As many of you have heard, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is trying to change the USPS by longer delivery times for mail, shorter store hours for local post offices and more expensive postal rates, which is all a part of a 10-year plan he hopes to set for the U.S. Postal service that he unveiled last week. The goal of this plan is to fix the ongoing financial challenges that are happening with the Postal Service that has been happening for the past 5 years, and he hopes also that his plan can modernize the USPS to compete better with bigger icons like United Parcel Service, and the Federal Express (FedEx).
The standard of the USPS is that the mail that is being delivered on a constant basis is supposed to be delivered on time about 96% of the time, but they have not reached that number for about 5 years now. This comes at a time also where in December, they reached the lowest numbers of on time deliveries they have had in a decade, with 38% of mail making it on time to their locations, but since then the number has gone back up to 83% in the month of March. This plan will modify its first-class mail standards noting that now only 70% of mail will be delivered within one to three days, and 10% may now be delivered within a longer five-day delivery method.
The delivery slowdowns coupled with price increases, mailing industry could threaten that system by driving commercial mailers to cut costs and pull more volume out of the mail stream. In the long run, that could force the Postal Service to increase postage rates on the customers left in the system, which includes small businesses, seniors and people with disabilities, or to further cut service overall. DeJoy has also discussed eliminating air transportation for their services which will also slow down the delivery date for mail across the United States, imagine having your mail be driven from Miami Florida to a place like Seattle Washington that is 3,300 miles away, your mail will get there in two weeks.
Because of this plan, DeJoy who is a supporter and donor to former President Donald Trump, has come under heavy criticism for a series of operational changes that slowed mail before the 2020 elections. The policy shifts increased the fears that DeJoy was attempting to sabotage the agency on the behalf of Trump, who we all know is a critic of mail-in voting, before it handled unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots in the Presidential election. President Biden is now being pushed to remove DeJoy out of the position, but he does not have the power to do that, he would have to appoint new members of the board and hope that they remove him from the position before this plan gets put into place. We will have to wait and see what happens in the coming months of the Biden Presidency to see if he pushes DeJoy out of the position.
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