Years of turmoil at USPS governing board fueled political firestorm, critics say.
DeJoy, a Trump mega-donor, is accused of trying to sabotage the election by making changes to slow down mail delivery just as mail-in ballots are expected to surge.
A United States Postal Service worker sorts packages in his truck in the Manhattan borough of New York, Aug. 17, 2020. Those cost-cutting measures, which include cuts to overtime pay and foregoing additional pickup and delivery trips, came as Trump railed against mail-in voting, sparking criticism that the voters turning to mail-in ballots amid the pandemic could be disenfranchised.
The board's most crucial task, experts said, is in appointing -- or removing -- the postmaster general and deputy postmaster general. On Wednesday, a group of Democratic lawmakersLess than 24 hours earlier, DeJoy acquiesced to mounting pressure, announcing that he would suspend some initiatives until after the election"to avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail.
At issue, those people said, were two Republican nominees: James Miller III, a former governor who had been renominated to the board in 2013, and Mickey Barnett, another former governor who had lobbied for payday lenders in his home state of New Mexico. "We wanted good governors because good governors are good for the public postal service," Dimondstein told ABC News,"and we couldn't get it done."
"It is a total lie and a distortion of reality to assert that Bernie Sanders, one of the strongest defenders of the U.S. Postal Service in Congress, enabled Trump's efforts to destroy the Postal Service," said Warren Gunnels, a senior policy adviser to Sanders. "McConnell basically said, 'if you don't give me James Miller III, I'm not giving you anybody,'" Sauber said."And that's what he did."The slate of nominees included former Sen. Ted Kennedy's widow, Vicki Kennedy, and Stephen Crawford, an economic sociologist who served on Obama's postal service transition team in 2009. Crawford said the group of five often met over lunch to discuss their mutual frustration at the holdup.
The Postal Service had spent years in dire financial straits by the time Trump took office in January 2017. One month earlier, the final governor remaining on the board had seen his term expire and stepped down, leaving two Obama-era holdovers as postmaster general and deputy postmaster general to lead the agency until DeJoy's appointment earlier this year.
"Because this administration inherited a completely empty slate, for the first time ever we have all new governors," Plunkett said."[It is] technically a bipartisan group -- but they all were appointed by the same president."The sitting board of governors comes from a diverse set of corporate backgrounds. Robert Duncan, its chairman, is a former banker and led the Republican National Committee from 2007-2009.
"The Postal Service has not communicated effectively in implementing these changes, and that might be attributable to a lack of experience and a lack of ability to foresee how some of these changes would be perceived and how stakeholders would react," he said."Because it should have been predictable ... and that's hurting them right now."
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