Despite its generalized service performance claims, the volume of market-dominant mail that is excluded from the Postal Service’s measurement process continues to justify questions about whether those claims are representative.

Because the USPS measurement process relies on pieces bearing an intelligent mail barcode, documentation from mail preparers, and processing over automated equipment, any mail not meeting one of those basic requirements reduces the volume of mail potentially eligible for measurement, even before other reasons for exclusion apply.

In the latest example of how Postmaster General Louis DeJoy defines “prudent and judicious,” he won Board of Governors support to seek the second price increase on market-dominant products in less than a year.  As in the prior rate hike, effective last August 29, DeJoy opted to use nearly all available rate authority.  If approved by the Postal Regulatory Commission, the new prices would mean ratepayers would have experienced price hikes of over 13% in less than a year.

In its April 6 filing, the Postal Service detailed the factors contributing to the proposed increase:

In a March 24 press release, the Postal Service announced that it had placed an order for 50,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles with Oshkosh Defense, the contractor it had selected last year. The total cost of the order was stated to be $2.98 billion, or about $60,000 per vehicle, although that average may include costs other than the “sticker price” of each truck. 

For the last seven months of 2021, the Postal Service’s public relations office has issued weekly releases touting service performance improvements.  However, a closer look at those releases suggests that, while the authors’ purpose seems to be to create a perception of improvement, that scenario isn’t supported by their own data, and shows a trend that actually isn’t as impressive as they want readers to believe.

Contexts

Last year, in the heat of allegations that Postal Service operational changes being implemented by then-new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy were politically motivated efforts to delay election-related mail, a group of attorneys general from several jurisdictions brought suit in federal court and successfully delayed some of DeJoy’s plans.

That group is no happier with what DeJoy is doing – or proposing – in his 10-year Plan announced last March.  On October 7, a complaint was filed with the Postal Regulatory Commission by the attorneys general from California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington.

The unrelenting impact of the pandemic caused the National Postal Forum to be virtual again in 2021 – actually as two online events, one last spring and a second last month that coincided with National PCC Week.

However, the September session’s presentations offered less than the usual wide variety of topics and instead were dominated by a Postal Service multi-part infomercial touting Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s 10-year Plan.  From the opening session to individual panel discussions, viewers were repeatedly presented with scripted “conversations” in which the PMG was fed softball questions, all designed to elicit planned answers that framed the Plan and its contents in the most favorable terms.

The 2020 peak mailing season likely didn’t go as the Postal Service or its customers had expected, to say the least.

Whatever preparations the agency had made for the usual seasonal volume were severely disrupted as the global pandemic impacted employee and transportation availability, and as package volume surged in response to orders from quarantined shoppers.  USPS processing facilities strained to move volume and maintain service but, as the Postal Service and commercial mailers learned, those efforts were unsuccessful in some locations, necessitating exceptional measures to redirect or completely halt the inflow of mail.

The Postal Service’s 10-year Plan, released March 23, optimistically assumes package volume will grow and provide a critical source of revenue to offset the Plan’s projected $160 billion loss over the period.

However, as we first reported last April, the continuing trend of competitive product contracts seems to not support the agency’s rosy expectations.  According to data available from the Postal Regulatory Commission website, from January 1, 2020, through August 13, 2021, 48% more competitive product (CP) contracts with the USPS were terminated (426) than were approved (287).

On June 22, 2021 Mailers Hub submitted its Statement of Position, regarding First-Class Mail and Periodicals Service Standards Changes, before the Postal Regulatory Commission. 

In the two-page statement, the author - Leo Raymond, Managing Director of Mailers Hub - candidly and emphatically summarized the failings in the proposed changes, as well as the rationale behind them. Citing the "appalling abandonment of the customers that they should be striving to retain", the subordination of the role of the Postal Service as a service, and the clear connection between more costly, slower service and a loss in mail volume, he urges the PRC to advise the USPS against these changes. 

Part of the Postal Regulatory Commission’s process for considering a Postal Service request for an advisory opinion – like the one now before it regarding changes to USPS service standards – is the opportunity for intervening parties to ask questions of Postal Service witnesses, based on their written testimony.

Last month, as an intervenor in the case, Mailers Hub submitted questions to three USPS witnesses: Logistics VP Robert Cintron; Stephen Hagenstein, Director, Logistics Modeling and Analytics; and Acting Budget Director Curtis Whiteman.  Some were about vehicle utilization and dispatch times, while others focused on the reasons for the changes that were proposed.  After some debate over what constitutes a “question” (the number that can be submitted is limited at 25), the USPS witnesses filed their responses on June 1.

In its Form 10-Q released May 7, the Postal Service reported an $82 million net loss for the second quarter of its 2021 fiscal year (January-March).  Adding its $318 million net income for PQI, the USPS is $236 million in the black halfway through FY 2021, nearly $3 billion better than it had planned and over $5 billion ahead of where it was in the middle of FY 2020.

On April 21, the USPS filed its Request for an Advisory Opinion on Changes in the Nature of Postal Services, seeking the Postal Regulatory Commission’s input on changes to the service standards for First-Class Mail and time-sensitive Periodicals. The fifteen-page filing was accompanied by direct testimony from five witnesses and eight “library references” containing supporting data.

Proposal

Letter exchanged this month between a coalition of industry groups and the Postmaster General illustrate the gap between them regarding the Postal Service’s 10-Year Plan, released March 23.  The industry letter presents a series of concerns, to all of which the PMG takes exception.  Readers can form their own conclusions. Links below. 

Industry Response to 10-Year Plan

On January 26, speaking to the virtual meeting of the Mailers Technical Advisory Committee, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy gave a broad overview of his developing plans to get the Postal Service back on track after months of worsening service that culminated in a historically bad holiday season.  As transcribed from his recorded remarks:

“... Calendar Year 2020 has been a tough year for the nation and a tough year for the United States Postal Service.  The causal circumstances continue to plague us in early 2021.  As a result, the consequences to many Postal Service customers have been significant, and we acknowledge the impacts our service decline has had on your businesses and our responsibility to restore.

In a perhaps unusual move, the Postal Service released a report in late December reviewing the 2020 election and its role in the vote-by-mail process.  Posted on its Link site on December 30, 2020, the 22-page document, Post-Election Analysis: Delivering the Nation’s Election Mail in an Extraordinary Year, summarizes the agency’s actions in support of the election process.

The report detailed its performance at the national level:

As is typical of a meeting of the Postal Service’s Board of Governors, the public session is a series of scripted formalities devoid of the candid remarks and discussion that likely were part of the preceding closed session.  So, during the open session on November 13, the chairman and postal executives read their prepared remarks that, as would be expected, said the right things but offered little of substance.

The closest anyone’s statement came to providing a look at where the agency’s leadership was taking it might be the remarks by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.

As has become all too apparent in the popular media, the viability of widespread voting by mail, and the Postal Service’s ability to timely process and deliver the associated volume, have become intertwined with other political controversies.

On one side, notably by the White House, vote-by-mail is portrayed as flawed or corrupt, and that regardless of its use, the Postal Service isn’t capable of handling the volume.  Concurrently, for that and other reasons, the administration is continuing its spiteful objection to any funds for the USPS being included in a COVID-related relief bill.

Changes to mail processing and delivery procedures being adopted by the Postal Service have been met with criticism in the general media.  News articles frequently cite customer and labor union concerns over delays in mail delivery and fault the USPS for placing budgets ahead of service.

Many examples

As if to illustrate that running the Postal Service as Postmaster General isn’t like running a corporation as its CEO, Senator Gary Peters (MI), ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote PMG Louis DeJoy on July 17 asking for “information about operational changes at the US Postal Service that have the potential to affect the quality of service for Americans.”

Peters’ letter was inspired by the reports of plans to modify delivery procedures that were contained in a PowerPoint leaked by a USPS manager in Ohio and other documents. (For more on this, see the July 25 post.)

When the new Postmaster General took office last month, it was widely assumed that he would make significant changes, though the nature of what those changes would be was then no more than speculation.  However, if the information in a leaked PowerPoint presentation that appeared on postalnews.com last week is credible, change may be starting and is focused on cost reduction.

Quick reference links: "The Source", "Document Two", "Publicity", "Another Talk"