Postmaster General Louis DeJoy often shows his pique toward anyone or anything that he perceives is interfering or resisting the full-speed implementation of his 10-Year Plan, including members of Congress.
At an April 16 hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, most of the panel was critical of declining service and the potential consequences of planned processing facility changes. This was reinforced in a May 8 letter from a bipartisan group of 26 senators, addressed to the PMG and the Governors of the Postal Service, repeating the call to pause further network realignment.
Among the signatories was Sen Gary Peters (MI), chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who, among other senators at the April 16 hearing, complained about DeJoy’s lack of responsiveness to letters and requests for information from Congress. Having more than a quarter of the Senate express their common concerns about the PMG’s Plan should have been a clear signal to both DeJoy and his allies on the Board that they need to rethink that Plan and pause further implementation until the issues raised repeatedly by senators have been satisfactorily resolved.
How DeJoy and the Governors chose to respond was interesting, to say the least.
After years of compliant support for DeJoy’s 10-Year Plan, the attention from Congress seemed to inspire a member of the Board to offer a different opinion – a bold departure from the usual stilted consonance of the Governors.
In a public statement made at the Board’s May 9 meeting, former Deputy PMG Ron Stroman agreed that the Postal Service needs to develop an integrated network for mail and packages, and noted that the hub-and-spoke network it’s developing, modeled on those used by other carriers, “has the potential to create a more efficient network,” but cautioned that “it has some inherent risks.” He added:
“…To better manage these risks, I believe we need to slow down new network changes until service has gotten close to our service targets for 2024. We should then more gradually phase in changes over time. Slowing down our network changes would accomplish several things. First, it would minimize the impact of any service declines on the entire network. Second, it would stop the necessity to address sustained service declines in several parts of the country simultaneously. Third, it would allow management more time to examine future network plans and to make necessary adjustments. Fourth, it would provide more time to ensure that the right employees are in place and provide them with the sufficient training. Finally, it would give the Postal Service more time to stabilize the network and ensure the country’s confidence in our network and the design well ahead of the November presidential election…”
Regardless of their motive, Stroman’s public comments were unprecedented. No member of the Board has ever spoken out during the Board’s open session in a way that was less than fawningly supportive of the PMG’s Plan, let alone suggestive of the need for any degree of reconsideration.
In a letter sent the same day to Sen Gary Peters, DeJoy appeared to react to Stroman’s comments, finally agreeing to slow some network changes:
“…Further to our conversation yesterday, I agree to pause the movement of processing operations associated with the Mail Processing Facility Reviews. In response to the concerns you and your colleagues have expressed, I will commit to pause any implementation of these moves at least until after January 1, 2025. Even then, we will not advance these efforts without advising you of our plans to do so, and then only at a moderated pace of implementation... I want to stipulate as part of the pause however that the positive investments in the facilities on the attached list will also not commence, just as the annual cost savings associated with these mail moves will not be achieved while we pause. We estimate the expected annual cost savings to be $133-177 million, and the positive investments to be more than $430 million….”
It deserves noting that his carefully worded agreement was to defer “movement of processing operations.” He did not commit to a “pause” in either ongoing facility reviews or the opening of more RPDCs or S&DCs, so the “pause” is simply to let the heat cool on politicians, not to truly alter his Plan.
In that vein, claiming that “confusion continues to proliferate in some circles about the work we have underway,” DeJoy wrote another letter on May 20 “to clarify the various initiatives we have ongoing” as well as those “we agreed to ‘pause’ in my letter to you on May 9.”
DeJoy’s six-page letter also clarified that, unlike past facility consolidations where all processing operations were moved elsewhere, the current “mail processing facility reviews” will result in relocation of only outgoing mail processing, not closure of the facility. He made it a point to note that “in some cases, the movement of these operations is freeing up space so that a Sorting and Delivery Center… can be co-located at the facility,” hoping to soothe politicians’ concerns about the loss of union jobs in their states.
Noting that “our plan currently provides for 60 locations,” the letter listed 13 regional processing and distribution centers now or soon to be open, then added that “our plan currently provides for approximately 190” local processing centers, listing 20 that are now open or planned to be open soon.
Adding further “clarification,” DeJoy stated that “nearly all these RPDC and LPC facilities for which we are not pausing implementation are existing and operating. The work we are engaging in with these initiatives is to catch up on 20 years of deferred maintenance, upgrade 30-year-old technology, in-stall modern sortation equipment and rearrange our production floor layout to logically accommodate the difference between the size of a letter and the size of a package.”
Lastly, the letter stated that “to date, we have deployed 55 S&DCs and will deploy an additional 28 prior to September 30, 2024."
The sum of all his correspondence and “clarifications” is that the network revisions he implied were being “paused” may not be as suspended as his agreement with Peters seemed to suggest. Any facility construction seems to be continuing, completed facilities are being opened, and plans to open more RPDCs, LPCs, or S&DCs are going forward. So, despite a “pause,” DeJoy and his Plan aren’t slowing down. If they’re still paying attention, how Congressional politicians will react to this remains to be seen.
Leo Raymond is Owner and Managing Director, Mailers Hub.
This article originally appeared in the September/October, 2024 issue of Mailing Systems Technology.
