Postmaster DeJoy Should Step Aside Gracefully

By Jim Coogan

Postmaster General DeJoy should see the handwriting on the wall and gracefully step aside.

Why?

He had no plan to insure delivery of ballots during an election season.
He whiffed on holiday deliveries and allowed UPS and FedEx to shift a backlog of packages over to the USPS.
His plans to improve the Post Office in the middle of the pandemic and election season were never subjected to any economic study. Economic study is required for almost all structural changes by the Post Office.
He hasn’t commissioned any studies to back up his restructuring plan.
On-time delivery of First Class mail has declined below acceptable benchmarks and is not improving.
He is announcing a 10-year plan when he may have only days left as Postmaster General.
His appointment politicized the job of Postmaster General given that he was a Trump fundraiser and vice chairman of the RNC. Political appointees are not “nonpartisan” and are moved out when their party loses the election.
He could easily announce that the fleet of Post Office vehicles is going all electric and get in synch with the Biden administration, but he hasn’t taken that step (which might signal he could be a team player).
He still faces ethical issues with his stock holdings in his old parcel delivery company because it competes with the Post Office.
He faces deep ethical issues with his fundraising tactics for the Republican Party. His bundling of donations from forced contributions from his executives when he was a private sector CEO are both illegal and well-documented.
He has shown no appetite for working with the diverse and important stakeholders of the Post Office, and has a management style that won’t work with stakeholders like the postal unions, Congress, the American public, and primary competitors such as UPS, FedEx and Amazon.com.
His plans to make First Class mail both slower and more expensive appears wrong on its face.
Previous USPS plans to raise prices have often resulted in lower revenues and lower profits because of price elasticity that wasn’t fully understood.
He appears to believe his job mandate is to squeeze out more revenue and lower costs without any consensus among stakeholders that those are in fact the goals of the many stakeholders.

So why not avoid the embarrassment of Congressional hearings and ride off into the sunset to enjoy his millions?

Biden will soon appoint some new board members and they will then get a new Postmaster under the leadership of the new Democratic chairman of the USPS Board of Governors. It may take a few months for that to happen, but it will happen in short order.

Postmaster DeJoy fundamentally doesn’t understand that his job is larger than simply squeezing the postal workers and trying to squeeze out a little more revenue.

Time to go, Postmaster DeJoy.

Jim Coogan is the founder and president of Catalog Marketing Economics, a consulting firm focused on catalog circulation planning.