Big changes and big problems at the U.S. Postal Service

Missing packages. Undelivered letters.

If you've been having problems with your mail lately, you're not alone.

The USPS is rolling out changes across the country, from Richmond, Virginia to Santa Clara, California.

Today, On Point: Big changes and problems at the U.S. Postal Service.

Luca Powell, investigations reporter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Mitchell Taylor, president of the American Postal Workers Union, Local 32 in the Atlanta Metro Area. USPS employee for 26 years.

Jamie Partridge, national organizer for Communities and Postal Workers United. Retired USPS letter carrier.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: For roughly a year now, residents of Richmond, Virginia have had problems with their mail. Packages going missing, undelivered letters.

ADELINE MILLER: I've had three packages that were supposed to be delivered. They arrived in my local Post Office on April 4th and they've never been delivered.

It's been almost two months. I've talked to the staff. They don't know where they are. They do know they're here, but they don't know where they are. So they can't deliver them.

CHAKRABARTI: That's On Point listener, Adeline Miller there. Here's Tracy Council, who also lives in Richmond.

TRACY COUNCIL: In January, I mailed a check for our property taxes and the check was simply never received.

We were charged penalties and interest because the payment didn't go through. And when I went down to city hall, they just chuckled and said, 'Yeah, we have terrible mail service here.'

CHAKRABARTI: Quite a revelation. I'm really sorry to hear that, Tracy. But as it turns out, last year, Richmond, Virginia, became the first place in the country where a local Post Office hub was changed to a regional postal hub. That shift is part of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's sweeping 10 year plan to modernize the United States Postal Service. The agency's been rolling out big changes in cities across the country over the past year or so. And many of them are creating big problems.

And today we want to understand more about why that is. And before we introduce our first guest, I want to just say that we did reach out to the USPS multiple times for an interview and did not receive a response. So we're going to start with Luca Powell. He's an investigative reporter with the Richmond Times-Dispatch and he joins us from Richmond, Virginia.

Luca, welcome to On Point.

LUCA POWELL: Hi, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: All right. So first of all, when did Richmond's mail problems first really kick in?

POWELL: I think they started in the spring of 2023, but all throughout last year they were simmering, until they came to a boil around Christmas time, which is when mail delivery really starts to pick up and they came to a head around fall, Christmas time.

CHAKRABARTI: But, one could immediately say Christmastime is a big crush anyway for moving packages and letters, so maybe that was the issue in Richmond?

POWELL: Possibly, but a lot of this is unusual. I think the big incident that came out was the failed mailing of 870 colon cancer screening tests that basically went bad because these cancer screening tests had a 15 day expiration date.

So that happened I think in the fall. So in the run up to Christmas, there started to be a real tension around this. And Senator Tim Kaine took that issue and began to ask questions about what was going on with the mail.

CHAKRABARTI: And these colon cancer screening tests that never arrived where they're supposed to, if I understand correctly, they were actually VA tests, so they were for veterans.

POWELL: Yeah, that's right.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay multiple reasons there why it probably caught people's attention. Okay, do you have some other examples of mail problems that have been going on during this time?

POWELL: Oh, sure. Yeah. So we did a call out to all of our readers here and we were overwhelmed with the stories that we got.

We actually just at one point published a whole story of our mail bag of stories we've got. We've had mail going across the Atlantic Ocean several times. And when you track that and see your mail moving back and forth, you start to wonder what's going on with the service. We've had missing checks, late checks.

The Virginia Museum of History and Culture was missing 300,000 in membership renewals that arrived. They're supposed to arrive around the winter, but arrived afterwards in January. And yeah, it's just been all the time different issues, but a real frustration with all types of people, from all walks of life, who use the mail for business and also just to send letters to say hi, and all of it seems to be becoming a lot more difficult.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, this is quite serious, right? Because while it makes me chuckle a little why a letter might go across the Atlantic six or seven times just to end up back in the United States, the mail is critical, right? Those colon cancer screening tests, for one example, people get their medications through the mail, all the financial issues that you laid out that people were suffering because checks didn't get to where they were supposed to get.

In fact, we have an example of that, Luca, from one of our listeners in Richmond who asked us not to use her name for various reasons. She has noticed a huge change in mail service there. And here are the financial headaches it's caused.

LISTENER: Checks going through the Richmond Postal Service, being stolen and then having it compromise a business account.

And we've also had issues with keeping postal carriers and having deliveries as late as 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Currently, our carrier's doing a great job and getting the mail to us at a normal time of day. The issue with the stolen checks was quite a problem for us.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Luca, so we have things going missing, packages apparently just sitting around, really long transit times for what should be regular first-class mail.

What is going on in Richmond?

POWELL: Yeah, so I think there are two types of mail issues that I want to separate here. There's on the one hand, this kind of mail theft or I think it was mentioned there, this type of whitewashing or issues with checks and payments, that they don't necessarily correlate.

They could correlate to someone, to there being a theft or something that isn't necessarily structural right? But there is also a massive change going on in how we deliver mail in Richmond, and we're the sort of the tip of the spear or the first guinea pig for what's going to be a nationwide change.

And in practice, it looks like lots of our local mail stations, where you might go to drop off your mail, you might know the clerks, you might drive by that every day. A lot of those shops are closing, and we're making do with a lot fewer of those and having more centralized sorting centers that basically do the work of these smaller stations.

If you think of the mail is like a circulatory system, everything is being redirected towards this one hub. And from what we can tell, causing a lot of bottlenecks and crush there.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so just to reiterate to listeners, we did reach out to the USPS to get as much detailed information and even someone from the Postal Service to join us, never received a response at all from them.

But this is all part of, Luca, of the program that Postmaster DeJoy has been rolling out called Delivering for All America, right? And if I understand correctly, as you said, one of the key things is your neighborhood Post Office, at least this is what's been happening in Richmond. Some of those are being closed in favor of a centralized operation, like one per zip code.

POWELL: For many zip codes. So these new sorting centers take on the work of these smaller stations and the idea is to have it all under one roof. If we can just invest in these high-tech processing machines, which are supposed to be able to sort thousands of packages in an hour and be more efficient than having John Doe at the Post Office be the one handling that, then we're going to speed up the system. And we're overall gonna, the background here is that the Postal Service has been struggling financially for decades, right?

Trying to make it solvent again is the strategy. And the idea of consolidating things, reducing trips and bringing everything into one roof is, I think, what was really attractive to DeJoy and was what was tried here. But yeah, it's clearly causing problems. One that I just want an example.

I want to mention, was our registrar here, talk about this being serious. And not just funny. The registrar said that with the upcoming election, they recommended that nobody vote by mail, because it's not like, they couldn't trust that the mail would come on time. And we had several people who said that even in past elections, they went and saw if their vote had gone through it or not.

And they went and saw that their ballot hadn't been submitted. So it turns out they never voted if they voted by mail. Yeah, just to put a head on it. This can be really serious. And I think the concern that it's not going to get better before the 2024 election is real. And the fact that nobody has really been convinced or heard back from the Post Office, just like you and just like us, many times, is not helping convince people who are already worried about election fraud that this election is going to be solid.

CHAKRABARTI: Wait, so the Postal Service hasn't even responded to you, a reporter in Richmond, where this rollout is happening, and its concurrent problems are taking place?

POWELL: We reach out to them all the time, but they give us a pretty bland statement saying that they know there were problems and we're working on them.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Okay. And also, sometimes our guests say things that are revealing that I want to be sure that listeners heard them. So you said that the registrar for Richmond, so one of the key people who's in charge of elections there, has told people not to send their, not to vote by mail, essentially, because they can't guarantee that it'll get to where it needs to get in time.

POWELL: Yeah, it's as crazy as it sounds. He said, make a plan to go in person because we can't trust that it's going to come on time.

CHAKRABARTI: In Virginia. Wow. Okay, so what about the services, other services that people get at their local Post Office, dropping off packages, passport pictures, money orders?

You name it. Are those things now gone if the local office is gone too?

POWELL: I think a lot of those things are staying, but the issue mostly is that if you have a relationship with your Post Office and you are used to paying your assessor's bill or your taxes or you're used to voting by mail, there's a frustration with the deterioration in service that you're getting.

And I think overall, the sense from our readers is that the Post Office they were used to and they grew up with for many years is just not the same anymore.

CHAKRABARTI: I don't think it's been the same for quite some time. Do you get any indication, maybe not since the USPS is not responding to your request, Luca.

But is there a sense that, okay, this is just the bumps in the road for a rollout that is an attempt to make things much more efficient in a very complicated system. Nothing can be expected to work perfectly at the same time, but maybe a year or two down the line, the USPS says, we're going to iron out all the wrinkles and it's going to be fine.

POWELL: Yeah. That's certainly what the Postal Service has said, when they've been brought to Washington several times earlier this year to explain to one of their oversight agencies what's going on here, and they said look, we had some preexisting weaknesses in Richmond, and I think that some of that is true.

There have been some challenges, particularly with absences in the workforce at our delivery centers here. And it's not clear that is something that you'd find in the next place to go through this transition, but certainly there is a hope that this is going to be a learning curve that we don't get with the other centers.

But, if we don't hear back from the Postal Service, really, and what's going to change, I'm not sure people really should believe that.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Luca, we got so many responses from folks, actually, not just enrichment, even, about concerns they have with their mail service. Here's Tom Lockwood in Bristol, New Hampshire, who says that he had to file some tax forms the old fashioned way.

Using paper this year, because he had some issues with his online filings. But then this happened.

TOM: About 10 pages in a large format envelope under certified mail, paid the extra fee and sent it the 20th of April. And it did not arrive to the Post Office in Kansas City until May 2nd. So it took like 13 days, 12 or 13 days.

I was amazed.

CHAKRABARTI: So that was Tom in Bristol, New Hampshire. Now we had talked about, Luca had mentioned the fact that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has had to testify in front of Congress a couple of times explaining why packages containing important medical tests for veterans are disappearing.

So he addressed some of those problems with the consolidation plan at a Senate hearing in April, so just a couple of months ago. And DeJoy acknowledged that there have been delays and other problems, but he still defended the need for an overall modernization plan.

LOUIS DeJOY: You're correct, in regards to the service deteriorating.

We recognize that. We apologize to the constituents that have received that service, but in the long term, if we don't make these changes, that will be every day, everywhere, around the nation. The problems that we are having, with regard to both facilities being open, have nothing to do with the fact that we want to process packages with a conveyor, rather than by hand, that we want to fill trucks and have it run 90% nstead of 30% full, and a host of other operational and strategic initiatives that we have in the plan that enable us to compete with private industry, because that's the law that you all have us operating under.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah, interesting. Okay. So that was Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in April. Luca, let me turn back to you about some specifics that have been going on in Richmond that we can read through the filter of what DeJoy just said there, in terms of the improvements he says he's trying to make.

Tell me about a big sorting facility that I guess is not that far from where you are in Sandston, Virginia.

POWELL: That's right.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Tell me a little bit about that.

POWELL: It's a big warehouse and it's got a new layout. It has these new high package processing machines that do 5, 000 packages in an hour.

And basically, it's supposed to handle, It's the main artery for all the mail going through the region now, and even some parts of North Carolina. So it's where everything is supposed to be happening. But it's also, we've learned a lot about this facility and things that have gone on there from a recent report that came out by one of the watchdog agencies that looks into the Post Office.

And they talked about how all these changes, which really solidified in July of last year, started to lead to morale issues. Confusion. It seemed from what these investigators found that the plan that came from DeJoy didn't really get communicated to the managers down here. So it started to, things started to go haywire on the workroom floor there.

They found packages that were sitting around that were months late. And the overall effort here, which again, is to make this federal agency soluble financially, started to bend and strain. Because you could see, they reported that there were an increase in trips by 700%, which is the opposite of what DeJoy wants when he's talking about being more efficient. Canceled trips, overtime that's been unauthorized, extra trips. So when you hear about somebody delivering the mail at 10 p.m., that's because the prior carrier didn't finish their route. So someone else has come to fill in for them, basically, and make sure that the package arrived on time.

Yeah, you can really see that there's been a, I guess things haven't gone the way he's wanted and he acknowledges that.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I want to keep straight the different points of oversight that Delivering for America has already gone through. Now, when you're talking about an oversight group, is this the Office of the Inspector General you're speaking about or another one?

POWELL: That's right.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

POWELL: That's right.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Interesting. And I think, you've said in the past that in the audit that the OIG did of postal services in Richmond, let's say the detail with which they found the various levels of challenges, if I can put it that way, verged on the absurd, right?

There's a part of the audit about a little note about a mail worker and a forklift.

POWELL: Yeah, he was asleep on a forklift. So that was not the best look, when these auditors are sniffing around trying to figure out what's been going wrong. And I think that speaks to the general level of confusion and I think lack of buy-in that DeJoy found when he tried to do these changes.

Remember he's in D.C. and he's orchestrating this whole plan across the country. And it's just not clear that the workforce was responsive to that. We don't get many interviews with folks that work there. But yesterday I spoke with a long-time veteran of the Postal Office who said that the company culture there is really strained, and the morale is low.

So that's going on at the same time as these organizational changes. And the report also highlighted a real spike in absenteeism. So it sounds like some people, postal workers, were just not interested in going along with the plan and stepped out.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Okay. So we're going to talk to some former postal workers in just a few minutes here to get their view on this.

But once again, I just want to remind folks, we wanted answers straight from the United States Postal Service, because of course, that's the best source to understand the program that they're rolling out, but they never gave us a response to our many inquiries here. Luca, one more question about that sorting facility, because, okay, not getting buy-in from workers, having poor communication in terms of what the rollout was actually supposed to entail.

Those things are clear, right? So there's some procedural breakdown there, but what about the actual physical capacity of the center to sort and deal with the higher volume of mail that was coming to it since the local Post Offices were no longer doing that sorting?

POWELL: So it took on a lot of additional zip codes.

And there were some highlights, positive highlights in that OIG report that found that it was able to, this new facility was able to take on all this extra mail. Yeah. And proceed and not shut down, which is it's a good thing, right? But at the same time, the fact that there were changing all the routes for the mail carriers, and the mail carriers weren't sure what the routes were, there were these backups of truck traffic in the driveway to the facility.

So you couldn't actually, you're getting delayed mail. And if the delayed mail didn't get there in time, then it wasn't stored until the next day. So all these little things did add up to issues with one person's mail arriving at the time that they expected it to. Another issue they ran into was not having enough drivers, one chain to deliver the mail.

One change they had was in sourcing from a contractor who was doing a lot of the long range package delivery. And they changed that to be in house, and they didn't have enough drivers to do that. These little bumps in the road did add up and they slowed things down from what we know from these reports.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay Luca, I hope that things improve rapidly for the people in the greater Richmond area. But for now, Luca Powell, investigations reporter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, thank you so much for joining us, Luca.

POWELL: Thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let's hear a little bit more from folks around the country and what they think about how their Postal Service has been working for them in the past year or so.

This is Lynn in Clearwater, Florida, who says she regularly mails gifts to her family members who live anywhere else in the United States. And recently, she's been quite disappointed with delivery times.

LYNN: What I find most frustrating is that even when I pay for priority or same day, suddenly it still takes one to two weeks.

In fact, I overnighted my nephew a present. And he got it a week after his birthday. Why did I end up paying for overnight if it was still going to take a week?

CHAKRABARTI: That's Lynn in Clearwater, Florida. And here's David in Minneapolis who says he has not seen problems with the United States Postal Service where he lives.

Here's what he told us.

DAVID: I have packages delivered most every week. And I've had them lost and misdelivered or just thrown on the ground somewhere random, far from my apartment. These problems were with FedEx, UPS, and others. The only service I have never had a problem with is the United States Postal Service.

The mail carriers have always been courteous and kind to me. Thank you, Mailman Mick. You're amazing.

CHAKRABARTI: It's David in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Joining us now is Mitchell Taylor. He's president of the American Postal Workers Union, Local 32, in the Atlanta metro area, and he's been a USPS employee for 26 years.

Mitchell Taylor, welcome to On Point.

MITCHELL TAYLOR: Greetings. Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: It's great to have you. Also joining us now is Jamie Partridge. He's the National Organizer for Communities and Postal Workers United and a retired USPS letter carrier. And he joins us from Portland. Jamie Partridge, welcome.

JAMIE PARTRIDGE: Thank you. Hi, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Thank you both for joining us today. Mitchell Taylor, can I start with you and just get a sense from you as to, from the perspective of you and your fellow postal workers, what are things like on the ground now? We've been focusing on Richmond, Virginia, but have some of these Delivering for America changes come to you in the Atlanta area as well?

TAYLOR: Yes, Meghna. Thank you. It's been chaotic to say the least. Especially since the RPDC, the Regional Processing Distribution Center, went live on February 24th. Prior to that, we had no real major issues. But since this facility has come online, there's been problems after problems, mail deliveries, transportation issues.

I'm seeing, I'm sure most of the people have seen the news. If they haven't, it's been a catastrophe, but we're dealing with it. We're resilient postal workers. So we do what we have to do. We come to work, and we just wish we had more cooperation and participation from management.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I'm going to get to that in a second, but when you say since this facility came online, is it a facility like the one in Richmond, Virginia, a larger regional sorting center? Is that what you're talking about?

TAYLOR: Yes, ma'am. 1.1 million square feet. It's a regional processing center. It's part of the consolidation plan of consolidating processing centers into one central location.

CHAKRABARTI: What does it look like in there?

TAYLOR: The building is really, what they're using it for, is probably too small. Because they're trying to not only sort all the packages, they're trying to do the letters, the flats and everything else. And I spoke to my constituents in the Postal Service. I told them very simply, since we've seen what they're trying to do since February 24th, this facility probably should just be a package sorting facility. And they should probably move the letters and flats back to the previous processing centers where they were being processed at. Because we never had delays, weeks, months on end, with letters, flats and packages that we've seen since this has come online since February 24th.

CHAKRABARTI: I got it. So just theoretically, Mr. Taylor, just for a second here, if the facility were bigger and it had all the equipment needed to process, as you're saying, letters, flats, and packages, then would the more centralized approach, do you think that would work? Or is there something fundamentally misaligned, let's put it that way, with centralizing postal processing and sorting that you don't think makes it a good idea at all?

TAYLOR: Great question. They will probably need, for what they're trying to do, an additional 500,000 square feet. I would say, maybe 2 million. Because the 1.1 is not big enough for the operation. The unit has, the facility has 192 doors and they're basically full the majority of the time.

So it's hard to get stuff in and out. You have an outbound side and inbound side. And if they're full constantly, that's where you get the backlog and it's just hard to get it to process. Because the initial aspect of it was to the trucks would drop and stay there for 30 minutes and be gone, in and out, on both sides, or maybe you don't, we have backlogs of three to four hours at the height of this thing. Has gotten a little bit better now, but the facility is definitely too small for what they want to do. So they're either going to have to add to that building, add an additional building, or like I said, just make the facility packages only. The recalcitrance of the Post Office, it might be three or four years before they decide to take a move on that.

They just don't move that fast.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Just so that people know clearly what you're talking about. Mitchell Taylor, you're talking about like docks essentially that trucks pull into, to drop off mail. And then that's supposed to just be a pretty quick process so they can turn around and another truck can come in.

And actually, get out, as well, obviously, but that hasn't been happening with efficiency. And if a truck's got, if the wait time is three to four hours for a truck to even come into the facility, how far have things been backed up then?

TAYLOR: And you're exactly right. That's exactly what I mean by the docks and the dock positions. Things have been backed up, especially in March and April. They were backed up down Highway 29, which is the major highway that runs through that area. And it was just a severe congestion. It was just severe congestion. Hours sitting there for hours.

Unloading and loading and unloading the mail was not being done in a timely manner. If you're talking about 3 to 4 hours, and then you're talking about a driver sitting there that long. So the route that he's on, he's not able to finish it. Someone else. So someone else has to go and pick up the mail or finish delivering.

And then that creates even more problems down the line. Yes, the facility is too small and it is a poor design. And the remedy to that is either additional space added to that facility or like they're doing in Charlotte, they have two RPDCs because the one wasn't big enough. So they have RPDC 1, and RPDC 2.

CHAKRABARTI: I see.

TAYLOR: So it's going to have to be something to that magnitude, or they're going to have to just make it packages only.

CHAKRABARTI: And RPDC meaning Regional Processing and Distribution Center? Processing and Distribution Center.

TAYLOR: Got it. Yes, ma'am.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Today we're trying to get a deeper understanding of the United States Postal Service's rollout of its program called Delivering for America, which is supposed to make the USPS more efficient. Once again, we reached out to the USPS for comments, statements, interviews, we reached out multiple times and did not receive a response.

But here's a view from the ground, another letter carrier here didn't want to give us his name for concerns about his work, but he's in Fort Worth, Texas, and he says the consolidation problems that we've discussing that have hit places like Atlanta and Richmond, Virginia haven't yet hit his region in the Fort Worth area, at least not yet, but already postal workers face a ton of challenges on the job.

POSTAL WORKER: The Post Office is a mess, my dude. We carry mail in the heat. We drive vehicles with no air conditioning, nothing. We're lucky if they got oil in them, much less an AC unit. And those of us who deliver letters every day, we're the ones who have to be the face of those problems. When it's not us, it's not us. We're working hard, man. We worked through the hottest summer on record last year.

CHAKRABARTI: That's a postal worker in Fort Worth, Texas. I'm joined today by Mitchell Taylor. He's president of the American Postal Workers Union, Local 32 in the Atlanta metro area, has worked for the USPS for 26 years. And Jamie Partridge is also with us in Portland, Oregon, National Organizer for Communities and Postal Workers United and a retired letter carrier.

And Mr. Partridge, you've been really patient as I was listening to your kind of agog to Mr. Taylor describing what the facility is like there in the Atlanta area. Let's step back for a second, though, and in order to understand what Delivering for America is all about, can you give us sort of your high-level view as to how the Postal Service has been operating in the past decade or so?

And I ask that because as Luca Powell had said earlier in the show, the USPS over many years has been showing net losses. More than $90 billion since 2007, which is one of the reasons why back in 2022, Congress and the president did sign a $50 billion package, a financial relief package for the Postal Service.

In all, there's still this idea that some critical changes need to be made, Jamie Partridge.

PARTRIDGE: There's certainly enough finances to save the Postal Service. Unfortunately, they're being spent, I would say, wasted, on all these consolidations and these building out new physical plans, which is not necessary.

And which is, of course, as we know, delaying the mail. And we, in communities and Postal Workers United, and postal workers generally across the country, want to see a reversal of what's been taking place and actually move us back to when these changes actually first started happening back in 2012, 2013, where half the mail processing plants were closed and half of the rural Post Offices ... got their retail hours reduced from 8 hours to 6 hours to 4 hours to some, even 2 hours a day.

And of course, all of this involves considerable job loss, and the postmaster general is saying, the current postmaster general is saying that he wants to eliminate 50,000 jobs, and of course, those would be primarily the clerks that sort the mail, who are being replaced by these automated, these big parcel sorting machines.

CHAKRABARTI: Can we go back to, can we go back to 2013 for a second? Because that's a really important point. That was under the Obama administration.

PARTRIDGE: Correct.

CHAKRABARTI: And what was the justification for those closures at the time?

PARTRIDGE: There was this big deficit that we discussed that was remedied in 2022 and at that time, we were trying to get rid of the postmaster general, because he was not only closing plants, but threatening to eliminate a day of delivery.

We did actually marshal forces to stop these consolidations at the time and got rid of him. Unfortunately, we now have a postmaster general that has no experience with the Postal Service, comes from the private sector. And who wants to run the Postal Service like a business rather than as a service, and a business to compete with Amazon, FedEx, UPS, which is not what we're set up for.

We're set up for universal service. If everyone gets the same, supposed to get the same rate, the same service, prompt, effective, universal service, whether you're in the outback in Alaska or the bottom of the Grand Canyon. You are expected to get, you should expect to get good service.

And unfortunately, the current model is that there is no taxpayer dollars involved. When letter mail declines, revenue declines, and there needs to be some replacement. And, of course, what we're suggesting is that the Postal Service expand into non-postal services.

There's 31,000 Post Offices across the country and that's more retail operations than McDonald's and Starbuck combined, and it should be used to, we should roll out postal banking. We used to have postal banking in this country, and there are many post offices across the world that use postal banking, and they, in fact, bring in more revenue through banking than they do through letter mail. And there's all kinds of ways that post offices, especially in rural areas, could be utilized, one stop government services.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, can I just jump in here? Because postal banking is also the service that jumped to mind for me when you mentioned other things that the Post Offices could do, and I think that's actually had some champions on Capitol Hill, although it hasn't come to pass yet but let me ask you, Mr. Partridge. Postmaster DeJoy was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2020 and you're right about him not having any direct experience prior to that with the U.S. Postal Service, but he did run, he was the CEO of a logistics and freight company called New Breed Logistics. Also was a major Republican Party donor and fundraiser for Donald Trump.

But the truth is that I take your point, we've had discussions about this before, about the Postal Service has a different mandate, right? It's supposed to be able to deliver to every mailbox in the country, wherever that mailbox may be. Which is different than Amazon or UPS, that can decide who they're going to deliver to or not.

But certainly, there has to be like a halfway point? We don't have to turn the USPS into an Amazon, we don't have to fully privatize it, but how would you, from your perspective, having been a letter carrier, what are the areas of greater efficiency that you think could be brought to the USPS?

PARTRIDGE: I think there's a major problem with understaffing. As we've discussed there, there's a 50% turnover rate in the 1st year, because conditions are so bad for postal workers. And as we've discussed, we have letter carriers delivering mail at 9 and 10 o'clock at night.

We need to raise the wages so that people, they can get better wages down the street at Chipotle than they can at the Postal Service. And we need to turn the job of working, for example, as a letter carrier into more responsibility for what's happening on their route and in their neighborhood. In France, for example, they postal workers look in on the frail and elderly and you can contract with the Postal Service to look in on your parents who live in another town. And are trained to be able to see problems with people when they come to the door.

This is the type of change, I think, that the Postal Service needs to go through to me to be able to survive. Because it can't survive as a business and also provide universal service. And there's all kinds of ways, including government subsidy, especially for rural areas, which are not profitable and are not going to be profitable, and our position, communities and Postal Workers United and the, the American Postal Workers Union at the top, at their conventions and their local presidents are calling for removal of DeJoy, jump DeJoy and put in someone who will value a public Postal Service.

CHAKRABARTI: Mr. Taylor, that brings me back to you, because I'm curious about, look, I'm asking this from the outside, so correct me if I'm wrong, but the unions are really important in the operation of the United States Postal Service. I presume you have high level union reps in Washington. I'm still stuck on the fact that Luca Powell said that various reports.

Maybe the Office of Inspector General's report says that perhaps wasn't adequate buy in or adequate communication to the postal workers are actually doing the job on the ground when these consolidation efforts were rolled out. Can you explain how that might be? Because I thought there had to be buy in from unions whenever major workplace changes like what we're seeing were taking place. Is there some kind of like lack of communication going on between the Postmaster General's Office and the postal unions?

TAYLOR: To answer your question, firstly we do have national level union representatives in Washington. The problem with the Post Office is we do have a national agreement, of course, like the bargaining agreement, but the Post Office follows it to a certain degree where it says you have to inform the union and they do that, but it's the process after that.

That kind of falls to the wayside. Where you have informed the union, but you're still moving forward with things that violate the contract. So that's the problem we've been dealing with the abolishment of jobs, of clerk craft jobs and transportation routes and maintenance.

Cause I represent all three crafts. I represent the clerk craft, the maintenance vehicle, motor vehicle craft, and the maintenance craft. And there have been fundamentally flawed changes made that violated the contract throughout this entire process by the Postal Service. Yes, they did inform us of the building being consolidated or being built and several units being closed and consolidated into that facility.

The major problem for us is it's too much too quickly. Had the Post Office just decided to consolidate the processing centers. That might have been a little easier to deal with, than trying to consolidate the processing centers and all of these retail units, because collectively it's a total failure, even if you wanted to take it individually.

The processing center, the RPDC is not working and now you've consolidated several units, as the previous gentleman discussed, into one centralized location, which is a complete disaster because the staffing is not there to support it. The management team does not know how to deal with it because it's nothing they've ever dealt with before.

They're used to dealing with their own individual stations, dealing with their own retail units, dealing with their own customers. Now you've left a void in these areas where there's no help on the window, retail window. You have one person trying to handle a line of 20, 30 people and customers are frustrated.

They want to get their packages delivered. And mailed off and delivered on time, because they're paying for a service. But we don't have the staffing to do it, because you made these other changes in the retail units that weren't even necessary to begin with.

So it's a twofold problem. Too much too soon.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting. Okay. So that seems to be reflected in the Office of Inspector General's report, that said there was a projected savings from doing these consolidations, like particularly in the Richmond area, right? Because that's where the OIG did its report, that it was supposed to save millions of dollars, but they're not on track to capture those savings because a lot of money had to be spent to fix the problems of the rollout there of Delivering For America, overtime costs, et cetera, for postal workers to to fix things with that new regional center.

But nevertheless, looks like Postmaster Louis DeJoy says his plan to modernize the Postal Service isn't going anywhere. He said back in April at a Senate hearing that the problems in Richmond and in Atlanta would be corrected soon.

DeJOY: Those two plans, Richmond and Atlanta, and the whole Georgia area, will be the finest running parts of the organization very shortly.

Alright, and we have to allow time to transition. There were consequences. I did not create this problem that exists or this trajectory. With three months, four months into Atlanta, we moved almost 2,000 people from 10 locations around the city into one. We went from processing packages by hand to doing a million a night.

This is an organization that has not engaged in change in over 15 years.

CHAKRABARTI: Jamie Partridge, we have about a minute left here. Do you think overall, if all of these consolidation efforts for Delivering for America are able to be implemented, that the Postal Service could save some money?

PARTRIDGE: Certainly, they could save some money, but they would be losing delivery that folks, the services that people expect from the Postal Service wouldn't be declining over time.

And that really will run the Postal Service into the ground. And I think that the basic agenda of DeJoy, and then previously the Trump administration, which actually issued a white paper from the office of management budget calling for privatization of the Postal Service. That that's the agenda.

And we need to get rid of this postmaster general and disorientation toward the business model. And unfortunately, we, although we have a lot of Congress people that are calling for the getting rid of the postmaster general, the postal board of governors is actually cutting off public testimony at their meetings. And Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general, is refusing to provide information to the Postal Regulatory Commission.