New documents detail USPS's spring in crisis.
Source: Washington Post
Economic Policy
A scrapped plan to ship masks to Americans. A standoff with Amazon amid pressure from Trump. New documents detail USPS’s spring in crisis.
Nearly 10,000 pages of emails, memos and other private documents offer new details about the agency’s struggles and the pro-Trump figures to whom it turned for advice
By Tony Romm, Jacob Bogage and Lena H. Sun
September 17, 2020 at 7:03 a.m. EDT
It would be months before Louis DeJoy took the reins of the nation’s mail system, and the U.S. Postal Service already was mired in crisis. ... Mail carriers were revolting, fearful they had few protections against the newly emerging coronavirus. The Trump administration was bearing down on its finances, sending USPS officials scrambling over what they saw as a potential illegal takeover of agency operations. And then there was a looming standoff with Amazon, which privately signaled it could take some of its lucrative delivery business elsewhere.
The tensions surfaced at an April 9 meeting, when Amazon executives “stated their concerns” about the Postal Service’s economic plight amid the pandemic and questioned its “viability to them as a continued shipping partner,” according to a once-secret memo circulated within the agency, which described the situation as an “inflection point.” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The wide-ranging headaches that so troubled the USPS in April ultimately foreshadowed a summer of upheaval, thrusting the once-venerated mail service into a political maelstrom months before a presidential election. Newly disclosed details of these struggles are laid bare in nearly 10,000 pages of emails, legal memos, presentations and other documents obtained by The Washington Post from American Oversight, a watchdog group that requested them under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents, which mostly span March and April, depict an agency in distress, as its deteriorating finances collided with a public-health emergency and a looming election that would be heavily reliant on absentee ballots. During that period, the USPS occasionally relied on the legal counsel of well-connected Republicans, including Stefan C. Passantino, who once served as a top White House lawyer under President Trump. Passantino, whose role has not been previously reported, is also part of a new pro-Trump legal coalition preparing for the possibility of a contested election, a relationship that has raised new ethical flags among the administration’s critics.
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Tony Romm
Tony Romm is a technology policy reporter at The Washington Post. He has spent nearly ten years covering the ways that tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google navigate the corridors of government -- and the regulations that sometimes result. Follow https://twitter.com/tonyromm
Jacob Bogage
Jacob Bogage writes about business and technology for The Post, where he has worked since 2015. He previously covered the automotive and manufacturing industries and wrote for the Sports section. Follow https://twitter.com/jacobbogage
Lena H. Sun
Lena H. Sun is a national reporter for The Washington Post covering health with a special focus on public health and infectious disease. A longtime reporter at The Post, she has covered the Metro transit system, immigration, education and was a Beijing bureau chief. Follow https://twitter.com/bylenasun
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/09/17/usps-trump-coronavirus-amazon-foia/
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