There Is No DeJoy In Mudville, Or In The Postal Service Either
Coming soon: No first-class delivery to Mudville.
After becoming the first postmaster general whose name most Americans had to know at all, Louis DeJoy resigned on Monday, potentially helping Donald Trump’s aim of privatizing the US Postal Service. According to the Washington Post (archive link), DeJoy left after he resisted pressure from the White House to interfere with the USPS. This doesn’t so much make DeJoy any kind of hero; he simply saw the Postal Service as his personal fiefdom, to be wrecked on his own terms.
DeJoy was hired by the USPS board in the final year of Trump’s first term, when Mad King Donald still sometimes followed laws, for appearances’ sake. Trump appointed the board’s majority, which then somehow figured out that it should give the postmaster job to a big GOP campaign donor instead of hiring someone with any experience at all in the USPS. As you may recall, DeJoy then got right to work fucking up mail sorting equipment and delivery systems in the name of fixing the Postal Service, coincidentally slowing down mail service during the pandemic when millions of Americans planned to vote by mail.
We won’t mourn his departure, but whatever comes next is likely to suck even more. At least our longstanding astonishment that Joe Biden’s USPS board never replaced DeJoy is now somewhat moot, since if Trump was willing to force out the guy who shared his basic aims, an actually non-terrible Postmaster General would have been toast even sooner.
DeJoy apparently didn’t care for Elon Musk’s DOGEboys trying to take over the post (the mail kind), the Post (the Washington kind) reports, according to four anonymous insiders. When the Incel Clown Posse showed up at USPS headquarters and demanded to be let into its computers and files, DeJoy instead treated them to the sort of malicious compliance that we wish more heads of federal agencies would engage in. Instead of giving them full access, DeJoy
required the two DOGE representatives to sit in detailed briefings with executives for each division of the Postal Service, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of professional reprisals. And in a letter to Congress, DeJoy told lawmakers he had deputized the DOGE team to seek policy fixes that required congressional action. The letter, two of the people said, frustrated lawmakers and administration officials.
“They were fed up,” one of the people said.
DeJoy managed to piss off TrumpMusk and congressional Republicans, who would have had to actually do something to enact the Trump/Musk plan for wrecking the place? We’re genuinely impressed! Reminds us of the old folk tale about Wicked John, the mean old man who was too evil to get into heaven and too ornery to be allowed in hell.
DeJoy had originally planned to retire once the USPS board chose a successor, but now that he’s resigned, the interim head of the agency will be, by law, Deputy Postmaster General Doug Tulino, who currently handles labor relations within the USPS. Presumably, Trump will find a pretext to shitcan him unless he yes-sirs his way into favor.
In February, reports from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal indicated that Trump was planning a coup against the USPS board, planning to dissolve it and move control of USPS to the control of the Commerce Department under Howard “only fraudsters mind losing Social Security” Lutnick. That plan was at least temporarily dropped after massive public condemnation and the likelihood that courts wouldn’t let Lutnick operate without the board.
That would presumably be a step on the way to privatizing the USPS, a priority for Trump and Musk. Even if Trump doesn’t resurrect the bad idea of handing the USPS to Lutnick to ruin, he and his billionaire backers still like the bad idea of privatizing the Postal Service one way or another, because 1) they’re just evil, 2) they hate everything the people of America actually like, 3) there are plenty of companies that would love to reap huge profits from taking over USPS and providing far shittier service, and 4) see #1.
A privatized version of the Postal Service would only be able to turn a profit by getting rid of stuff that only makes sense for a government service, like the law requiring USPS to deliver mail to every address in America, even rural ones out in the sticks where many Trump voters live.
As reported by the Revolving Door Project, which tracks the federal agency-to-corporate-lobbying pipeline, Wells Fargo’s investment banking research arm is bullish on getting a piece of the USPS’s action, as are other Wall Street firms.
A report by the bank offered a plan for dismembering the agency and making big bucks, by peeling off USPS’s highly profitable package deliveries from the less-profitable mail delivery service, which is burdened by having to serve all of us. There’s simply not a lot of money to be made in doing the job the Constitution set up the Postal Service for in the first place. Stupid Framers!
Ah, but if you view that as a “restructuring issue,” the problem solves itself, at least for the lucky corporate duckies who take over the parted-out parcel delivery functions of USPS:
The analysts propose severing USPS’ lucrative parcel business from its less profitable letter mail delivery, selling the former to private investors and potentially leaving taxpayers on the hook for the latter. Without the USO, parcel and package delivery to regions deemed “unprofitable” (such as rural communities) could be scaled back or cease entirely, while public 6-day letter mail service could enter a death spiral.
And hey, nobody likes junk mail, so why not just let that part of the mail wither and die? Sure, it’s sometimes useful for entire states’ voting systems, keeping voters informed, and making it possible to send birthday cards to your grandkids in Nome. You’ll get used to it, shut up.
Even better, corporate raiders could offload USPS’s 8,500 properties, including historic post offices that only elitists care about because “history” and “architectural treasure.” If the publicly funded stump of the letter service needs to sort mail, Amazon could probably lease sites back to it, at a profit.
And just think what a deal it would be to slash the 600,000 postal workers into tiny bits, or at least their job positions! Leave the expensive pension system to the taxpayers, and extract all the value possible from what’s left. Sure, the USPS is 91 percent unionized. But if you eliminate most of the jobs, buy the workers out at public expense, and hand the profitable services to private companies, only the still-public letter service will be stuck with those old labor agreements, while the for-profit package service can be lean and mean.
That’s just one possible plan for “reforming” the USPS by privatizing the profits and socializing the costs. We’re sure the Trump team could find even worse ways to do it, too. Oh, hey! Another reason Trump would want to wreck USPS: It helped create the Black middle class, so eliminating it would be a blow for justice against DEI.
As for Louis DeJoy, maybe he’ll end up running a privatized delivery service into the ground, or maybe he’ll get some cushy job on a corporate board. Or maybe, like your Etsy order, he’ll get stuck forever in the Indianapolis USPS hub and never be seen again.
[WaPo (Archive link) / Revolving Door Project / Guardian]
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The idiots jumping on the "USPS would work better privatized" bandwagon can fuck all the way off
What service has actually been made better by CORPORATE coming in just for profits? Look at our fucking "healthcare"
Try as I may, I can't get the image of people, shackled. all with shaven heads, dressed in white pajamas , no shoes only socks, being clubbed along by black masked guards and herded onto planes bound for a concentration camp. For everyone who ever said "It can't happen here" I offer those images that it can, and it is!
To make matters worse, we now find out that very few, if any had been given any opportunity to prove their innocence. NO hearing, no pleas, no due process,. NO NOTHING! That is not America.