Donald Trump loves big donors and hates the U.S. Postal Service, and now he’s putting one of the former in charge of the latter. Trump has tapped Louis DeJoy—who has given more than $2 million to the Trump campaign and other Republican causes since 2016 and is the finance chair for the Republican National Convention—to be the next postmaster general.
Trump has made his agenda for the Postal Service clear: starve it of resources and force it to charge uncompetitive amounts to deliver packages for Amazon, which he hates because Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. And of course Trump is always eager to hurt workers like the Postal Service’s unionized, 21% Black workforce.
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There’s currently just one Democrat (and three Republicans) on the Postal Service’s board of governors after last week’s resignation of David Williams, who, The Washington Post reports, “told confidants he was upset that the Treasury Department was meddling in what has long been an apolitical agency and felt that his fellow board members had capitulated to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s conditions for the $10 billion line of credit, according to four people familiar with Williams’s thinking.”
That $10 billion line of credit is all the help for the Postal Service that the Trump administration would allow into coronavirus relief packages when the need is for tens of billions of dollars in direct aid—something that private industries got while Trump flatly refused to back such aid for a federal agency that is in the Constitution. Without aid in the coronavirus crisis and because of congressional restrictions on how it does business, the Postal Service is in imminent danger of not being able to fund its continuing operations.
Outgoing Postmaster General Megan Brennan stood up to pressure from Trump to raise fees for Amazon (and, incidentally, other companies) and directly asked Congress for more coronavirus aid. DeJoy is unlikely to frustrate Trump as much on either of those fronts.