The U.S. Postal Service is being destroyed from within.
Two months ago, a major Republican Party donor who had no prior experience working for the USPS was named its chief executive. In his brief tenure as postmaster general, Louis DeJoy has ordered numerous vaguely described “procedural changes” at facilities nationwide that are designed, he claims, to cut costs. The effect has been a nationwide backlog of mail leading to postal delays that have impacted some of our nation’s most vulnerable.
If you have information about any efforts to hinder the delivery of U.S. mail or election ballots, please contact us at tipbox@gizmodo.com. Your identity will be protected so you can speak freely with one of our reporters.
Because of the pandemic, more Americans than ever before are relying on USPS. Needless to say, being a postal worker is one of the most essential jobs in the country. Items that people would normally purchase from stores or would never think to send by mail are flooding USPS distribution centers. As the Los Angeles Times reported in June: “Letter carriers are delivering gifts and cards for virtual birthday parties, food and flowers, toilet paper and bleach, as well as countless tokens of love and friendship sent by parents and children and friends who can’t be there in person.” Postal workers are now handling more mail than they normally would during Christmastime, which, as you know, is traditionally peak season.
The changes imposed by DeJoy—who has direct financial ties to USPS competitors—have hindered the delivery of life-sustaining medications and are on track to disrupt the delivery of ballots, potentially threatening the integrity of the November election.
Not everyone believes this is a coincidence. Nor should they. The Trump administration has done virtually everything it can to hasten USPS’s demise—delaying, for example, access to a $10-billion line of credit earlier this year and continuing to blocking additional financial relief that’s sorely needed to weather the ongoing crisis. And then came Trump’s confession. Speaking to Fox Business News this week, Trump acknowledged that USPS requires additional funding now “so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.”
In that one moment of candor, Trump validated all of the “conspiracies” that had, for weeks, been swirling around DeJoy’s seemingly self-destructive management—this is sabotage, not negligence. The president not only knows, but hopes, his actions will result in the suppression of, in his words, “millions and millions of ballots.”
The election is now mere months away. This means that some of the traditional tools available to reporters working to uncover the truth behind the unusual goings-on at USPS are useless. Suing DeJoy’s office, for example, to gain access to internal records will simply take too long. Even in the unlikely event a judge decides to grant journalists free rein to pore over DeJoy’s personal records, the election will, by that time, be long through, rendering the impact of any sabotage of America’s democracy irreversible.
The only way for the public to get to bottom of what’s happening at USPS is for reporters to speak directly to honest people who have worked at USPS for years, and to examine documents leaked from within. If you are a USPS employee, we want you to become one of those sources.
If you have information about any efforts to hinder the delivery of U.S. mail or election ballots, please contact us at tipbox@gizmodo.com. Your identity will be protected so you can speak freely with one of our reporters.
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