Why did Trump’s Postmaster General Louis DeJoy replace twenty-odd high-ranking United States Postal Service executives in a “Friday Night Massacre” on August 7, including replacing the two top executives overseeing operations? DeJoy said that he wants to fix the USPS’s “broken business model”, but what does that really mean? What was the old business model, how was it broken, and how was the “massacre” supposed to help fix it? Surely the public has the right to know — but DeJoy has said very little about this publicly.
So let’s do a little detective work, shall we?
In particular, let’s look at the role played by David E. Williams, who DeJoy just made the USPS’s Chief Logistics & Processing Operations Officer. Dave Williams is a career USPS executive: he has a BS in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Florida and an MBA from William & Mary, and has risen through the USPS ranks since he joined it in 1987 as a specialist trainee. As can be seen in his 2012 testimony before the Postal Regulatory Commission, Williams is expert in logistics and mail delivery; his testimony focused on the elimination of excess mail processing capacity, and on slowing down delivery to cut costs.
To decipher Williams’s public statements about mail delivery we’ll need to cut through the fog a bit, as the political uproar about the recent USPS changes has included widely-reported falsehoods. President Trump recently lied that USPS funding proposed by Democrats is needed “to make the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots” — which is false, as the USPS has plenty of capacity to deliver ballots and at its current burn rate it won’t run out of money until August 2021 or so.
The USPS’s problem is not capacity (letters delivered per day), it’s delay (days to deliver a letter). In “What's Really Going On At the Postal Service”, Government Executive reporter Eric Katz wrote that on Thursday DeJoy admitted to USPS employees that his recent initiatives had “unintended consequences that impacted our service levels overall” — and “service levels” here really mean delays.
So what was the Friday Night Massacre about? It came after delays had already increased due to DeJoy’s initiatives, so was it merely DeJoy’s way of deflecting blame or is something else going on?
In 2019, Postal Service revenue was 34% from first-class mail, 32% from packages, and 23% from “marketing mail” like this.
To help answer this we can look at public statements by Dave Williams, the USPS executive that DeJoy promoted. After the 2018 elections, Williams proudly told the USPS Mailers Technical Advisory Committee that “political mail revenue was $563 million, tracking above goal by 31%,” which indicates a priority on making money by getting bulk political mail delivered before the election. In contrast, Williams’s boilerplate statement last month that although the USPS plans to deliver ballots in a “timely manner”, it “cannot guarantee a specific delivery date or alter standard to comport with individual state election law” underscores the fact that the USPS does not consider ballot delivery to be any more important than delivering other bulk or first-class mail.
Of course ballots are not officially lower priority than the other mail; but let’s just say that the USPS makes more money delivering political junk mail than it does delivering ballots, and money talks at the USPS, particularly under DeJoy.
Is this why Williams is now DeJoy’s right-hand man while others were shuffled aside? Does DeJoy promote a USPS faction that wants to delay deliveries to cut costs (which is fine for most junk mail), and did DeJoy oust a competing faction that wanted to avoid this? Or is there something else going on? We don’t know, because DeJoy hasn’t told us. Why not?
Today, Congressional Democrats called on DeJoy to testify about this at a House Oversight Committee meeting August 24. Will DeJoy show up? (Hint: Democrats already asked weeks ago, and DeJoy said then that September 17 was his first available date.)
And really, why does DeJoy need to wait until August 24 or September 17 or whatever? He can just tell us now. We want to know.