Will mail slowdown affect your area? Postal Service won't say (2024)

The U.S. Postal Service is proposing a new plan in order to keep itself afloat, and the plan involves slower mail in rural ZIP codes across the country. But the agency will not say which post offices will be affected.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on Aug. 22 proposed what are being called “operational changes.” Since then, the Richmond Times-Dispatch has sought clarity on the changes, which were outlined in a memo to the Postal Service’s main regulator.

In the memo, DeJoy promised that the changes would “boost service reliability, cost efficiency, and overall productivity,” and save the Postal Service $30 billion over the next decade. The agency has run in the red to the tune of several billion dollars each year on the back of declining mail volumes.

The details of the proposal forecast how the agency plans to achieve that — by “adjusting” pickup and drop-off times when a post office is far away from a regional hub.

Richmond was a pilot site

Regional hubs are new mail sorting mega centers key to DeJoy’s overhaul of the Postal Service.

That overhaul, called “Delivering for America,” involves shutting down thousands of smaller post offices and bringing most mail through 60 high-tech mail sorting facilities. In July, Richmond was the first region in the country to get such a facility, known as a Regional Processing and Distribution Center.

“Depending on location, time and distance, expected time to deliver will increase for some ZIP code pairs,” the proposal reads.

Asked for clarification, USPS spokesperson Philip Bogenberger said the slowdown will affect mail being picked up from rural areas, rather than delivered to rural areas.

“If a mailpiece enters the mailstream near a USPS Regional Processing and Distribution Center and delivered to a rural area, it will get there as fast, if not faster, than current delivery. If mail enters the mailstream from a rural area, it may take 12-24 hours extra but still within our service standards,” Bogenberger said.

A public hearing on the proposed changes will take place on Thursday.

The Postal Service previously proposed a similar rollback that it called “optimized collections.”

Richmond was again the pilot region. Under optimized collections, 58% of post offices in the Richmond region lost evening mail collections. Mail dropped off in the afternoon would sit overnight, wrote auditors who analyzed the pilot program.

Regulators with the Postal Regulatory Commission specifically asked the Postal Service for a list of Richmond-area post offices that had lost evening collections. USPS gave the commission a list confidentially, citing competitive business information.

The Postal Regulatory Commission did not return requests from The Times-Dispatch to share the list of affected facilities. Nor did Bogenberger.

‘It’s going to be quite extensive’

Steve Hutkins, a retired New York University professor who chronicles USPS issues on his “Save the Post Office” website, says the USPS has been dressing delays in the guise of improvements.

He said the latest announcement is no different.

The proposal “totally obscures the extra day. It makes it sound like we’re not changing anything, like the service standards are going to be the same,” Hutkins said. “Oh, and by the way, it’s going to be an extra day for not only rural, but a lot of the country. It’s going to be quite extensive.”

U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman, R-1st, who has been vocal about Postal Service problems for months, criticized the proposal.

“Virginians residing in our rural communities deserve reliable mail service just as much as our suburban residents. This abrupt change in mail operations in rural areas and the uncertainty of impacted facilities is the exact opposite of the improvement and transparency I’ve demanded from the Postal Service,” Wittman said.

He said the Postal Service has continually failed to fix mail delays for over a year now and “must do everything it can to rebuild trust amongst Virginians.”

U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-11th, said the Postal Service “might as well announce a return to delivering mail by horse and buggy.”

Despite rebukes, DeJoy has remained adamant that the agency needs nothing less than a drastic overhaul to stay afloat, which, by law, it is mandated to do.

“Ultimately, it is up to the Postal Service to save the Postal Service,” DeJoy said during a hearing before an oversight committee in April.

DeJoy told legislators he did not need more assistance, but rather that politicians give the agency time to implement “Delivering for America.”

That request was not entirely successful.

Georgia, the second region to switch to a Regional Processing and Distribution Center, followed suit. It currently has a 40% on-time delivery rate, down from 80% before the transition.