New Postmaster General Is Top GOP Fundraiser Who Seeks to Weaponize and Destroy U.S. Postal Service

The Trump and Republican takeover of agencies that they hate and seek to destroy continues....

Louis DeJoy, a North Carolina businessman who has given millions of dollars to the Republican Party, including the Trump campaign, has been named the nation's new postmaster general.  DeJoy has contributed more than $1.2 million to the Trump Victory Fund, and millions more to Republican Party organizations and candidates, according to Federal Election Commission records. He was also in charge of fundraising for the Republican National Convention.

"The idea that we would appoint and accept the appointment of a partisan political donor with no credentials ... is reckless and irresponsible ... and a stick in the eye by Trump to a service Americans count on every day," Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., told NPR.

By the end of next month, every member of the agency’s bipartisan governing board will be a Trump appointee. Democratic vice chairman David Williams resigned April 30, fed up with Trump’s approach to the agency, according to people familiar with his thinking.

Congress allocated billions in the CARES Act to help our U.S. Postal Service.   While Republicans send hundreds of millions to giant corporations, they attack and starve the U.S. Postal Service.

The Postal Service's finances have been a problem for many years. It ran a deficit of $8.8 billion last fiscal year, and Postal Service officials are in talks with the Treasury Department over terms of a $10 billion line of credit for the agency, which Congress included in the CARES Act approved in March. 

Trump has recently threatened to withhold a $10 billion line of credit approved by Congress in a coronavirus stimulus package unless the Postal Service quadruples what it charges to deliver packages. Independent analysts warn that such a change would devastate the agency, which has increasingly relied on such deliveries for a fast-growing portion of its business.

This is Trump's executive branch launching a new effort to leverage his powers against the media and his critics - another potential mechanism of democratic erosion. This is not a drill.

Trump for years has alleged, without evidence, that the Postal Service is undercharging companies, particularly Amazon (whose founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post). The agency has steadfastly rejected that assessment, saying it charges what it can given a competitive marketplace.

Trump often cites... the Postal Service’s relationship with Amazon... as the main driver of the USPS’s financial woes.  He falsely stated in April that the agency loses $2 to $5 each time it delivers a package for “Internet retail companies.”  The Postal Service is required by law to charge enough on each package to cover the cost of delivery and a percentage of the agency’s overhead expenses.

Much of Trump’s ire is aimed at Bezos and his ownership of The Washington Post. Trump has been critical of the newspaper’s coverage of his administration, and his policy priorities on mail issues appear to directly target Amazon...

... Trump repeatedly railed against Amazon and Bezos and told Brennan — the outgoing postmaster general — and others to raise rates.  When told that the rates were fixed by the contracts, Trump regularly grew irate, the official said.

And so.... Trump gets his way and the Postal Service is launching a review of package delivery fees for contracts with Amazon, UPS, FedEx and others while another top official is resigning.

Weeks before a Republican donor and top White House ally becomes postmaster general, the U.S. Postal Service has begun a review of its package delivery contracts and lost its second-highest executive, which will leave its board of governors without any officials who predate Trump.

The Postal Service in recent weeks has sought bids from consulting firms to reassess what it charges companies such as Amazon..... Higher package rates would cost shippers and online retailers billions of dollars, potentially spurring them to invest in their own distribution networks instead of relying on the Postal Service.

The reevaluation of those bulk-discount contracts signals how swiftly the independent agency and its board of governors have fallen under the administration’s influence..

And just like tarriffs the people who will pay the increases are the American general public.  

Congressional Democrats are attempting to thwart the White House’s growing influence with the Postal Service by including funding and no-strings-attached borrowing in the $3 trillion Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (Heroes) Act, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced Wednesday. It includes $25 billion in aid and new language forbidding Treasury from attaching conditions to the earlier $10 billion loan.

Advocates are fighting to persuade Senate Republicans to preserve the no-strings-attached borrowing provision. GOP Sens. Susan M. Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Steve Daines (Mont.), Dan Sullivan (Alaska) and Pat Roberts (Kan.) joined with five Democrats last week in a letter to McConnell and Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) that called for “significant emergency appropriations” and unconditioned borrowing.

Sources:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/14/trump-postal-service-package-rates/

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851976464/new-postmaster-general-is-top-gop-fundraiser