Louis DeJoy is going to make mistakes. A lot of them.
For the postmaster general, that is sort of the point. It is a sign of progress. He inherited a U.S. Postal Service in 2020 that was directionless, losing billions of dollars per year, shedding countless jobs and allowing mail delays to spike, all without a serious plan to turn things around. You may not like what he is doing about it, but he wants you to know he is doing something.
“A lot of people say they don’t know exactly what we’re doing,” DeJoy told Government Executive in a recent interview. “Well, neither do I.”
Again, that is a feature, not a bug. When DeJoy says he is going to “make a lot of mistakes,” it is because he is willing to adapt. He has a vision. He can see where there is $35 billion in costs to eliminate, when delivery trucks are running unnecessary routes and how to reduce turnover in the workforce. Not all of his ideas are going to work—some have already prominently failed—but he will continue pushing forward. He describes his biggest accomplishment as “juicing the place up:” namely, getting his management team and the rest of the 650,000 postal employees to embrace a mindset of change.
