly, obscene and vulgar sexual remarks by a manager”, as well as a male employee who confirmed the harassment, the jury found.
In 2018, The New York Times published an investigation into a warehouse run by XPO Logistics, the company that acquired New Breed Logistics and put Mr. DeJoy on its board. The investigation revealed that six employees of warehouses who were paused during work commitments had refused miscarriages after lifting heavy boxes, and one woman had died of heart attack after refusing for a while.
Four months after the investigation, XPO closed the warehouse, which employed about 400 people, criticizing the company for retaliating against workers who complained about working conditions. The company denied the allegations.
Mr DeJoy has also been sued by the National Board of Labor Relations for dealing with “anti-union animus.” A 1997 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit confirmed that the company had violated labor laws by deliberately avoiding the recurrence of unionized employees working at a U.S. military terminal where New Breed a contract had been secured.
Susan Beachy contributed research.
