The President, the Postal Service and the Election

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2020

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The installation of Louis DeJoy as postmaster general has caused alarm. Since taking up the role in June, he has enacted a number of cuts to the Postal Service: ending overtime for workers, limiting how many runs they can make in a day, reassigning more than 20 executives and, from the perspective of the unions, speeding up the removal of mail-sorting machines. The actions of Mr. DeJoy, a Republican megadonor and Trump ally, have been interpreted by many Democrats as an attempt to sabotage the election in concert with President Trump, who has himself admitted to wanting to limit funding that could help mail-in voting. Today, we explore to what extent Mr. Trump is using the post office, and the postmaster general, to influence the election. Guest: Luke Broadwater, a congressional reporter at The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: Postmaster General DeJoy has ushered in measures that, three months out from an election that is expected to rely heavily on mail-in voting, have caused widespread delays.Amid warnings that changes to the agency may disenfranchise voters, Speaker Nancy Pelosi recalled the House from summer recess to vote on legislation blocking any further steps. Mr. DeJoy will testify before the Senate on Friday.In response to mounting criticism, the Postal Service has suspended operational changes until after the election. It is unclear whether changes already in place will be reversed.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From The New York Times, I'm Mike Obabaro. This is The Daily.
0:09.4	Today, the President, the Postal Service, and the Election.
0:15.2	My colleague, Luke Broadwater, on what's actually going on.
0:19.5	It's Wednesday, August 19.
0:31.2	Luke, there's a theory floating out there about the Post Office,
0:34.7	the President, and the upcoming election. I wonder if you can just explain it. What is this theory?
0:40.6	So the theory, I guess the short version of it is this. President Trump has installed a
0:45.9	mega donor and close ally as the Postmaster General and has set him about on a course to cut the
0:55.3	Post Office and in doing so wreak havoc onto mail-in voting, thereby helping President Trump be
1:04.8	reelected. And look, where does this theory come from? Well, we can take it all the way back to
1:11.6	about the turn of the century when mail use peaks in America right around 2001. And since that time,
1:19.7	we've seen about a 50% reduction in the mailing of first-class mail. To accommodate this,
1:28.0	a series of Postmaster Generals have approved cuts and reductions to things like mailboxes,
1:36.0	to things like sorting machines, in an attempt to shrink the agency along with the lower volume of mail.
1:44.8	Got it. Then you have this pandemic come in and you have a ton of people now at a ton of states
1:52.6	looking at mail-in balloting. Something like three out of four Americans may be eligible to vote
2:01.1	by mail this year. And so you have this whole new demand on the Post Office. Then on top of all these
2:09.2	problems, a new Postmaster General is installed. His Postmaster General is a Republican mega donor,
2:17.8	who 85 days from the election, by the way, decided the time was right for a chaotic and sweeping
2:24.0	overhaul. His name is Louis DeJoy. He has never worked for the Post Office before. Critics of the
2:30.5	President say he's trying to sabotage the Postal Service ahead of the election. It was only a
2:35.2	month and a half ago, Trump identified mail-in voting as the biggest threat to a second term.
	...

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