The Washington Post reports:

Soon after Louis DeJoy arrived at the U.S. Postal Service’s L’Enfant Plaza headquarters in mid-June, Mark Dimondstein, the veteran leader of the agency’s largest union, called to get on the new postmaster general’s schedule.

He had urgent matters to discuss: The coronavirus pandemic was forcing widespread absenteeism among his 200,000 members. Protective gear was running low. The post office needed a plan to handle a historic crush of mail-in ballots.

Dimondstein had spoken weekly with DeJoy’s predecessor, Megan Brennan. But it would take six weeks for him to get an audience with the new boss, and by then, the labor leader had other priorities: to halt the rapid-fire cost-cutting moves DeJoy ordered that were degrading the delivery of mail, medicine, food and other staples to a country homebound as the virus was surging again.

“You’ve been there less than a month,” Dimondstein said in an interview. “Wouldn’t you want to get the opinion of the unions and the mailing community on what might happen if you cut service like this? He never talked to us or sought our input.”

DeJoy’s short tenure leading the Postal Service has quickly engulfed an apolitical corner of the government first led by Benjamin Franklin in a controversy that’s fueling alarm over the reliability of vital services and the integrity of voting in November.

People familiar with his rocky 69 days in the job say DeJoy came into office not adequately focused on the two biggest challenges facing the post office — the pandemic and the upcoming election. Instead, he absorbed himself with making long-term changes that Republicans have long sought to run the money-losing agency more like a business, while also addressing one of President Trump’s obsessions: what the Postal Service charges Amazon for the “last mile” delivery of packages. [Continue reading…]