Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s former company landed a $5 million highway-shipping contract last month with the United States Postal Service.
DeJoy continued to own a multimillion-dollar stake in XPO Logistics as of early October. The $5 million deal is the first regular contract for a postal route that XPO Logistics has signed with the USPS in more than a year. XPO’s last highway contract with the USPS was in December and it was temporary. The one before that was in signed in July 2019.
XPO’s contract — to move mail for the next 18 months between Norfolk, Virginia, and Evansville, Indiana — has not been previously reported. The contract was negotiated in August and disclosed in mid-October as part of a quarterly update to a database of USPS suppliers.
The Postal Service will pay XPO $3.3 million annually to manage its route between the two cities, which are roughly 700 miles apart. The USPS database shows the contract has one of the highest annual rates of more than 1,600 contracts the Postal Service initiated with outside firms in its most recent quarter, the first full quarter DeJoy has served as head of the agency.
DeJoy was a top executive of XPO before he left the board of the company in 2018. He joined XPO after selling it the logistics company he had founded in a 2014 deal valued at $615 million.
XPO still pays DeJoy about $2.3 million a year in rent and expenses for 220,000 square feet of office space he controls in his home state of North Carolina. The company’s lease agreements for DeJoy’s properties run through 2025.