Following another court order, the U.S. Postal Service is sending out a new round of notifications formally repealing the most significant operational change implemented by its new chief executive.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s initiative to limit late and extra transportation trips within the USPS network has caused severe delays in the mail, which have persisted months after its implementation. A series of injunctions against the Postal Service have already required the mailing agency to walk back those reforms, but an order late Tuesday from a federal judge was the most direct yet requiring management to instruct local leaders those trips must continue as needed to restore on-time performance.
Emmet Sullivan, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, mandated that postal leadership tell any employee who was previously informed of DeJoy’s push to dramatically scale back late and extra trips that the directive is no longer operative and USPS personnel should perform those trips “to the maximum extent necessary to increase on-time mail deliveries, particularly for election mail.” Sullivan instructed USPS to tell employees specifically that “late and extra trips should be performed to the same or greater degree than they were performed prior to July 2020 when doing so would increase on-time mail deliveries” and that “any prior communication that is inconsistent with this instruction should be disregarded.”
Dave Partenheimer, a USPS spokesman, confirmed the agency will comply with the order, adding USPS takes “all of our legal obligations very seriously.”
- October 28, 2020
- USPS Says Timely Vote Delivery Isn’t a Constitutional Right