ESSAY: Project Safe Delivery and the Impacts of a Broken US Postal Service

As co-owner of a long-running Charlotte-based indie record label, Self Aware Records, what’s now known as “snail mail” still plays a critical role in my professional life. I tend to mail items on a near-daily basis and, over the last year, I noticed something about how my outgoing mail is handled — or not handled. 

In the past, I would put a letter or package outside of my Windsor Park home and usually within 24 hours it would be gone. Lately, letters and packages have sat for multiple days until I’ve been forced to simply drop them off at the nearest post office or USPS collection box. However, I’ve recently noticed that the spot for such packages has been sealed up.

Not only that, the front slot where you would drop a letter or smaller package has been changed in a way that only actual letter-sized items could be inserted. 

At first, I thought this was just a localized change in east Charlotte, but soon found it was implemented at boxes across and city, statewide, and even outside of North Carolina. What I discovered is a small but widespread change by the USPS with potentially big impacts. 

I reached out to the USPS for clarification on the issue and heard back from spokesperson Philip Bosenberger who confirmed that the changes are a part of Project Safe Delivery, a new program launched by the USPS in partnership with the US Postal Inspection Service in May 2023 “to combat postal crimes and protect postal employees.” 

He also sent a link that explained how the project had led to a 73% increase in arrests for robberies targeting letter carriers and a decrease in both the number of robberies and complaints involving mail theft over a five-month span leading up to March 2024. 

I know what you’re thinking: “Can’t you just put in a request for the USPS to pick up mail directly from your house?” Yes, that can be done. Specifically in my case, however, I tend to ship items Media Mail or First Class, but USPS only picks up if one item is Priority. So for folks like me running a small business on razor-thin margins, shipping can prove a little difficult.

With that in mind, I dug deeper into recent changes at the USPS to see who’s affected and if anyone is pushing back. 

When did things change at USPS? 

In May 2020, the USPS Board of Governors appointed Louis DeJoy as postmaster general. DeJoy was the founder and CEO of logistics and freight company New Breed Logistics before becoming the first postmaster general since 1992 with no prior USPS experience. 

New Breed was bought by XPO Logistics for $615 million and DeJoy continued to serve on the board of directors until 2018. He still owns around $30 million in stock with the company. 

DeJoy’s companies still hold active contracts with the USPS, a clear conflict of interest. He is also a major Republican Party donor and supporter of Donald Trump. 

DeJoy was criticized for the extreme cost-reduction policies he implemented through his infamous 10-year plan in March 2021, including eliminating overtime and banning late or additional trips to deliver mail. 

Adam Clark Estes of Vox reported in 2020 that USPS had sent a letter to 46 states and Washington, DC, in late July of that year warning that it could not guarantee their mail-in ballots would be delivered in time to be counted. In August 2020, due to public pressure, DeJoy said his cutbacks would be suspended until after the election. 

Read more: Is Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Hitting the Self-Destruct Button on Democracy? (2020)

With another election looming in about a week, are DeJoy’s shenanigans raising their ugly head again? 

On Oct. 14 of this year, U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger held a press conference with US Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, all Democrats from Virginia, following their briefing on election mail readiness with DeJoy.

“USPS plays a critical role in guaranteeing that every eligible voter can cast their vote. We met with Postmaster General DeJoy to make sure that the agency is working to deliver a higher standard of service ahead of Election Day to make sure ballots arrive on time,” Spanberger said. 

When asked last month about Donald Trump’s allegations that mail-in ballots might be purposefully displaced, DeJoy said, “My response is like my response to everyone who says that we’re not prepared for the election; it’s that they’re wrong,” he said. “I don’t know that I need to comment any more than that. They’re wrong.”

Impacts on the upcoming election

Last month, an investigation in NBC6 in South Florida found that some of the country’s slowest mail is in presidential swing states that enforce strict mail ballot delivery deadlines. The recent destruction wreaked upon western North Carolina by Hurricane Helene has only raised more questions about how delays could affect absentee voting. 

In the days following Helene, about 1.2 million people in western North Carolina had their mail service disrupted, including many who rely on medicines received by mail. 

Shortly after the storm, the USPS announced the suspension of mail delivery operations in the areas with zip codes beginning with 286, 287, 288, and 289. As of Oct. 22, more than 20 post offices in western North Carolina remained closed. 

More than 40,000 absentee ballots have already been sent to voters in the 25 counties most affected by Helene, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NC BOE). 

NC BOE executive director Karen Brinson Bell worked with emergency management officials to deliver outstanding absentee ballots, which had already been delayed due to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s lawsuit to remove his name from the ballot.

On Oct. 7, the board approved an emergency resolution that will make absentee voting more accessible to voters living in 13 counties hardest hit by Helene: Ashe, Avery, Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson, Madison, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Transylvania, Watauga, and Yancey. 

The resolution allows voters to request absentee ballots in person up until the day before Election Day and, if needed, return their absentee ballot to a county board other than their assigned one. Whichever board receives their ballot will mark it and send it to the correct county board to be processed and counted.  

Bell confirmed that absentee ballots would be counted by officials as long as they were postmarked by Election Day and arrived to local boards of elections within three days after. Any ballots received after 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 5 cannot be included in this year’s count.

In a recent Twitter thread, Wake County Board of Elections member Gerry Cohen recommended that any North Carolina resident participating in absentee voting mail their ballot by Oct. 31 at the latest to ensure it reaches the proper office by the Nov. 5 deadline, which applies to everyone regardless of Helene’s impacts.

I reached out to Shannon Steele, USPS’s manager of customer relations in North Carolina who handles support for election and political mail across the state. She declined to comment about Louis DeJoy and how the changes made through Project Safe Delivery have impacted North Carolinians. 

Who will save the post office? 

I spoke recently with Steve Hutkins of Save the Post Office, a site that he launched in 2011. The about section of his site says he created the site when his local post office in New York’s Hudson Valley was in danger of closing. He’s never worked for the Postal Service and has no affiliation with it.

The website provides information about post office closings, suspensions, and consolidations; the historic post office buildings that are being sold; and the fight to preserve the USPS. 

The website also examines topics like the USPS’s finances, court cases, and the efforts to privatize the postal system. I told him about my personal issues and he directed me to a few articles on his site. In an article titled “Who Gets Hurt When the Post Office Closes?” he explains how these closures and changes of service are often framed as saving the USPS money but just put the burden back on our local communities. 

The USPS justifies the closing by saying that email has led to a decrease in physical mail. Many of the closures affect smaller branches, disproportionately impacting elderly and low-income residents. The latest data shows that about 8.8% of Americans do not have internet, which translates to around 11.5 million people, a lot of these folks in more rural areas or low income. 

What’s more, these changes have shifted the focus for remaining employees to focus on deliveries and de-prioritize pick-ups. Save the Post Office has also reported that the USPS is planning to stop collecting the mail at the end of the day at most of the country’s post offices. 

Rather than being processed overnight, the mail will sit in the back of the post office, waiting for collection the next morning, when the day’s mail is dropped off. People in metro areas won’t really be affected by these changes, but people who live in more rural areas surely will. 

Earlier this year, US Sen. John Ossoff (D-GA) grilled DeJoy about slowdowns at a new USPS facility in Palmetto, a small town outside of Atlanta, where just 36% of inbound first-class mail was getting delivered on-time.

DeJoy insisted it would take several months to improve the new facility, to which Ossoff replied, “The long run is too long. You’ve got weeks, not months, to fix this.” 

Ossoff recently proposed the Postmaster General Reform Act, which would require the US Senate to confirm a president’s appointment to the role. As of now, the position is appointed by the United State Postal Service Board of Governors without confirmation from members of Congress. 

The new legislation also proposes a maximum of two five-year terms for the position, which currently has no term limits. 

Two steps forward and one step back

In 2021, President Biden signed an executive order pledging to fully electrify the USPS’s entire fleet of vehicles, an order that DeJoy seemingly defied in February 2022 when he announced an $11.3-billion plan to replace its aging mail trucks with largely gas-powered new vehicles. 

Months later, when Biden announced a $9.6-billion investment over the next five years to carry through on the previous year’s promise, DeJoy awarded the contract to Oshkosh Defense, a company that had previously admitted its lack of expertise in electric vehicles. 

In 2021, NC Attorney General and now gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein filed a complaint against the USPS over its 10-year plan, titled “Delivering America: Our Vision and Ten-Year Plan to Achieve Financial Sustainability and Service Excellence.”  

“The Postal Service is an essential government service, and it cannot restructure without considering how those changes will affect millions of Americans,” Stein said. “I’m filing this complaint to ensure that Postmaster General DeJoy’s radical plan doesn’t destroy the timely mail service that people depend on for medications, bill payments, and business operations in rural parts of the state.”

In the years since, we have seen what these changes are doing to service. Under the guise of making the USPS more profitable, service has suffered across the state and countrywide, all while postage rates have nearly doubled during DeJoy’s tenure. None of this has led to the cost savings originally projected by DeJoy through his 10-year plan. 

Looking at all of these examples together leads one to ask: Is Louis DeJoy just this bad at his job or is he purposefully slowing things down to benefit Donald Trump, who has repeatedly voiced his distrust for absentee voting and the country’s election process in general? In a swing state such as North Carolina, these slowdowns could shave razor thin margins off of an already tight presidential race and even tighter down ballot decisions that directly affect state and local elections. 

DeJoy will claim he is working to make the USPS “financially sustainable,” but this a public utility, not a private business — one that we need to function as a nation. Delays and non-deliveries are not acceptable results of cost-saving measures.

As a business owner who relies heavily on the USPS, I know that I am but one in a sea of people who rely on this public service to survive, many of whom for more critical reasons than myself. Whether it be through correspondence, mail-in ballots, receiving disability checks or ordering medicine, countless Americans need the USPS to operate as it should. 

We should all be invested in USPS’s success, because as taxpayers, we already are all invested in USPS’s success.