More DeJoy corruption exposed, along with the extent of damage he's done to the Postal Service
Joan McCarter, Daily Kos Staff
It likely will
not surprise you to learn that the guy who gouged
taxpayers in previous contracts with the U.S. Postal Service
(USPS) at his old company, and who bought his way into this job with allegedly
illegal campaign donations to Republicans, as well as
donations to the Trump
campaign and Senate Republicans when the postmaster job opened
up in December, has allegedly been a cheat for a good part of his whole life.
So much so that
he was sued by his
own brother for deceptive financial practices in the family
trucking company.
From the outside, it sure does look like DeJoy bought his way into the job and is there to do his benefactors' bidding, which includes sabotaging the agency and along with it vote-by-mail in this pandemic.
It's amazing how effective he was in accomplishing that from the time he started in June until mid-August when all hell broke loose with mail delays.
In just five weeks, a new report from
the Senate has found, nearly 350 million pieces of first class mail—about 7% of
it—was delayed because of his actions. Those actions include strict dispatch
schedules that left mail behind, prohibited extra mail trips, empty mail trucks
leaving distribution centers, and no overtime for postal workers to complete
routes.
The report shows that USPS leadership didn't take time to implement these policies, forcing them on an ill-prepared agency without considering the potential upheaval it would all cause, including real harm to people not getting prescription drugs, not getting Social Security checks, having rent and utility payments delayed—all the business of first-class mail.
Before DeJoy's changes, the report from Sen.
Gary Peters found, more than 90% of first-class mail was delivered on time.
DeJoy's changes were implemented in mid-July, and immediately the on-time
delivery rates dropped to below 85%. That ended up meaning 85 million
deliveries delayed in the week of Aug. 8 to Aug. 14 alone.
Every single USPS district in the country saw a drop in on-time performance, but the worst delays were in some key November battleground areas: service fell by 20.4% in northern Ohio, 15.8% in the Ohio Valley, 19.1% in Detroit, and 17.9% in central Pennsylvania.
Since DeJoy's
sabotage became public knowledge, he's had to reverse some of those changes and
there's been some improvement in delivery, but it hasn't recovered to pre-DeJoy
levels. It declined again in 30 of the 67 USPS districts form Aug. 29 to
Sept. 4.
"The results of my investigation clearly show that Postmaster General DeJoy’s carelessly instituted operational changes to the Postal Service resulted in severe service impacts that harmed the lives and livelihoods of Michiganders and Americans,"
Peters said in a statement. "I have repeatedly made
it clear to Mr. DeJoy, that his actions have had consequences for many of my
constituents and people across the nation. My report shows his decisions were
reckless and caused significant harm to the American people."
DeJoy has left the orders on transportation schedules in place—making the trucks run on time, as he repeatedly talked about in the congressional hearings on his changes. Those are the changes that postal service employees and independent experts find most controversial, and that cause the most problems with delays.
These
are the changes that force postal workers to leave mail behind, to send empty
trucks out from distribution centers. Peters wants all the directives,
including the transportation schedule, to be reversed, and he wants DeJoy to
commit to treating all election mail with first-class privilege.
Here's part of what's so maddening about this: "Postmaster General DeJoy's changes appear to have been focused on cost-cutting based on an inflated estimate, and at a high cost to the American people in terms of delays," the report states.
But at the same time, DeJoy is giving high-paying jobs in the USPS to his old cronies.
While he's insisting that he's had to make drastic operational
changes because the agency is going broke, he's hired four
people who worked with him previously in that company that
bilked taxpayers and broke campaign finance laws (allegedly) for a lot of
money.
DeJoy hired Patrick Fiorentino and Kelly Abney to be senior executive advisers to him at the USPS, making $180,000 and $195,000 respectively as their base salary. DeJoy's former executive assistant, Heather Clarke, is now his chief of staff with a base salary of $184,900.
She's the one who, allegedly, "personally
called senior staffers, checking on whether executives were coming to
fundraisers and collecting checks for candidates" in that straw donor
scheme at DeJoy's old job. She also gave Republican campaigns $47,000 from 2002
to 2014.
He's a perfect
Trumper, in other words: corrupt to the core.
