Vishal Shankar, Revolving Door Project: The past two weeks have been newsworthy, to say the least. You’d be forgiven if you missed a June 8th op-ed in The Washington Post entitled “We’re fixing the Postal Service. We can’t stop now,” written by none other than the embattled Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy.

The op-ed is DeJoy’s latest effort to rehabilitate his image, which has been (deservedly) defined by his numerous conflicts of interest and the destructive 2020 mail slowdowns. Despite this, DeJoy has recently been the subject of glowing profiles in Politico (see our rebuttal) and TIME, the latter of which claimed he had embarked on a “Surprising Second Act” with his 10-year strategic plan for the agency. DeJoy devotes the bulk of his own column space to this plan, touting his “agenda to improve our efficiency and accuracy, reduce costs, improve service, grow revenue and create appropriate work environments for our employees.”

It’s a rosy picture, but one that is starkly contradicted by reality. DeJoy’s scheme (which is advancing with almost no opportunities for public input) would put the agency on the glide path to privatization. Postal experts from Take On Wall Street’s Save The Post Office coalition have warned that DeJoy’s 10-year plan would increase delivery times, slash tens of thousands of jobs through attrition, and cut operations at more than 200 post offices and sorting facilities – which could devastate rural and Indigenous communities. The rollout of the plan’s facility consolidations has been a disaster, resulting in chronic mail delays that prevented passports, wedding dresses, utility bills, important legal documents, and life-saving medications from arriving on time. After being grilled about these delays in a recent Senate hearing, DeJoy reluctantly agreed to pause consolidations until next January.

Alongside these service cuts, DeJoy has relied on aggressive stamp and package rate increases to boost agency revenue – hiking First Class stamp prices an unprecedented six times in three years. Public interest groups and mailing industry advocates have warned that these postage rate hikes will raise costs for postal customers, driving business and volume away from USPS. House Democrats have echoed these concerns in letters to Postal Board Chairman Roman Martinez and the Postal Regulatory Commission calling for an immediate pause on rate hikes. DeJoy has largely ignored calls from postal advocates to explore new revenue sources, such as postal banking.

DeJoy also mentions “acquiring new vehicles” as one of his successes, a reference that omits crucial context. DeJoy, as I wrote last August, has consistently opposed giving the Postal Service a fully-electric and union-built fleet. Though he’s been pressured by lawsuits into increasing the share of electric vehicles in the fleet to 62% (up from a paltry 10% in DeJoy’s initial proposal), DeJoy’s current plans fall far short of the near-100% target that environmental advocates have urged and that the Postal Service’s own inspector general has said is feasible. The backbone of the next-gen fleet, the Oshkosh NGDV, is currently being built by manufacturer Oshkosh Defense at a non-union factory in South Carolina, which UAW workers and Congressional Democrats have blasted as a “scab facility” and “bait and switch”. DeJoy has resisted calls from UAW workers to renegotiate the contract to be union-built.

Notably absent from DeJoy’s op-ed is any mention of worker safety, a year after postal carrier Eugene Gates died of heat stroke while completing his Dallas route in the scorching summer sun. An investigative report by E&E News following Gates’ death found that thousands of postal workers have failed to receive heat safety training in accordance with agency policies, and that managers across USPS have falsified official records to hide the lack of training. In January, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined USPS for failing to protect its workers from high outdoor heat. Though Postal Governor Ron Stroman and more than a dozen members of Congress have urged DeJoy to improve USPS’ heat illness prevention program, DeJoy has remained silent on the issue. His inaction is yielding tragic results: two days before DeJoy published his op-ed, postal worker Wendy Johnson died from heat stroke in the back of a postal truck.

Throughout his op-ed, DeJoy expresses a desire to run the Postal Service like a private business – a destructive mindset that has come to dominate USPS since its Nixon-era demotion from a Cabinet department to a corporation-like independent agency. This view was recently taken to its logical endpoint by neoliberal pundit Matt Yglesias, who proudly declared on Substack that he was “all for postal privatization” and “selling off some of USPS’ extensive real estate assets, many of which are probably very valuable.” The problem with this approach (as made gleefully explicit by Yglesias, who laments the “subsidization of low-productivity rural areas”) is that it would subject large swathes of the country to the mercy of private couriers, who have no universal service obligation to keep postal rates affordable or uniform, and can deny delivery service altogether to “unprofitable” remote and rural areas. Though DeJoy and Yglesias may not like it, the United States Postal Service is the only carrier obligated to provide universal service at affordable prices to every American, regardless of their geographic location.

Read more: Revolving Door Project | Don’t Buy Louis DeJoy’s “Second-Act” Spin | Revolving Door Project