Within a week of Louis DeJoy starting as the United States Postal Service’s postmaster general on June 15, people around the country report unprecedented mail delays.
The media doesn’t pick up on the story for a month, assuming the influx in delays are due to the COVID-19 pandemic. By the time they notice, even more changes have hit the post office hard.
The rapid-fire moves just months before the November election concerned Postal Service insiders, who said that, since at least the Obama administration, the agency had generally sought to avoid significant changes within two or three months of a general election.
Soon, mail was piling up at post offices, veterans were not receiving their medications, bills were arriving late and questions began surfacing about the ability of the Postal Service to handle what is expected to be a record number of mail-in ballots this November because of the pandemic.
The New York Times, August 2020
Sources
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/us/politics/trump-usps-mail-delays.html?searchResultPosition=1
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/22/business/economy/dejoy-postmaster-general-trump-mnuchin.html?searchResultPosition=10
Photo: Kim Smith