Democrats consider the U.S. Postal Service being in a state of crisis, as they seek to throw out Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
DeJoy was brought in by the Trump administration to solve the USPS logistics and finances, but Democrats see the best way to fix the federal agency is to start with cutting its leader, The Washington Post reported.
The problems were showing cracks in the structure of the USPS long before DeJoy, or the global coronavirus pandemic that added stress to an already overworked and underperforming federal agency.
DeJoy is expected to present plans for a new future for the USPS this week, but Democrats are simultaneously seeking to remove him from the role.
Among DeJoy's logistics reforms are service cuts, increased and region-specific pricing, and lowering delivery expectations – all designed to reduce overtime on the workers and improve the bottom line.
President Joe Biden is being lobbied to stop the fiscal responsibility moves and instead infuse more taxpayer dollars into the broken system. The USPS lost $9.2 billion in 2020, despite taking in $73.2 billion, the Post reported.
The ouster of DeJoy, who has been in the role for less than a year, would not be up to Biden himself; however, the board of the USPS could be restructured to overturn the past majority, leading to a change in leadership.
A problem in reform are 644,000 career workers who are left to compete with private companies' independent contractor workforce that proves cheaper, like Amazon for instance. There is talk in Congress to give the USPS a $100 billion bailout to help with pension payments, but the agency has more than $188 billion in entitlements liability, so that Band-Aid does not even cover the wound.
"Throughout the peak season, the Postal Service, along with the broader shipping sector, faced pressure on service performance across categories as it managed through a record of volume while also overcoming employee shortages due to the ongoing surge in COVID-19 cases, winter storms in the Northeast, as well as ongoing capacity challenges with airlifts and trucking for moving historic volumes of mail," USPS spokesman Dave Partenheimer told the Post.
The USPS has notched some positives under DeJoy that do not get heralded by Democrats or the media. It processed 135 million mail ballots and moved more than 1.1 billion packages during the holidays – as UPS and FedEx were maxed out and turned down business due to the pandemic flood of mail requests.
"Absent substantial changes, our financial losses will continue to widen, and our ability to invest in the future of the organization and deliver for the American people will be severely curtailed," Partenheimer told the Post.
USPS is asking Congress for $10 billion in borrowing authority and another modernization grant, he added.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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