6 Ways Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Has Ruined the USPS Best Life

May 17, 2024

When Louis DeJoy was appointed as the 75th Postmaster General of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) in 2020, he vowed to get the agency back on track. The USPS had been experiencing financial turmoil for years, and DeJoy declared that he was prepared to fix it. Less than a year into his reign, the Postmaster General released his magnum opus: Delivering for America (DFA), a 10-year improvement plan to transform the Postal Service "from an organization in financial and operational crisis to one that is self-sustaining and high performing."

But the decisions DeJoy has made have not all been well received, with his naysayers claiming he's doing the opposite of what he promised. Read on to discover six ways the Postmaster General has been accused of ruining the USPS.

One of the first points of outrage against DeJoy was his plan to reduce overtime for USPS workers in summer 2020. Despite the Postmaster General claiming during a hearing that he did not direct any overtime cutbacks, a leaked memo revealed that he had. Under the overtime reduction plan, DeJoy indicated that "letter carriers will start their route on time and leave behind any mail that has not yet been processed."

In response to the revelation, several Senate Democrats wrote a letter to the Postmaster General in Feb. 2021 calling out his directive.

"Our constituents, including postal workers and Postal Service business partners, have reported concerning practices in at least some areas of the country, including management rejecting most overtime requests," they wrote.

Around the same time, DeJoy started slashing post office hours around the country in another abrupt, cost-cutting attempt. But this decision earned immediate backlash, with many postal employees insisting that these changes would only worsen the agency's financial situation.

"A lot of this has been dropped on us with little or no communication. The times that they're slating [the offices] to close is when they do a lot of business," Elizabeth Coonan, a steward for the American Postal Workers Union Local 3264 in the Clarksburg, West Virginia area, told Vice. "Slashing and hacking has already been tried. It's not going to work."

DeJoy ended up suspending these cuts after members of Congress accused him of shuttering post offices in the run-up to the 2020 election, but he eventually wound up reinstating plans to limit hours with the launch of DFA, per The Washington Post.

Another controversial move DeJoy made early on was referred to as a "Friday Night Massacre" by critics. In Aug. 2020, the Postmaster General restructured postal management in a way that some alleged would centralize mail-processing power around him. Two top executives were displaced, while 23 more were reassigned, according to MarketWatch.

"How many ways can the new Postmaster General sabotage the @USPS?" Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote in a Twitter post at the time. "@OIGUSPS should also investigate why Louis DeJoy is removing top officials who run day-to-day operations. It's his job to get the mail delivered on time, not play partisan games."

DeJoy has also been dedicated to moving the Postal Service away from air transportation, with the Associated Press reporting in Aug. 2023 that the agency had reduced its aircraft shipments by 90 percent over the last two year. The Postmaster General said this shift has put the USPS on track to save $1 billion in annual transportation costs, but critics have argued since the beginning that this cost-cutting effort isn't worth it.

Porter McConnell, co-founder of the Save the Post Office Coalition, warned in 2021 that DeJoy's dedication to prioritizing ground transportation over air transportation would permanently slow down mail delivery across the country.

"These new service standards won't improve the Postal Service—they will make it harder for people all across the country to receive their medications, their bills, their paychecks, and more," she said.

It's becoming harder and harder for the Postal Service to keep workers, as compensation restructuring plans initiated by DeJoy caused many carriers to see massive pay cuts last year.

"The Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, calls his plan 'Delivering For America.' In reality, he is destroying the Postal Service," a rural carrier from Arizona told the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).

Through their more than two decades as a rural carrier for the USPS, the former worker said they've never seen "such a mass exodus of highly capable, long term carriers" from the organization.

"Some were able to retire as they had the age and time in. Others just decided it wasn't worth it. I'm trying to stay for my last few years, but it's difficult," they added. "What other company just decided they think you're making too much money and just takes it out of your pay?!"

DeJoy's consolidation efforts have been massively controversial, with both Republican and Democratic officials criticizing the Postmaster General's plan to consolidate hundreds of smaller postal facilities into fewer, larger, and more-centralized sorting and processing centers, The Guardian reported.

Despite DeJoy's instance that consolidation will streamline the Postal Service's operations, many claim it will have negative effects, from delivery delays to closed post offices.

"Thousands of postal jobs will be eliminated, and tens of thousands of employees will be faced with relocating to a new job, possibly a couple of hundred miles away, or ending their careers at the Postal Service," Steve Hutkins, a retired NYU English professor who founded and operates the advocacy group and website Save the Post Office, told the newspaper.

Hutkins added, "The consolidations will also create excess space in processing facilities that will then be used to house a sorting and delivery center, which relocates letter carriers away from post offices. The carriers will need to drive 10 or 20 miles to their routes, which will increase costs and pollution. And the excess space at the post office, where the carriers used to work, will lead to post office closures and relocations of retail services to smaller spaces. In the meantime, postal rates go up, volume goes down, jobs are eliminated, service deteriorates. And what comes next?"

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