LAKELAND — For most of the past seven years, Stephanie Wagenbach could count on her mail being delivered around the time she arrived home from work at 4:30 p.m.
That changed about a month ago. Lately, Wagenbach said, mail sometimes doesn’t arrive at her house in Lakeland until 7 p.m. or so. In addition, a package sent from Colorado in July didn’t materialize for 24 days, long after the sender had assumed it was lost in shipment.
“I personally don’t care what time I get my mail, especially since it comes after 4:30 anyway, but you can definitely see a change,” Wagenbach said. “And if there are people that are waiting for things that they need to get at a specific time and they’re going to have problems, then that’s just not good.”
The United States Postal Service is facing intense scrutiny over the actions of a new director and questions about its ability to handle an expected surge in mail ballots for the Nov. 3 election. Reports have emerged of delays and disruptions to mail delivery in some parts of the country.
While Wagenbach and some other Polk County residents shared anecdotal impressions of changes in mail service, it’s difficult to make any assessments about local delivery. The U.S. Postal Service would not provide statistics on service in Polk County, and The Ledger could find no active employees willing to talk publicly.
Al Friedman, president of the Florida State Association of Letter Carriers, said Postmaster General Louis DeJoy recently issued an order barring employees from speaking to the media while on duty. Asked if he could find employees willing to talk while off duty, Friedman said postal workers are afraid to do so.
“If their name gets back, they’re all worried about retribution,” said Friedman, who is retired after 22 years as a letter carrier.
DeJoy became the nation’s 75th postmaster general in May. A former CEO of a supply chain company, he is the first leader of the federal agency in about two decades with no background in the Postal Service.
Controversy has emerged since DeJoy took his position. News reports soon arose that mail-sorting machines were being removed or taken out of use at mail processing facilities and blue collection boxes hauled away. The agency also began restricting overtime for employees, even if it meant delays in mail delivery, according to reports based on internal documents.
Meanwhile, news outlets have documented delays in mail delivery nationwide. NBC News reported that first-class mail delivery was running several days behind schedule in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and stacks of backlogged mail covered the floors of sorting facilities in Chicago.
Other media outlets have reported on chicks mailed to farmers arriving dead because of delays and food rotting in sorting facilities overwhelmed with undelivered mail. Democratic senators have called for an investigation into delays in the delivery of mail-order drug prescriptions.
Members of the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee said internal documents show that mail service has slowed throughout the country. That has caused some to accuse DeJoy, a major contributor to Republican candidates, of seeking to disrupt mail voting in the November election.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized voting by mail, alleging that it is prone to fraud. Trump has sometimes made a distinction between states — such as Florida — that send ballots only to voters who request them, and the five states that conduct all-mail elections.
Called to testify before the committee in late August, DeJoy said he didn't order the discontinued use of sorting machines or the removal of drop boxes and did not direct a reduction in overtime for employees. While strongly denying any intention to slow delivery before the election, DeJoy said he had ordered a halt to some actions, including reductions in workers’ overtime hours and the planned removal of mail-sorting devices.
DeJoy stressed that he is taking steps to address persistent financial problems with the Postal Service. The agency has operated at a loss of $69 billion over the past 11 fiscal years, including a loss of $3.9 billion in the 2018 fiscal year, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Losing trust in service
Wagenbach, whose home and office are both in the Dixieland neighborhood, said she hasn’t noticed any change in mail delivery at her office. That location, though just blocks from her house, is served by an auxiliary route, she said.
Troubled by the extremely tardy delivery of the recent package from Colorado, Wagenbach said she had decided to use a commercial service for mailing a package out of state.
“I usually would use the Postal Service, but I’m going to try to figure out another service to use just because I feel like it can’t be trusted right now,” she said.
Marcella Benton, co-owner of Whatever Tees in Lakeland, also responded to an online query from The Ledger. Benton said she has noticed regular delays in mail delivery, particularly packages, at her business near Lakeland Linder International Airport.
“Regular business-size envelopes seem to be getting to us in a reasonable amount of time, but small packages are taking forever,” Benton wrote. “We print shirts, so we get shipments of blank shirts daily. I had a package already delayed and scheduled to come in on a Friday that didn't show up until the following Wednesday.”
Diane Donnelly, who lives in a mobile home community in Lakeland, said mail used to arrive in the cluster mailboxes between 2 and 4 p.m. Lately, it has been delivered as late as 8 p.m., she said.
Buzz Faiks of Babson Park recently submitted a letter to The Ledger saying regularly scheduled shipments of prescription drugs had been arriving much later. Faiks said that three deliveries mailed in July took nine, 13 and 19 days to arrive.
Faiks, a Vietnam veteran, said TriCare, the health care service for current and retired military members, only provides prescriptions by mail. Faiks, 77, said his mail service seemed to return to normal after the last delivery from TriCare on Aug. 5.
The majority of those responding to The Ledger’s query said they had detected no recent delays in mail service.
“I have not experienced any delays in receiving mail,” Kelly Bare wrote. “If anything the service is excellent. I even routinely receive parcels from Europe and China extremely fast. Whoever is saying there are delays must have an agenda because it just isn’t true.”
Others also suggested that the notion of disruptions to mail service is an invention of the media or politicians hostile to Trump.
Pandemic has effect
The Ledger asked the communications staff of the Postal Service whether any sorting machines or drop boxes have been removed in Polk County. A spokeswoman didn’t provide such information, instead replying with an email containing statements made by DeJoy and USPS Board of Governors Chairman Robert Duncan to the House Oversight Committee, along with a link to an online statement headlined, “Just the Facts.”
That document, posted Aug. 21 on the USPS “newsroom” page, contains six assertions, among them that the Postal Service has ample capacity to handle election mail volume and that the removal of collection boxes has been a routine adjustment for decades. It said sorting machines for letters and flat items are only used one-third of the time.
The statement also said that DeJoy has ordered two main changes to improve efficiency since his appointment: requiring trucks to run on time and on schedule and “realigning” the Postal Service’s reporting structure.
Friedman, the Florida State Association of Letter Carriers president, said the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted scheduling at many Postal Service locations. He said the viral disease has claimed three active carriers in South Florida.
“So this is an issue when they stopped overtime,” he said. “You can’t do that in the middle of what’s going on.”
Friedman said he had not heard any definite reports that the Postal Service had recently removed sorting machines or collection boxes from use in Polk County.
Like many labor organizations, the state and national associations of letter carriers tend to support Democrats. The National Association of Letter Carriers has endorsed Democratic nominee Joe Biden in his challenge to President Trump.
Friedman said he suspects that DeJoy is trying to undermine the Postal Service and drive more business to commercial shipping companies. Critics have accused DeJoy of conflicts of interest, noting that after his appointment he continued to hold stocks and options worth tens of millions of dollars in a USPS contractor, XPO Logistics, and he owns sizeable stocks options in Amazon, which competes with the Postal Service.
Plenty of challenges
Another retired letter carrier and a former president of the association, Matty Rose, said information is scarce because leaders of the Postal Service have instituted a “gag order,” warning employees not to talk to the media or to discuss internal issues on social media. Rose said supervisors have invoked the Hatch Act, which prohibits civil service employees from engaging in certain political activities.
Rose, who lives in Volusia County, said he had received reports of mail-sorting machines being removed from some facilities in Florida but didn’t know of any actions affecting Polk County. He is president of the board of trustees for Nalcrest, a retirement community in eastern Polk County inhabited by members of the National Association of Letter Carriers.
Aside from those who serve rural routes, postal workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement, Rose said, which includes provisions for overtime pay. He said he has heard from active employees that most of the recent attempts to curb overtime have affected not letter carriers but employees who process and sort mail.
“So what the Postmaster General did is delay the mail coming out of the processing centers,” Rose said. “So if it doesn’t get to a letter carrier, the letter carrier can’t deliver it.”
In addition to the increased absences among employees during the pandemic, the Postal Service has been burdened in other ways, Friedman said. While the volume of first-class mail has declined, package delivery is up as much as 60% in some places as more Americans order items online, he said.
Rose noted that commercial shippers, including FedEx and UPS, only deliver packages that will result in a profit. He said those services drop off hundreds of thousands of packages every day at post offices for “last-mile” delivery.
“So letter carriers are being bombarded with unusual amounts of packages,” Rose said. “It takes longer to deliver those packages than it does letter mail.”
Despite all of the strain the Postal Service is facing, Friedman and Rose said they are confident the agency’s roughly 650,000 employees are capable of handling an increased volume of mail ballots this fall.
“We just want to work,” Friedman said, as if addressing DeJoy on behalf of USPS employees. “Why are you doing this to the Post Office and making us a political football? We have a mission; we know what it is. The American people love us. We’re eight years running the most-loved government employees. That’s a pretty hard task to do every year, but we get it done.”
Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.