Dejoy Announces Search For Successor

*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***
https://www.linns.com/news/postal-u...eneral-dejoy

DeJoy must have seen the writing on the wall as he says he is seeking successor a few days before Trump and DOGE announced publicly of taking over USPS and dissolving the board. The Linn article quotes the USPS which provides the hollow praise of his work (but DeJoy did nothign really, this is just a way to salvage his uselessness.)

Running away before the mess he created fully craters or perhaps afraid of Trump II.

Trump has ONE Vice-president , Biden had ONE Vice-President ----Now tell me why the Post Office has 212 Vice-Presidents each making over $220,000 a year , if people say they are over staff I can guarentee you that is not at the local level or city level .

I don't think he legally can dissolve the Board. The current USPS was legislated into existence in 1971(?) and required the establishment of a Rate Commission and a Board of Governors for oversight & approval. It is considered a quasi Federal Executive Branch entity, & with approval of the Board & Rate Commission made it's own decisions on operations, investment with the Board approval. No tax funds were used to support the operations & within 10 years broke even, and for several years after raked in a modest profit. Under the 2nd Bush the House demanded USPS contribute $5 Billion per year for future health benefits premium payments to OBM/OPM. That plus the onset of electronic communication began the USPS financial downfall. Congress can stop this, but will not.

Eligies is correct. This revolves around Congress who always conveniently throw grenades and then disappear. Pinning this all on DeJoy, while it may feel good if you are a partisan, is disingenuous.

Floortrader is also correct. The USPS is bloated beyond recognition. It is a massive patronage operation. I know, having had a number of acquaintances through the years that worked slept there.

Further: The present 'management' tree was not the original structure of the 1971 USPS. Originally there were 5-Regional Offices, with top management of Regional Postmaster Generals. There was a reorganization some years later, which established geographical areas (originally 10 I believe) with Area Vice Presidents as top management. Several years later 2-Areas were discontinued & absorbed into remaining. The title of Vice-President was mostly just a name change from Postmaster to vice president. Vice President Marketing was Assistant Postmaster General Marketing. Same with Facilities, HR, right down the line. Granted some positions were added as technology set in, or programs initiated to provide for the changing work schemes. Nepotism was there, I wouldn't say prevalent, just the nature of the beast. Up until mid-2000's, USPS was a stable entity to work for. After, political forces began to see the USPS as a successful cash cow, & used legislative power to acquire funds for purposes that no other federal agency was accountable for. Today the USPS, because of political 'gnawing', is not the USPS of 1971, or after the Re-organization into its current managerial structure. Financially hobbled by legislated fund grabs, lack of timely AI advancements, loss of its major revenue base (First Class Mail), failure to identify its need to change its market focus, the USPS has moved backward to the days when funding programs or investments needed appropriation through the legislature. Slow in coming it is (has) degraded into it's current condition.

I saw yesterday that the POTUS is thinking about Commerce absorbing the postal service. Not sure what that would mean except for it having a seat at the Cabinet through the Commerce Secretary. Am curious to hear much more because POTUS also stated no interest in it being privatized. I do think that this tech friendly administration will likely look hard at how to bring the USPS into the present as they want to do with FAA, IRS, Treasury etc.

I've met DeJoy; he seemed a nice (and, importantly, competent) enough individual. My local PO lady has only good things to say about him and the changes he's enacted. Given the structural issues the USPS faces, I think he, or anyone else, in that job was going to have a tough go of it. Criticism from all sides, etc.

I don't doubt there's significant managerial bloat, which can and should be taken care of. It's all well and good for Elon to go on TV wielding a chainsaw, though; it's another to act in a way that will actually pull USPS out of its death spiral.

This is all quite simple. Difficult, but simple. Unless we're drastically slashing the network footprint and delivery and hiking prices (as happened in Denmark over the last couple years - no universal service obligation, no post offices, a letter abroad costs ~$7 to mail), USPS will have a high cost floor that you can only Elon cut your way out of to a certain degree. Given the universal service obligation, there is a cost floor, and a pretty high one at that. Trimming the bureaucratic fat needs to happen, but costs will still stay high.

Therefore, USPS needs to come up with new revenue, new money coming in the door, to fund all of the existing obligations and keep the big network going.

The obvious place to start is to do what other postal administrations elsewhere do, and offer financial products. Folks on the political right have done their utmost to prevent this from happening:



(https://apwu.org/news/magazine-camp...hrough-fed).

The libertarian argument against this is outlined here: https://reason.org/commentary/posta...n-to-sender/

Not a very convincing argument, given that their solution is to just privatize USPS and make it a publicly traded company, which, as has been pointed out earlier in this thread, POTUS and others are against.

(It also strains credulity - which private sector investors would willingly pump a ton of cash into such a loss-making enterprise?)