Friday morning’s appearance by the Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee had the feel of a Zoom office meeting in which every participant feels the need to speak but no one has time to listen. Senators appeared onscreen from scattered offices that were apparently unenhanced by Room Rater shaming, while DeJoy stood before flags and a Postal Service logo, speaking in business jargon that reflected his long career as a logistics-company executive. The Kefauver or Watergate hearings this was not, and yet, in between political speeches by the senators and vague talking points from DeJoy, the hearing provided startling insights into why the U.S. Postal Service may fail American democracy at this hour of crisis, and what must be addressed if people planning to vote by mail in November are to have high confidence that their ballots will be counted.
DeJoy is a longtime Republican and a Trump donor who took office in June, quickly reorganizing the Postal Service’s leadership and implementing new work rules that soon caused a slowdown in performance—a slowdown that has persisted until now, he admitted in his testimony on Friday. The hearing’s ostensible purpose was to investigate why this happened, how it will be fixed, and, above all, how the public can be assured that the Post Office will facilitate timely, reliable voting by mail this fall, when, owing to the pandemic, many more Americans are expected to cast ballots through the mail than ever before. Yet the hearing was often as notable for the questions that weren’t asked as for the ones that were.
Republican senators often invited DeJoy to deliver his rehearsed points, and he duly pledged that the Postal Service is “diligently working to assure the American public and to assure a successful election.” More helpfully, he testified that he was “extremely, highly confident” that the service would deliver ballots to election offices on time in November—if voters mailed them at least seven days before the deadline to have their votes counted. (The deadline varies from state to state, but many local laws may encourage voters to mail ballots much closer to the deadline than seven days; in the event that voters wait too long, DeJoy implied, they may be disenfranchised.)
DeJoy decried what he called the “insinuation” by Democrats and media skeptics that, because he has a record as a political ally of Donald Trump, he might shape postal operations to favor the President’s reëlection. He said this was “frankly outrageous.” It required Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, to remind DeJoy that the reason people worry about such dirty tricks is that Trump has repeatedly denounced mail-in voting, has said he worries that it will favor Democrats, has claimed without evidence that it is susceptible to significant fraud, and has said that he might withhold funding for the Postal Service precisely because doing so might inhibit it. With an ally like Trump, and with recent evidence of mail slowdowns, why would anyone take as a given that DeJoy was on the up and up?
Judging by their scripts, Democratic senators came to the hearing with two objectives: to press DeJoy to disclose more details about the management overhaul that he implemented and its negative effects on postal performance, and to demand that he reverse—not merely suspend, as he had previously pledged to do—the removal of postal boxes and sorting machines which has been under way this summer. DeJoy stonewalled demands by Democrats for data and transparency on these issues, and parried questions about the removal of boxes and equipment by arguing that these reductions had been going on for years and were incidental to on-time performance.
Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan, noted that the removal of mail-sorting machines in his battleground state was happening at a time when his office is being flooded by complaints of slow delivery of medicines and other vital mail. He asked DeJoy directly if he would reinstall any machines that had previously been removed. “There’s no intention to do that,” DeJoy answered. “They’re not needed.” He said the sorters that had been removed were only being used at about a third of their capacity.
At a time when the Postal Service is failing badly across the nation to meet its own standards for on-time delivery, the removal of any sorting machines, especially in states that may be closely contested in the upcoming election, can hardly be defended. Yet the focus by Democrats and some media outlets on disappearing sorters and postal boxes (seven hundred of the iconic blue street boxes have been removed since he took office, DeJoy testified on Friday, out of a total of a hundred and forty thousand nationwide) looks like a distraction from two deeper problems at the Post Office, both of which seem more likely to determine how much of a mess mail-in voting will be this fall.
The first problem is the ongoing, measurable decline in delivery performance that has been caused by DeJoy’s hasty management reforms. DeJoy testified that by trying to implement a demanding program of on-time trucking operations, he failed to anticipate that the new schedules would fall out of synch with mail-production operations. “Certainly there was a slowdown in the mail when our production did not meet the schedule,” he conceded. He estimated that his botched program caused a “four-or-five-per-cent hit” to mail-delivery times.
DeJoy said that the disruption should have been fixed within days, but it had, in fact, lasted several weeks. He pledged to address it, but senators on the committee did not press him on how he would do so, or exactly when, or on how the mere suspension of his policies would rapidly improve performance in time for the election. DeJoy said that he would add resources to election-focussed operations beginning in October, but it wasn’t clear why he would wait so long, where the resources would come from, or why anyone should have confidence that his plans would work.
The nationwide decline in performance caused by DeJoy’s summer reforms is certainly consequential—senators from both parties read powerful letters from constituents who have been deprived of medication and other essentials because of slow mail—but that screwup is interacting with another crisis, one that DeJoy inherited and which did not attract much comment during Friday’s hearing. This is the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the postal workforce and the service’s ability to deliver mail on time, particularly in cities that have been hit hard by the virus, and which have large African-American populations.
Romney asked whether current mail delays are greater in some areas of the country than in others. The Postmaster General answered that “urban areas” have suffered the greatest impact, because of “the intimidation of the coronavirus, which scares our workers.” He said that “employee availability,” meaning the number of people expected to turn up to work every day, had fallen about four per cent nationwide during the pandemic, but that “when you can go into some of these what I would say hotspots—Philadelphia, Detroit—there’s as much as twenty, twenty-five per cent.”
In Philadelphia, he said, there are days when the Post Office is short two hundred letter carriers. “When the American people see two, three days that they haven’t seen their carrier, that’s an issue,” DeJoy said, with understatement.
According to quarterly performance reports for Detroit released on August 10th, which cover the period from April through June, on-time delivery of single-piece first-class mail collapsed by about twenty per cent, compared to the previous quarter. DeJoy testified that there “at least twenty” cities coping with “descending levels of consequence” for mail performance because of the coronavirus, although he did not name any cities other than Philadelphia and Detroit, which happen to be centers of large African-American populations whose voting will be decisive to the Presidential-election results in their battleground states.
If these pandemic-linked service deficits are not addressed by November, and if, therefore, delivery times in heavily African-American cities are much slower than in whiter, rural areas, the net effect may be large-scale voter suppression of Black citizens in an election heavily influenced by mail-in voting.
What is DeJoy doing to prevent this? He wasn’t asked on Friday, and he didn’t address the matter directly. Would a rapid infusion of funding to the Postal Service allow for extraordinary hiring to fill gaps in the workforce, in Philadelphia, Detroit, and other cities? Would it allow the Postal Service to temporarily move workers around the country as needed as the election approaches?
Congress approved ten billion dollars in relief for the Postal Service in the spring, but the Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, has used the aid to interfere with labor agreements and operations, according to David Williams, a former member of the Postal Board of Governors, who spoke out about the problems last week. On Friday, DeJoy sounded equivocal about whether he wanted the aid at all, which would come in the form of a loan, unless it were tied to the cost-cutting and management changes he wants to see through—only after the election, he now insists.
DeJoy is scheduled to appear on Monday before the Democratic-led House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Perhaps that committee will press him harder on the details of the Postal Service’s slipping performance, and when and how it can be raised measurably—improved beyond pre-pandemic levels, even—before November. DeJoy may be a stealthy Trump lieutenant, or he may be an honest, reform-minded businessman in over his political head, but the nature of the Postmaster General is not the main issue in these hearings. Voting rights and enfranchisement are. Congress is the only institution that realistically has the means to insist that the Postal Service moves decisively to enable—and not undermine—the votes of all Americans in November. Congress “needs to get granular,” Vanita Gupta, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told me this week. “This is the oversight function.”
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