Last summer, United States Postmaster General Louis DeJoy laid out what he called a “splendid vision“ for the future of the Postal Service.
In his vision, one of America’s oldest agencies would shed the shackles of inefficiency and become greener, leaner, and finally competitive with logistics titans like Amazon.
DeJoy said his plan — Delivering for America — would save his agency from dire financial straits and give America “the best national delivery system in the world.”
But in Virginia, the opposite happened.
The Commonwealth became the worst state in the country for on-time delivery of first-class mail, according to the main watchdog agency that oversees the post office. Since October of last year, Virginia was last place for on-time mail delivery, with its “D” score a full 13 points below its nearest competitor. Virginia’s mail delivery rate dropped from 89% in 2020 to 66%, where it sits now.
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Records reviewed by the Times-Dispatch and Lee Enterprises’ Public Service Journalism Team suggest that Richmond’s mail problem is directly linked to the rollout of Delivering for America, a key leg of which involves consolidating mail sorting into larger, centralized sorting centers.
Richmond’s Sandston facility was the first facility in the country to undergo DeJoy’s efficiency makeover, which began in 2023. When activated, the 719,000-square-foot building became the main hub for central Virginia and Hampton Roads.
Publicly, problems rose to a boil in December, when U.S. Senator Tim Kaine fumed over the mishandling of mail containing hundreds of cancer screening tests on behalf of the city’s local VA hospital. The tests were unusable.
In private, the agency was well aware that Delivering for America’s first test-case was coming off the rails. “Challenges in execution” had impacted service performance on a regional level, lawyers for the Postal Service wrote in response to grilling by the federal Postal Regulatory Commission, which oversees USPS. Pre-existing weaknesses also hampered the rollout, as well as “issues with machine sort plans and adherence to the operating plan” outlined by DeJoy, the lawyers wrote.
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At one point, a team of 20 personnel from the agency’s headquarters in D.C. were dispatched to Richmond to troubleshoot, according to the filing. All of these problems were avoidable, the lawyers wrote.
The Postal Service has since “undertaken extensive efforts to address these issues in Richmond,” lawyers wrote, but did not detail those efforts.
In response to an interview request, a spokesperson for the post office, Philip Bogenberger, replied with an emailed statement.
“The new Richmond Regional Processing and Distribution Center (RPDC) is part of the Postal Service’s Delivering for America plan to modernize our mail and package processing network by combining and centralizing mail processing operations,” Bogenberger said.
Bogenberger said the agency made significant investments to ensure that USPS can provide reliable services for years to come, and that a vast majority of mail in the Richmond area is being delivered on time.
“Local management is aware of the concerns of some local customers regarding their mail delivery and are working quickly to resolve any issues,” said Bogenberger.
‘A black hole’
A thorough examination of systemic failures is expected to be made public in the first week of April. That’s when the agency’s main watchdog has said they’ll release an audit of the Sandston facility.
Until then, politicians and even postal regulators have remained in the dark about mail problems in Richmond.
An independent ombudsman for the Postal Regulatory Commission said “the Postal Service is playing it coy with the commission in every respect as far as these problems.”
“It makes you wonder what precisely is going on,” said Kenneth Moeller, public representative for the Postal Regulatory Commission. “Some of this stuff is just too outrageous. I really would love to know what is going on in Richmond. My attorney who lives there said it’s like a black hole.”
In a filing to the PRC by Moeller and attorney John D. Avila on March 15, the team noted that even those employed by the Postal Service’s regulatory agency are “not immune from significant mail delays.”
“One member, who resides in the Richmond area, was twice charged with late fees after the local assessor did not receive his personal property tax payments until nearly a month after they were mailed,” Moeller wrote in the filing. “Though it pales in comparison with the difficulties experienced by other individuals, this anecdote illustrates why consumers often switch to online payments, thus driving more mail volume out of the system.”
The Postal Regulatory Commission said in a statement that there has been “insufficient transparency” from the USPS and that it “shares the concerns of the public and members of Congress regarding the service issues around the country that are related to the implementation of the Postal Service’s Delivering for America plan.”
Recently, Richmond’s elections chief told voters not to risk letting their ballot be swallowed by a dysfunctional Postal Service.
“The reports we’ve been receiving about delayed, misplaced, or even missing mail are deeply troubling, especially as we approach crucial electoral events like the Presidential Election in November,” Richmond General Registrar Keith Balmer wrote in a blog post.
It’s not just Richmond
Other sites that have rolled out Regional Processing and Distribution Centers have faced similar challenges, the Postal Service has admitted, despite its lawyers stating that the Postal Service “has reviewed the weaknesses identified in the Richmond implementation and made appropriate adjustments to our planning and execution processes and timelines.”
“It’s a national problem; it’s not just Richmond,” said Steve Hutkins, a retired New York University professor who now chronicles USPS issues on his “Save the Post Office” website. “Things are just not working as planned. They’re making big changes faster than the network can keep up with it, and it’s not even clear how long this will go on and what the outcome will be when it’s all over.”
In Atlanta, the deployment of the RPDC allegedly left other post offices so short-staffed that they couldn’t function, according to what a local union leader told Atlanta news outlets.
“The void that they left behind was so great, that they don’t have enough people left behind,” Mitchell Taylor, president of the American Postal Workers Union, told WSB-TV in Atlanta.
There were also reports of mail trucks waiting hours to process and receive mail for delivery at the RPDC, and “alarming reports and allegations of criminal activity,” according to U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Georgia.
“They have miles of tractor trailers trying to get in and out of the facility,” Hutkins said. “You can see videos from helicopters of just the trucks backed up for hours and hours and hours.”
In Houston, a longtime USPS employee told KHOU-TV that two package sorting machines were removed from its facility to make way for one massive sorting machine that was to be installed as part of its RPDC transformation. But the bigger machine didn’t fit in the facility.
“They basically ended up with no package sorting machine,” Moeller said of the situation in Houston, leading to a backup of packages and mail just sitting at the facility.
Regulators at the PRC asked USPS “why the adjustments … the Postal Service made after it learned from its experience with the Richmond RPDC were insufficient to mitigate against negative impacts of the Houston RPDC on service performance in (the) Houston area.”
In response, the USPS stated that “a confluence of disruptive events” impacted the Houston RPDC.
“The combination of machine removal, space constraints, lack of employee availability, and weather disruptions caused delays,” lawyers for the USPS told the PRC in a March 8 filing.
“As with the launch of the Richmond RPDC region, we continue to investigate the root causes of the challenges faced and are building additional safeguards into future modernization plans,” the lawyers wrote.
Additional reporting contributed by Thad Green.