Lawmakers say it's time to get rid of Trump-backed postal chief and his enablers

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) is the latest in a growing number of congressional Democrats calling on President Joe Biden to get rid of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors members who have not yet fired him.

“DeJoy is a disaster,” she tweeted on Sunday. “I’m asking President Biden to restore trust in @USPS — by sending every last member of its’ Board of Governors packing.”

In a letter Friday, Duckworth wrote that DeJoy “implemented and accelerated flawed and harmful system wide operational changes that included gutting overtime pay, reducing hours of operations for facilities and removing community mail drop boxes,” and did so “with little — if any — public rebuke from the current USPS Board of Governors” who hired and kept him on the job.

Last month, Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) made a similar demand.

“Today I am calling on President Biden to fire the entire Postal Board of Governors for their silence and complicity in trump and dejoy’s attempts to subvert the election and destroy the Post Office,” he wrote in a series of tweets.

“Trump confessed he was wrecking @USPS to rig the election. His toady Postmaster General dejoy carried out that arson. It’s time to clean house. Dejoy should be fired but also prosecuted,” Pascrell added.

Since that time, Reps. Tim Ryan (D-OH) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA) have echoed those calls. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said earlier this month that DeJoy “should have the common decency to go because he has lost the confidence of the American people and Congress.”

Since taking office, Biden has moved quickly to remove most of Donald Trump’s executive branch appointees. But under the law, DeJoy answers not to Biden but to a board of up to nine independent Postal Service governors. The governors are appointed by the president for fixed terms and can be fired only for cause.

Duckworth suggested in her letter that the board’s “silence” and “complicity” in DeJoy’s “harmful policy changes” amounted to cause for removal.

DeJoy, a top Republican donor, has been under fire since he was selected last May.

His policy changes harmed the American public by significantly increasing delays in delivery times — for vote-by-mail ballots and for vital items like prescription drugs — in the middle of a pandemic. A federal judge called these slowdowns a “politically motivated attack” and the agency’s inspector general determined his decisions “negatively impacted the quality and timelines of mail service nationally.”

Last week, DeJoy apologized for falling “far short of meeting our service targets,” but took no responsibility for apparent sabotage of the agency. The board has not held him accountable and has even backed DeJoy; one governor said in September they were ‘thrilled” with the job he was doing.

In a briefing last week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that Biden “stands by his concerns about what happened last fall and improvements he’d like to see at the Post Office,” and noted that there are already four open seats on the board.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.