There’s no need to wonder how badly Postmaster General Louis DeJoy messed up the U.S. Postal Service. A new report from the USPS Office of Inspector General shows that DeJoy has managed to do major damage to the Postal Service in record time.
DeJoy took office on June 15 and quickly put three major changes into effect—banning late and extra trips to transport mail, changes to mail sorting and delivery, and corporate reorganization. Those changes, in addition to staff shortages related in some cases to the coronavirus pandemic, “negatively impacted the quality and timeliness of mail delivery nationally.” On-time delivery of first-class mail dropped from 90% to below 80% in July. It had recovered somewhat by the beginning of September, but was still not back to 90%. This is on DeJoy. It’s not something that just happened.
DeJoy implemented these changes without pilot programs to find out how they would go, or even a detailed analysis to anticipate the impact. And, the OIG report said, changes were “implemented quickly, and were communicated primarily orally,” which is a recipe for confusion and screw-ups.
DeJoy was billed as the guy who was going to run the U.S. Postal Service like a business. The plan to have him be the guy who sabotaged the Postal Service in an election year when vote by mail would be bigger than ever was less well publicized, at least until about 10 minutes after his “reforms” started taking effect. But even if you subtract the intention to sabotage, the plan to treat a public good—something that’s supposed to be there to connect everyone in the United States to each other, to their prescriptions, to information and goods they can’t get other ways—as a profit-making enterprise was always going to screw up the mission of the Postal Service.
This is Republican governance in action. Yeah, there’s a partisan impulse contributing to the mail slowdowns—but then, there’s usually some kind of partisan impulse somewhere for Republicans—but it’s also just part of the broader commitment to killing off any institution that doesn’t bring more profit to the already wealthy.