Don’t let postal service derail 2020 US election

When Louis DeJoy became postmaster general in May, he was the first person in more than 20 years to run the US Postal Service who had never worked there. His predecessor, Megan Brennan, had spent her entire career with the service, originally as a mail carrier.
On the other hand, DeJoy, an accountant, founded and sold a company, New Breed Logistics, that worked for decades with the Postal Service and other public and private enterprises wrestling with supply and transportation challenges. DeJoy’s Postal Service work while running New Breed reportedly focussed on the basics: repairing postal equipment, mail bags and hampers.
In theory, what DeJoy lacked in familiarity and expertise would be more than offset by a fresh, outside perspective and an ability to help modernise the Postal Service, which employs almost 500,000 people, operates a massive domestic retail network (bigger than McDonald’s Corp, Starbucks Corp and Walmart Inc combined), and, until Covid-19 arrived, was delivering 182 million pieces of first-class mail daily.
I would think DeJoy also came to the attention of the Postal Service’s board of governors because he is a generous political donor to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Since 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records, DeJoy has donated more than $2 million to Trump’s campaign and other Republican groups. As recently as February, he gave $210,600 to a political action committee, Trump Victory. The Republican National Committee and the McConnell Senate Committee have also received money from DeJoy. In 2017, he hosted a joint fundraiser for Trump and the RNC at his North Carolina home.
DeJoy’s wife, Aldona Wos, is vice chairwoman of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships and was nominated by Trump to be the next US ambassador to Canada. DeJoy and Wos have disclosed financial assets worth $30.1 million to $75.3 million, the bulk of which is tied up in the company that bought New Breed from them. But they also have small stakes in Postal Service competitors, such as United Parcel Service Inc.
All of this has weighed heavily on DeJoy’s brief tenure. When he arrived at the Postal Service, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was leading a White House effort to leverage federal bailout funding to get the struggling agency to agree to greater presidential control. Trump himself was exercising his animus toward Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com Inc and owner of the Washington Post, threatening to tie up the $10 billion Congress had earmarked for the Postal Service until it raised prices for package deliveries Amazon relies on.
That mud wrestling prompted the resignation of a veteran member of the Postal Service’s board of governors. Another veteran left the 11-member board after DeJoy’s appointment. In short order, the postal workers’ union and Democrats in Congress voiced concerns that the Postal
Service had become politicised and that DeJoy was a stalking horse for Trump’s resentments — and for the possibility that the beleaguered president would use the service to undermine mail-in voting for the November election.
In mid-July, DeJoy made a number of operational changes, including shorter post office hours and eliminating overtime for postal workers, that promised to slow down mail delivery and could throw a wrench into mail-in voting. DeJoy said it was all about cost-cutting and efficiency.

—Bloomberg