YOUR LETTERS: Postmaster DeJoy helps himself

The U.S. Postal Service has awarded a $120 million contract to a shipping company that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy used to run and still has a financial interest in. And this contract is partly paid for by a hike in prices that took effect jut last month.

This is deeply unethical, but so far, the USPS Board of Governors has done nothing to stop DeJoy from destroying the mail—and profiting from it on its way down.

The group Demand Progress is pressuring the Board of Governors to rid the USPS of DeJoy and for Congress to pass legislation to protect the post office. We are working to ensure that personnel making the decisions in the federal government are doing so in the interest of the people, not to line their own pockets.

The price increase is part of DeJoy’s 10-year plan, unveiled last spring, that includes sharply raising prices while simultaneously slowing mail delivery, making it significantly less competitive and harder to sustain.

While the plan calls for ending air transport for first-class mail, it still pays hundreds of millions of dollars to contractors like XPO Logistics, DeJoy’s former corporation, from which he still garners millions of dollars a year from.

Making the mail more expensive won’t hurt most giant corporations, which are allowed to negotiate their own rates with the USPS. It hurts the individual in an urban center who has to pay $8 to mail a certified rent check to a landlord. It hurts the retiree in rural America who can’t afford the shipping costs to receive medication anymore.

The Biden administration needs to be cleared of anti-government Trump appointees, starting with Louis DeJoy.

ROBERT CRUICKSHANK
Demand Progress