Attorneys general who sued the US Postal Service over a nationwide mail slowdown told a federal court on Monday that the agency has not improved its performance enough since being ordered to reverse the policies, Bloomberg News reports.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who is leading one of multiple lawsuits against the USPS, told a court that USPS performance is still down more than 5% compared to the period before the changes were implemented.
Some divisions had a compliance rate as low as 85% and the agency has made little progress in bringing back late and extra trips.
"Despite being subject to multiple injunctions, defendants have not improved their service performance," Shapiro said.
IG report faults Louis DeJoy:
The filing came on the same day that the USPS inspector general’s office released a new report blaming the decreased performance on changes ordered by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
"No analysis of the service impacts of these various changes was conducted and documentation and guidance to the field for these strategies was very limited and almost exclusively oral," the report said. "The resulting confusion and inconsistency in operations at postal facilities compounded the significant negative service impacts across the country."
The IG report added that the policies "individually may not have been significant" but "launching all of these efforts at once, in addition to the changes instituted by the Postmaster General, had a significant impact on the Postal Service."
USPS disputes:
"We do not agree with the premise that underlies the report: That the initiatives reviewed are strategic in nature, or that they are 'transformational' to postal operations, either individually or collectively,” the USPS Board of Governors said in a statement to CNN.
"The noted efforts this year are similar to efforts that the Postal Service pursued over the last several years, predating the hiring of Mr. Louis DeJoy as the Postmaster General," the statement added.
House Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney said the report “confirms that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's sweeping changes -- which were hastily implemented without analyzing their potential impact -- caused serious delays across the country.”
