If you had spent Monday watching members of the House Oversight Committee grill Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, you would be as confused as I am.
The U.S. Postal Service is in dire financial straits.
The U.S. Postal Service is well funded, partly thanks to a dramatic, pandemic-related increase in mailed packages.
DeJoy is a logistical genius, who has successfully demanded that mail trucks leave processing centers on time.
DeJoy is a soulless bureaucrat so intent on getting mail trucks to stick to their departure schedules that he let them drive away empty. (As LA-area Democratic Rep. Jimmy Gomez put it, "You focused on getting trucks to leave on time, but you didn't focus on getting mail to the people.")
Ah details, details.
I felt a little sorry for DeJoy, 63, who sat alone at the witness table in front of smattering of socially distanced lawmakers. He is not a public servant. He is a wealthy, well-connected Republican megadonor and former owner of a logistics company, which evolved from his father's Long Island trucking company.
Under questioning by Democratic Rep. Brenda Lawrence of Michigan, a former letter carrier and post office supervisor, De Joy admitted he did not know about Chapter 39 of the U.S. Government Code, which holds that the USPS "shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people."
He confessed to Democratic Rep. Katie Porter of California that he doesn't know how much postage is required for a postcard, nor has any idea how many Americans "to the nearest million" voted by mail in the last election.
DeJoy, it's clear, knew next to nothing about the Postal Service when he took it over in June. But hey, Donald Trump didn't know anything about the federal government when he took over, either, and look how well that's worked out.
Like the president, DeJoy probably thought his private business experience was all he needed. He would transform the Postal Service, and its 600,000-plus employees who deliver 451 million pieces of mail a day, into a better, more businesslike version of itself.
That hasn't happened.
Instead, he has instituted a management hiring freeze, pushed for early retirement for workers and allowed overtime pay to be curtailed at a moment when as many as 40,000 postal workers are either ill or in quarantine because of the COVID-19 virus.
Attempts at cost containment, he admitted, have caused serious delays in mail deliveries.
How serious?
A couple of Democratic lawmakers cited the work of my LA Times colleagues Maya Lau and Laura Nelson, who reported last week on widespread delays and dysfunction in California post offices, where sorting machines have been removed or locked up with no explanation. By early August in a South Los Angeles processing facility, they wrote, "gnats and rodents were swarming around containers of rotted fruit and meat, and baby chicks were dead inside their boxes."
Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona tried to get DeJoy to blame the slow deliveries on "all the rioting going on," but the postmaster general did not bite.
