Louis DeJoy, wearing a blue suit and a red tie, his bald head glistening in the light of the chandeliers above, leans over a podium in a hotel ballroom. His voice swells with indignation as he describes some of the deficiencies he discovered after taking his current position. The 75th U.S. postmaster general says he found that the agency’s training manuals on how to operate mail processing plants were 40 years old. “Forty years old!” he shouts, his accent redolent of his native Brooklyn. “They instruct you how to do things wrong! So I’m collecting all those.”
Then there are the cost-cutting measures that went into effect at the agency after mail volume was decimated in the Great Recession. DeJoy says he was mortified to learn that in parts of the country, post office bathrooms are cleaned only three times a week. “What about the other four days?” he asks.
DeJoy is sharing his findings with about 250 U.S. Postal Service executives gathered in a Marriott near the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. His listeners murmur in agreement. Their responses become more emphatic when he mentions a note he recently received from a letter carrier with a concern about his mail truck, which, if it’s typical of USPS vehicles, is probably three decades old. “He was told not to use reverse in his vehicle,” DeJoy says. “Not to use reverse!”
