David Ball: Change needed at the USPS

I’ve got some questions about the Trump-appointed head of an important government agency. The U.S. Postal Service has a proud history. Ben Franklin was our first postmaster general, appointed in 1775 by the Continental Congress to set up a national postal service. It helped bind the colonies together during the Revolution. Our current postmaster general is Louis DeJoy. What qualifies him for this position? Let’s see … He was the first postmaster in two decades with no previous experience in the USPS, but he did contribute $695,000 to the Republican Convention in 2016. In fact, he’d been a major donor and fundraiser for the GOP for some time. Good qualifications, right? When he took office, DeJoy set up a 10-year plan for the USPS. It eliminated overtime, banned late trips to deliver mail, took away hundreds of high-speed, mail-sorting machines, and removed many mail collection boxes from the streets. This, during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the months before the 2020 presidential election. Result: delays in delivery that affected mail-in ballots among others. I’m sure the don was delighted. He also held on to tens of millions of dollars in stocks he owned in XPO Logistics. Three months after DeJoy’s appointment, XPO Logistics got a $5 million contract with USPS. Coincidence, right? Now he’s announced a plan to phase out 50,000 USPS jobs in the coming years. That will surely help service, right? Soon after he was appointed, DeJoy bought over $100,000 in stock options in Amazon, one of the main competitors to the USPS. I wonder why? There’s another, more pressing question: why doesn’t President Biden fire this Trump holdover whose goal is clearly to destroy the USPS? And the most important question of all: why don’t you write President Biden and ask him to do just that? Please go to https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ and write him a brief note. If he gets enough pressure, there’s a good chance the president might get him dismissed. It would be a boon to the country if he did it before the midterm elections.

David Ball 

Northampton