As a retired federal government employee, I am dependent on the United States Postal Service to carry and deliver my health insurance documents. As a home owner, I rely on the USPS to deliver my monthly mortgage statements and carry my payment checks to my mortgage company on time. As a writer and book reviewer, I depend on the USPS to bring books to me and transport my manuscripts to publishers expeditiously.
On all counts, the USPS is currently failing. Some days, I receive no mail. Others, my mailbox is overloaded. Mail is consistently slow and unreliable. I have had to pay penalties because my mortgage checks did not arrive on time even though they were mailed more than ten days in advance of the deadline.
But I know that the USPS is doing the best it can. It was deliberately crippled at the direction of President Donald Trump to thwart voting by mail in the November 2020 election in hopes that making voting by mail more difficult might help Trump win the election. In June 2020, the nine members of the Postal Service Board of Governors, most of them Trump supporters and operating under Trump’s direction, named Louis DeJoy to the job of Post Master General. In short, Trump in effect named a loyal patron to head the USPS and do his bidding.
DeJoy has a net worth of around $110 million. He had contributed more than $1.2 million to the Trump Victory Fund and millions more to Republican Party organizations and candidates, according to Federal Election Commission records. He was also in charge of fundraising for the Republican National Convention.
DeJoy, on Trump’s orders, proceeded to dismantle mail sorting machines, cut overtime, restrict deliveries, and remove mailboxes to deliberately slow the mail nationally. Donald Trump himself openly admitted that his administration was withholding funding for the Postal Service to make it harder to process mail-in ballots.
More tomorrow.
Tom Glenn, Writer 