NORTHAMPTON — In some 34 years of working for the U.S. Postal Service, Neil Hofrichter says he’s never seen anything like it.
“It’s unheard of to hold back delivering the mail,” said Hofrichter, a longtime employee in the Northampton post office who’s on the verge of retirement. “We’ve never been allowed to leave first-class mail behind.”
Hofrichter is one of a number of veteran local postal service workers who in recent weeks have been following the twists and turns of the controversial decisions made last month by U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, which DeJoy said were aimed at cutting Postal Service costs.
Among those changes were a prohibition on overtime pay, shutting down and removing sorting machines and requiring letter carriers to leave mail behind to avoid extra trips or late delivery on routes.
Those moves have alarmed postal workers and Democrats, who say the procedures could undermine timely delivery of mail-in ballots — considered essential this year because of the pandemic — in the November election, at a time when President Donald Trump has made repeated unfounded attacks on those ballots as being susceptible to fraud.
Given that DeJoy, before taking over the USPS, was a key Trump fundraiser, it’s not surprising, says Hofrichter, that there’s a growing perception that mail delays are the result of a political effort to undermine absentee voting.
“It’s not a secret what they’re trying to do,” he said.
On Tuesday, DeJoy said some of the controversial changes he has made at the USPS would be suspended until after the election “to avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail.”
But in yet another twist, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said via Twitter on Wednesday that DeJoy had told her he has “no intention of replacing the sorting machines, blue mailboxes and other infrastructure that have been removed.”
“That’s another issue,” said Hofrichter. “They’ve already taken away who knows how many high-speed sorting machines, and they haven’t said they’re going to bring them back in time for the election.”
The continued questions surrounding USPS have sparked activist groups to protest the changes and demand that mail-in balloting be protected. Groups such as MoveOn and the NAACP, for instance, have organized “#SaveThePostOffice Saturday,” which asks Americans nationwide to show up at post offices at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 22, and call for DeJoy’s resignation.
A rally outside the Northampton post office on Bridge Street is part of that effort. That comes just days after U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern held a press conference outside the building to demand DeJoy’s resignation and pledge to secure a vote in the House on a bill providing $25 billion in emergency funding for USPS.
Bob Currie, a longtime Northampton letter carrier who retired earlier this year, said he’s also been dismayed by DeJoy’s decisions. “I’m livid. You just don’t hold back the mail arbitrarily … delivering the mail on time is part of our identity.”
Currie also says at least four of the six current members of the USPS Board of Governors, which selected DeJoy as postmaster general, have ties to the Republican Party and to Trump’s administration and his associates. “It’s not exactly a neutral group,” he said.
DeJoy has said the changes he put in place were designed to come to grips with a USPS debt that, according to the government’s General Accounting Office (GAO), had reached $160.9 billion at the end of 2019, of which some $119.3 billion came from retiree benefits.
However, Currie and another former Northampton postal worker, Bob Leroux, point to passage of the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which required USPS to assure health and retirement benefits for future as well as current employees. That law envisioned the Postal Service as a self-sustaining agency whose revenue could cover all of its expenses, especially delivering packages across the country.
But the obligation to prepay retirement and health-care benefits is rare not just in government agencies but in private companies, too. And since 2006, the rise of email, texting and social media for personal communications, and a decline in commercial mail brought about first by the 2008 recession and now the pandemic, have combined with benefit payments to push USPS deep into the red.
“Who funds a health care system 75 years in advance?” said Hofrichter. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”
Leroux, a former union rep who retired from the Northampton post office last year, said in his 30-plus years with USPS, “There were times when we made money and times we lost it, and then we’d get some additional funding.”
But the Postal Service was never intended to be like a private company and turn a profit, he added. “We’re a government service, and we have been since the post office was established by the Constitution.”
Delaying mail to try to save money is not the answer, Leroux said, and works against the basic premise of the agency. “People there are pretty dedicated. We all take pride in our work, and that means delivering the mail on time.”
Currie, who spent almost 42 years delivering the mail in Northampton, said he has real concerns that unless USPS restores sorting machines and mailboxes that have already been taken out of service, mail-in ballots could be compromised this fall.
“That really is just an attack on basic democracy — the right to cast your vote,” he said.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.