With slower mail and election concerns, Trump’s postmaster general is in the hot seat

In the wake of what DeJoy is calling a “restructuring,” the agency’s inspector general is now reviewing these policy changes. Democrats are amping up demands that DeJoy rescind his changes and get the agency ready for the flood of mail-in ballots necessitated by the pandemic. Former President Barack Obama characterized the administration’s approach to the postal service as “a knee-capping” — sabotage by an executive who dislikes mail-in balloting and also has power over the agency that makes it possible.

DeJoy appears sanguine amid the furor, acknowledging to employees this week that the slowdown is a direct result of his policies. In a memo to postal service staff and workers, he allowed there had been “unintended consequences” but promised that the changes will eventually mean “transformation into a financially stable organization” — a longtime conservative goal for the fiscally-challenged agency. Election experts may be worried about the post office role in a free and fair election, but DeJoy revealed that he, like Trump, is focused on the bottom line.

For the two months of his tenure, postal workers and election observers have been watching DeJoy closely and wondering to what extent he’ll serve Trump’s interests during the 2020 elections. The week’s events served to highlight just how in sync with his boss he may be.

“He’s a fantastic man,” Trump said when asked Saturday evening during his news conference at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, if he backs DeJoy’s changes at the agency. “He wants to make the Post Office great again.”

A new kind of postmaster

A successful businessman and Republican donor, DeJoy is known among friends for his take-no-BS attitude. His wife, the Polish-born Aldona Wos, was the US ambassador to Estonia under George W. Bush and is currently awaiting confirmation as ambassador to Canada.

Relatively unknown outside of GOP circles in North Carolina, DeJoy became a part of the President’s large circle of unofficial advisers in his role as a prolific fundraiser for Trump. DeJoy had been tapped as the finance chair for the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte, a high-profile position generally reserved for confidants or financial bundlers.

DeJoy was Trump’s preferred pick when the agency’s board of governors tapped him earlier this year to run the centuries-old Postal Service like a private enterprise, and one source close to DeJoy said he was easily convinced to accept it. Unlike several recent postmasters general who came up through the agency, DeJoy is a government novice whose connection to the mail is primarily commercial.

The similarities between Trump and DeJoy don’t end there. Both are New York natives who are known to speak their minds loudly and without regard for the rules. DeJoy’s house in North Carolina, where Trump attended a fundraiser in 2017, resembles a castle — complete with a rotunda, a two-story kitchen wing, and a staircase painted with 24-carat gold leaf.

Most importantly, DeJoy shares the President’s view that government should be approached more like a business, and he seems to have little patience for bureaucratic niceties. That aspect comes through in DeJoy’s memo to Post Office employees, which is remarkably blunt in its assessment of the agency’s problems (“Over the years we have grown undisciplined in our mail and package processing schedules”) and asserts with Trumpian fanfare the changes are part of a “transformative initiative.”

That my-way-or-the-highway attitude has permeated the office of the Postmaster General. In a change from previous practice, the USPS is telling elections officials that election-related mail will not be treated as first class even when states pay for bulk rates — a costly policy change as states prepare for a bigger-than-expected number of mail-in ballots.

The problem, according to the letters, lies with the states’ schedule, not with the Post Office itself.

Disrupting the mailbox

The up-front approach has already spurred action from several states, illustrating the impact DeJoy is having on officials across the country worried about conducting an election in unusual times.

That combative tone reflects the way Democrats have zeroed in on DeJoy as a partisan stalking horse for suppressing the vote. Democrats in Congress have expressed their objections with the USPS cutbacks following what were described as “heated” discussions with DeJoy earlier this month. In that meeting Democrats demanded the cuts be reinstated, citing the need for a fully functioning Post Office ahead of the election.

“[T]he President, his cronies and Republicans in Congress continue to wage their all-out assault on the Postal Service and its role in ensuring the integrity of the 2020 election,” said House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leader Sen. Chuck Schumer in a joint statement Friday.

DeJoy and the Post Office have also received criticism from the NAACP for “disrupting the machinery of democracy. A top postal-workers union, the National Association of Letter Carriers, also took a swipe at Trump’s USPS. In a Friday statement endorsing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, NALC president Frederic Rolando said their decision was “partly informed by what we have seen from the current administration with regards to the Postal Service.”

At the August 7 meeting of the postal service’s board of governors, DeJoy dismissed the idea he was a puppet of the President.

“While I certainly have a good relationship with the President of the United States, the notion that I would ever make decisions concerning the Postal Service at the direction of the President, or anyone else in the administration, is wholly off-base,” he said.

Still, Trump appears willing to stand by his appointee and his decisions at the Post Office.

“He’s a very good businessman. He’s very successful. And I know he wants to make the Post Office at least somewhat lose a lot less money than — they’ve lost so much money over the decade. Nobody has ever — nothing loses money like the Post Office. And he wants to make it successful,” Trump told reporters at his Bedminster club last week, adding, “Let’s see what he can do.”