Postmaster Common Louis DeJoy’s broadly praised announcement final week that the Postal Service will purchase tens of hundreds of electrical autos within the coming years to assist change its growing older supply fleet shouldn’t be sufficient to save lots of the scandal-plagued USPS chief’s job, advocates mentioned, pointing to his refusal to assist a extra formidable electrification plan and his ongoing efforts to slash jobs, consolidate mail amenities, and hike costs for customers.
“The underside line is that any improve in E.V. acquisition at USPS is despite DeJoy, not due to him,” Vishal Narayanaswamy of the Revolving Door Undertaking, told The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff. “Electrification could be continuing a lot quicker if we had a board that might fireplace him.”
DeJoy, a Trump and GOP megadonor, was selected to function postmaster basic in Could 2020, and even information final yr that he was going through an FBI investigation for potentially unlawful marketing campaign finance exercise throughout his time as a non-public logistics government wasn’t sufficient to hurt his job safety.
The postmaster basic is chosen by — and might solely be eliminated by — the USPS Board of Governors, a physique composed of 9 officers nominated by the president.
Within the face of large stress to drive out DeJoy, Biden has nominated and the narrowly Democratic Senate has confirmed 5 board governors, giving the president’s picks a majority on the postal board and sufficient votes to take away the postmaster basic, who doesn’t serve a set time period.
Whereas Biden’s nominees have raised questions and concerns about DeJoy’s 10-year plan to overtake USPS operations, calling it “strategically ill-conceived” and “harmful,” they’ve but to mount a severe push for his removing.
Narayanaswamy lamented that the White Home, too, seems tired of ousting DeJoy. The Biden administration “doesn’t appear to care about changing DeJoy and has kind of dropped it as a precedence,” Narayanaswamy informed Aronoff, who argued in a column final week that “the potential of the USPS to propel an vitality transition will proceed to go untapped” so long as DeJoy is on the helm.
Although the brand new electrical automobile plan is a major enchancment over DeJoy’s earlier proposal — which known as for the acquisition of 90% gas-guzzling trucks — “the USPS solely plans to affect 40% of its fleet” in complete, Aronoff famous.
“The newly introduced purchases additionally solely signify about 10% of the present federal fleet of automobiles, SUVs, and vehicles, which is the biggest on this planet,” Aronoff continued. “Meaning the vast majority of the fleet will nonetheless run on gasoline for the foreseeable future. What’s extra, the interior combustion engine–powered variations of the USPS’s ‘Subsequent Technology Supply Autos,’ or NGDVs, get simply 8.6 miles per gallon.”
“The potential for the USPS to behave as an engine of decarbonization and set industry-wide requirements for electrification is huge. However DeJoy — who’s talked repeatedly about downsizing and privatizing the USPS and has profitable ties to personal logistics corporations — is unlikely to see issues that approach,” she added. “It’s nonetheless attainable for Biden to switch pro-DeJoy members of the USPS Board of Governors, paving the best way for them to switch DeJoy himself.”
Two Trump-nominated board members who’ve defended DeJoy — Donald Moak and William Zollars — are presently in holdover years after their phrases expired earlier this month, however Biden has but to announce any new board picks regardless of grassroots stress.
In late October, the Save the Publish Workplace Coalition — a community of greater than 300 public curiosity teams — urged Biden to switch Moak and Zollars with retiring Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.) and coverage knowledgeable Sarah Anderson.
Earlier than her election to Congress, Lawrence labored for the Postal Service for 3 a long time. Anderson, director of the World Economic system Undertaking on the Institute for Coverage Research, has written about and researched the USPS for years, and her grandfather was a Postal Service employee.
“Congresswoman Lawrence and Ms. Anderson are public servants who would convey wanted views and experience to the USPS Board of Governors at a time when the nation is trying to the board to start out asking the powerful questions of Louis DeJoy,” mentioned Porter McConnell, co-founder of the Save the Publish Workplace Coalition.
