AN OPEN LETTER TO CONGRESS and the POSTAL SYSTEM BOARD of GOVERNORS

Last night, I sent the letter below to Marc Veasey, my congressman and to Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, and I will send it to Nancy Pelosi and the US Postal System Board of Governors. as well. The letter is long, but it’s important.

If you care about the November elections and the Post Office itself, I urge you to write to your congressional representatives as well. Feel free to use any or all of my letter as a template.

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As you know, the original US Post Office, now the US Postal System (USPS), was founded in July, 1775 with Benjamin Franklin as its first Postmaster General. It’s current iteration, the USPS was established nearly 200 years later, in 1971. However, to most of us, there is no difference, it’s The Post Office, and its mail carriers and blue mailboxes are part of the fabric of our American culture. We know our mail carriers by their creed, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

Recently appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy seems not to know or care about the mail carriers’ creed or the jobs they and other postal workers do. Rather, he seems to have embarked on a campaign to destabilize, undermine, and destroy the Post Office. Since his appointment this May, DeJoy has removed  upwards of 670 mail-sorting machines from Post Offices around the country; conducted a massive shuffling of 33 senior USPS officials, including the people in charge of day-to-day operations; eliminated overtime resulting in mail delivery delays; removed mail boxes from the neighborhood streets in some vote-by-mail states; and most recently told post offices to open later and close for lunch. Dejoy’s changes are not improving service, and they are alarming customers, many of whom are no longer getting their mail and prescription medications in a timely manner.

These piecemeal changes and slowdowns are especially alarming just two and a half months before a momentous presidential election. At this point, I am not going to talk about this in political terms; but if Mr. DeJoy continues to hobble the post office just ten weeks before the election, I will be forced to believe his actions are political in nature. Meanwhile, I suggest Mr. DeJoy’s containment or removal. He has no postal service experience and seems to be moving the USPS backward rather than forward.

I am appealing to you because as a registered voter and an American taxpayer, I need to know how you plan to put an end to Mr. DeJoy’s seemingly senseless decisions and restore the USPS to its recent, efficient level of operation.

Pamela E. Ice  Dallas Texas 75211