USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy didn’t even look into the impact his drastic policy changes would have on mail delivery before implementing them, a Senate report concluded. These policies, which included ordering trucks to leave distribution facilities according to a predetermined schedule regardless of whether there was any mail on them, resulted in hundreds of millions of delayed mail pieces and packages across the country. And the report echoes arguments made in several recently filed lawsuits that implementing these drastic changes without first getting approval from the Postal Regulatory Commission may have violated federal law.
Overall, the report raises the question of how a supposed logistics genius could make such elementary mistakes resulting in the widespread tanking of USPS performance.
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“Postmaster General DeJoy failed to conduct any meaningful analysis about how his planned changes could affect customers,” concluded the investigation by Democratic Senator Gary Peters. The report quotes USPS Chief Logistics and Processing Operations Officer David Williams admitting, “USPS was ‘expecting a service bump’ simply because on-time ‘should mean better service’,” according to Williams, a sentiment which expresses a disturbing lack of sophistication about USPS operations, exhibited by the obvious fact that it did not, in fact, result in better service.
The report, titled “Failure to Deliver: Harm Caused by US Postmaster General DeJoy’s Changes to Postal Service Mail Delivery,” characterizes the cratering USPS performance as entirely predictable based on available data, had DeJoy and his management team consulted it. But they didn’t.
“The Postal Service collects data on the amount of mail in each truck, so it would have been possible to anticipate how much mail could be misplaced or delayed,” the report said. “At the briefing, Mr. Williams confirmed that the Postal Service did know how much mail was on those trips, but did not use this data to conduct additional forecasts.”
Do you work for the USPS? Do you know anything about these service changes we should know? Email Aaron Gordon at aaron.gordon@vice.com.
During a House committee hearing on August 24, DeJoy explained he ordered no more late trucks because “It is a fundamental premise how the whole mail network is put together. If the trucks don’t run on time then the mail carriers cannot leave on time, they are out at night, have to come back to get more mail, the collection process is late, the plant process is distorted. I see several billion dollars in potential savings in getting the system to connect properly and that’s why we ran out and put a plan together to really get this fundamental basic principle: run your trucks on time.”
But this seemingly common sense solution ignores all the underlying reasons the trucks ran late; mainly, because they are waiting for the mail to get loaded onto the trucks. DeJoy repeatedly cited a USPS Investigator General report to justify his actions, even though that report did not recommend the actions he took.
USPS spokesperson David Partenheimer did not refute the report’s findings.
“Getting trucks running on time created a temporary dip in delivery, which we previously acknowledged,” he said. “That dip is now largely gone. As of September 16, USPS trucks are more consistently running on time. By insisting that trucks run on time, we have now seen improvements in all categories of delivery.”
Nevertheless, DeJoy’s policy changes had consequences for nearly everyone: Americans sheltering at home relying on the postal service to deliver their medicine, pay their bills—which millions of Americans still do through the mail thanks to unreliable rural internet—and receive other vital goods during a global pandemic. It hurt small businesses during a trying economic time. It also thrust the post office into the spotlight of the national news cycle, amplifying widespread concerns about its ability to deliver ballots in November. And it put DeJoy himself front and center of the national spotlight, leading to investigations into his past fundraising efforts as a major Republican donor and potential violations of campaign finance laws.
After weeks of double-digit performance declines, USPS service is on track to gradually return to its baseline as the organization makes internal adjustments, but it is still well below its performance targets. It’s even struggling to get back to its performance levels during the height of the pandemic in late March.
DeJoy has promised not to make any further drastic changes before the election, but has ominously warned he has big things planned for afterwards, such as region-based pricing, reducing the number of days USPS delivers, and raising postage rates (which would need to be approved by the Postal Regulatory Commission). Considering what he managed to do by accident, one can only imagine what he will do on purpose.
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