The general public’s direct interaction with the US Postal Service has been declining for decades now. How many young people have mailed a letter or picked up a package at the post office? We send emails. We pay bills online. If we need to ship a physical document, we hand it to FedEx Corp. or United Parcel Service Inc.
That long decline of regular post office connection obscures the fact that consumers increasingly depend on this 249-year-old federal agency as a pillar of the economy. The Postal Service is the backbone of e-commerce, delivering more packages across the US than all couriers, including Amazon.com Inc.
That’s the goal of an aggressive transformation plan proposed by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who was hired by the agency’s board of directors at the end of the Trump administration and rode out a storm of criticism — including that he tried to sabotage mail-in balloting — to remain on the job during the Biden administration. The reason DeJoy survived the onslaught is largely because he is a logistics guru and presented a solid plan on how to fix the Postal Service. It has drawn criticism from entrenched interests, but DeJoy deserves time and leeway to show that he can finally turn around the agency.
DeJoy is now in the middle of the hard part — implementing the plan. The blowback is beginning to bubble up as the changes disrupt the status quo and disturb the many Postal Service stakeholders. There are accusations that DeJoy is slowing down the mail, and this is the case for some products. At the bargaining table, the postal workers union will push for rules that would keep local mail from traveling outside the immediate area, limiting how volume flows to the large processing centers. Critics have pounced on the inevitable stumbles in the early deployment of these large processing centers in Richmond, Virginia, and Atlanta as evidence the plan needs to be halted and reworked.
“We had a bad spell,” DeJoy said in an Aug. 2 interview. “We’re going to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and move forward with all these initiatives. We’re 15 years behind.”