Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has imposed cost-saving measures at the Postal Service in recent weeks, leading to complaints of delivery delays.
Photo: Alex Wong/Getty ImagesWASHINGTON—Democratic lawmakers called for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to testify before Congress this month as concerns mounted over mail delays ahead of the November election.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and top Senate Democrats announced an Aug. 24 hearing and called for Mr. DeJoy and Robert Duncan, chairman of the Postal Service Board of Governors, to appear.
The U.S. Postal Service has warned that it can’t promise it will deliver all ballots in time to be counted if they are mailed close to Election Day. That has intensified the sparring between the White House and congressional Democrats over recent operational changes at the Postal Service and potential funding measures that might be needed to handle the expected flood of mailed ballots.
Amid a mounting financial crisis at the agency, Mr. DeJoy has put in place cost-saving measures in recent weeks, including reducing deliveries outside normal service. The Postal Service has removed some mail-sorting machines from places it says they weren’t needed. The changes were recommended by the agency’s watchdog in studies conducted before Mr. DeJoy took the role.
At the same time, the Postal Service has publicly said its financial condition won’t impact its ability to process and deliver election mail and that the sheer volume of ballots won’t be an issue. Senior Postal Service officials have estimated that election mail will account for less than 2% of all mail volume from mid-September until Election Day.
An issue, the Postal Service has said, is that some states allow voters to request and cast a mail-in ballot up to a few days before Election Day, which might not leave enough time for ballots mailed late in the process to be counted. Election officials say the solution is for voters to mail back a ballot well before the election if they want to vote by mail.
Changes at the Postal Service have become entangled in partisan fighting over the election, as the two parties have adopted different stances over whether and how to expand voting by mail at a time when coronavirus has raised fears among many Americans about in-person voting.
President Trump has said that universal’ mail-in voting would leave the tally subject to fraud and errors. Democrats say the president is trying to sabotage the election. Studies haven’t found evidence of widespread voter fraud, although there have been isolated cases linked to mailed ballots.
“Alarmingly, the postmaster general…has acted as an accomplice in the president’s campaign to cheat in the election, as he launches sweeping new operational changes that degrade delivery standards and delay the mail,” the Democrats said in a statement. In a 10-page letter sent Friday to Mr. DeJoy, Democratic lawmakers gave the postmaster until Aug. 21 to produce documents related to the delays. The planned hearing would be held by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
President Trump has said he supports a process in which voters request a ballot and vote absentee. “But now they want to send in millions and millions of ballots,’’ he said Saturday. “And you see what’s happening. They’re being lost, they’re being discarded. They’re finding them in piles. It’s going to be a catastrophe. So—and this is beyond the post office.”
Mr. DeJoy, a Republican donor, is the former chief executive of a consulting and project-management firm. He is the first postmaster general in decades without prior experience at the Postal Service.
The changes that Mr. DeJoy has implemented were recommended before he took his position. The Office of Inspector General has repeatedly found that the Postal Service hasn’t cut costs tied to processing mail enough to account for the decline in mail volume.
A recent report by the Postal Service inspector general highlighted some of the inefficiencies, including mail that wasn’t processed quickly enough and missed trips from sortation stations. That required more overtime to finish processing the mail and extra trips to get it out to post offices for delivery.
The White House signaled on Sunday that it is open to supporting a stand-alone bill to boost funding for the Postal Service. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said that he supports a piecemeal approach to dealing with the spate of issues facing policy makers in Washington, including Postal Service funding and the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’m all about piecemeal. If we can agree on postal, let’s do it,” Mr. Meadows said in an interview on CNN. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the remarks.
Mrs. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) have refused to negotiate separate bills on extending the enhanced unemployment-insurance benefits or small-business assistance that began in March, saying they want a comprehensive bill that includes funding for state and local governments, schools and the food insecure, among other things. Republicans are divided on whether more assistance is needed and don’t want to send money to states that were already facing budget shortfalls before the pandemic.
Negotiations over such a bill hit gridlock more than a week ago. Both chambers are out of Washington on recess.
The chief of staff also said the White House supports including increased funding for the Postal Service in a broader coronavirus relief bill on which the Trump administration and lawmakers have been unable to agree. “Put the postal funding in there. We’ll sign it tomorrow, and this will all go away,” Mr. Meadows said.
Mr. Meadows’s comments come as Mrs. Pelosi is considering bringing the House back from its August recess for a vote on a bill prohibiting the Postal Service from making new operational changes, according to a senior Democratic aide.
The bill, introduced by Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.), would prohibit the Postal Service from implementing any changes to operations or level of service it had in place on Jan. 1, 2020, until the end of the Covid-19 emergency or Jan. 1, 2021.
The bill forbids the closure or consolidation of any post office, the reduction of facility hours, ending overtime pay for workers or other steps that would prevent the Postal Service from meeting its service standards, as well as any change that would delay mail or increase the volume of undelivered mail.
Lawmakers also are considering adding language that would require ballot-related mailings to get first-class status, the Democratic aide said.
The House can pass the bill with only Democratic votes, but such a bill isn’t likely to be taken up by the Senate and then become law. Should the House pass the legislation, Mr. Schumer said Sunday that he would press Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) to bring the Senate back into session.
Democrats backed $25 billion for the Postal Service in a $3.5 trillion bill that passed the House in May, aiming both to help the quasi-independent agency recover from lost revenue during the pandemic and shore it up ahead of the election. The bill, which Republicans dismissed as a partisan wish list, also would have expanded voting by mail and included $3.6 billion to cover the costs of running an election in the pandemic.
The Postal Service reached an agreement for a $10 billion loan from the Treasury Department last month.
President Trump has previously said he is reluctant to provide new funding for the Postal Service, arguing that additional money could be used to institute universal mail-in voting, a practice he opposes. But the president signaled late last week that he is open to a compromise in which the administration would agree to additional funding if Democrats make concessions on other matters in the coronavirus-relief negotiations.
In all, the Postal Service spent nearly $4.3 billion in overtime and extra transportation costs in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, while meeting performance targets for only 15% of the types of mail it offers.
The need to cut costs has become even more critical with the financial impact from the pandemic. “It is vital that the Postal Service focus on its financial health and address causes for costs increasing at a time when mail volumes decreased,” the Office of Inspector General said in a June report.
At the same time, the Postal Service has said in financial filings that it has enough liquidity to fund operations through at least August 2021.
Efforts to curtail excess capacity at the Postal Service due to declining mail volumes aren’t new, said Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at R Street Institute, a free market think tank, who previously analyzed postal policy at the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
“There’s not too many people who know postal policy who would dispute that the postal service has excess capacity,” Mr. Kosar said, noting that mail volumes have declined amid a long-running shift to digital communications.
“Sorting machines, post offices, mail sorting facilities, blue collection boxes, those are all part of the mix,’’ he said. “They’ve all been getting reduced over a many-year period.”
But Mr. Kosar said the Postal Service faces some other challenges ahead of the November election, including the potential impact from Covid-19 on postal employees and a flood of parcels due to a surge in online shopping amid the pandemic.
—Paul Ziobro and Alexa Corse contributed to this article.
Write to Andrew Restuccia at Andrew.Restuccia@wsj.com and Natalie Andrews at Natalie.Andrews@wsj.com
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