Not everyone is on board with what DeJoy has accomplished so far, which has earned him a shorter leash with some postal stakeholders for what lies ahead. DeJoy will not let those concerns stand in his way. There remain serious questions about whether his reforms will produce the savings he has promised-previous efforts to consolidate facilities led USPS to perform worse while realizing just a tiny fraction of the cost reductions it had anticipated. Employees will not lose their jobs, but some may have to report a different space. In his telling, that will mean savings on transportation, gas, real estate and time. DeJoy is converting unused, dilapidated facilities or buying new ones to create mega-centers that can handle all sorts of processes currently spread across dozens of different buildings. The first of hundreds of sorting and delivery centers just opened in Athens, Ga., with more slated for February.
It is a process the postmaster general said will take years, but one that will get underway in earnest in 2023.
USPS CHANGES COMING MANUALS
That will include condensing and updating the more than 900 policy manuals USPS employs, improving facility conditions, making the flow of mail more logical (DeJoy wants to eliminate “wasted motion”), rerouting letter carriers starting their day away from post offices to consolidated sorting centers, adding equipment to boost package processing capacity and generally shifting from a scattered network to a fully integrated one. “We have stuff to work on for, like, a long time, together as an organization,” DeJoy said. Even when mistakes are made, at least they will be happening with purpose, toward an eventual goal. Previously, he said, that all got swept under the rug, but that will no longer fly. “We have a terrible network,” DeJoy said. Officials have found inefficiencies in the agency's network and will change delivery routes, get rid of buildings, buy some new ones, relocate employees, reduce mail sent through the air and do whatever else is necessary to improve. Next up, USPS will look to identify savings. He has already crossed major pieces of that agenda off the list: the first significant postal reform bill in 15 years, which is expected to wipe $107 billion off the agency’s books a new pricing structure that has allowed DeJoy to raise rates above inflation slowing down delivery for some mail to make performance targets more manageable and stabilizing the workforce by converting more than 100,000 part-time employees to career positions. The new postmaster general, he conceded, “wants to assess and adjust.”Ĭarley has at times butted heads with DeJoy, but their relationship has improved as ideas have come into focus and communication has increased: “I’m more optimistic now than I was at this time last year,” Carley said.Īll of the attitude shifting and vision making will come to a head in 2023, which will be a pivotal year for DeJoy’s “Delivering for America” plan to get USPS on firm financial footing within 10 years. “When it’s a complete disaster, we’re just going to keep doing it,” Carley said in summarizing the attitude at USPS in the past. Under prior leadership, the Postal Service often stuck to its ideas regardless of whether they were working. That's what I'm most proud of.”įor Edmund Carley, president of United Postmasters and Managers of America, that is a key difference between DeJoy and his predecessors. And that's the beginning of a well run operational services organization. “We also have visibility, we catch them now, and we react to them,” he said of the inevitable forthcoming mistakes. He describes his biggest accomplishment as “juicing the place up:” namely, getting his management team and the rest of the 650,000 postal employees to embrace a mindset of change.Īnd when things go wrong, DeJoy and USPS will course correct. Not all of his ideas are going to work-some have already prominently failed-but he will continue pushing forward.
USPS CHANGES COMING HOW TO
He can see where there is $35 billion in costs to eliminate, when delivery trucks are running unnecessary routes and how to reduce turnover in the workforce.
When DeJoy says he is going to “make a lot of mistakes,” it is because he is willing to adapt. “Well, neither do I.”Īgain, that is a feature, not a bug. “A lot of people say they don't know exactly what we're doing,” DeJoy told Government Executive in a recent interview. You may not like what he is doing about it, but he wants you to know he is doing something. Postal Service in 2020 that was directionless, losing billions of dollars per year, shedding countless jobs and allowing mail delays to spike, all without a serious plan to turn things around. A lot of them.įor the postmaster general, that is sort of the point.
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