Ever since he was nominated by Donald Trump’s administration for the top spot at the U.S. Postal Service, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has been accused of fucking up the mail. Sometimes he has been accused of fucking up the mail intentionally. Other times he’s been accused of just being incompetent. Either way, not delivering the mail in a timely fashion can be annoying during normal times but, in an election season, it can have much broader ramifications.
In 2020, after DeJoy tried to ram through changes to the way mail was delivered, the USPS chief was accused of sabotaging the mail in a “politically motivated” attack ahead of the presidential election. “Although not necessarily apparent on the surface, at the heart of DeJoy’s and the Postal Service’s actions is voter disenfranchisement,” said U.S. District Court Chief Stanley Bastian, a federal judge who filed an injunction to stop DeJoy’s proposed changes. Bastian further called the move “an intentional effort on the part of the current Administration to disrupt and challenge the legitimacy of upcoming local, state, and federal elections.”
Now, DeJoy is once again being accused of potentially influencing a U.S. presidential election. An NBC News investigation claims that “some of the country’s slowest mail is in presidential swing states with strict mail ballot delivery deadlines.” Those states, which are plagued by low USPS performance metrics, include places like Georgia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. In those states, dysfunctionally slow mail could translate to significant aggregates of ballots not getting counted, critics worry. In the exceptionally tight presidential race, the loss of several thousand votes could have a critical impact on the outcome of the election.
Tons of government officials—both Democrats and Republicans—have been yelling at DeJoy for weeks and telling him to do a better job of ensuring that mail-in ballots can be sent (and counted) on time, to avoid a negative impact on the election. Even Republicans aren’t holding back: “It’s a disgrace,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told NBC. “They need to understand the importance [of election mail], and they need to make no more excuses.”
DeJoy even seems to be fielding negative rhetoric from Trump. After claiming in 2020 that mail-in-voting was some sort of Democrat-led conspiracy to commit voter fraud, Trump ultimately realized that mail-in ballots could help him and did a 180 on the practice. Lately, Trump has been claiming that the postal service can’t handle the processing of mail-in ballots. “I read the post office is saying how bad it is,” Trump said, during a conversation with Real America’s Voice. “The post office is critiquing themselves, saying we’re really in bad shape. We can’t deliver the mail. And they’re not even talking about mail in ballots, right? We’re going to dump millions and millions of dollars.”
“My response is like my response to everyone who says that we’re not prepared for the election — it’s that they’re wrong,” DeJoy recently said, in response to Trump’s accusations. “I don’t know that I need to comment any more than that. They’re wrong.” Way back in April, DeJoy was promising that he would fix the USPS’s speed issues, but doesn’t appear to have done so yet.
Gizmodo reached out to DeJoy’s office for comment.
It’s sometimes hard to tell why, exactly, DeJoy is so terrible at running the postal service. When he was selected, Louis DeJoy was criticized for being the first Postmaster General in decades who had no formal experience working for the U.S. Postal Service. He also came from the private sector and was invested in postal contractors that stood to gain from the postal service’s dysfunction. DeJoy has also been accused of wanting to privatize the postal service, making him similar to other Trump appointees who seem like they were appointed to head agencies for the purpose of running them poorly. One thing’s for sure: whether on purpose or by accident, DeJoy sucks at his job.
