• Opinion
• Review & Outlook

Nancy Pelosi Goes Politically Postal

Congress ought to be embarrassed by this evidence-free conspiracy theory.

By The Editorial Board

Aug. 17, 2020 7:45 pm ET

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Aug. 14.

Photo: Tom Williams/Zuma Press

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling the House back into session this week to address fears that the U.S. Postal Service is being infiltrated by alien lizard people posing as letter carriers. OK, it isn’t quite that bad. The actual conspiracy theory holds that President Trump is strangling the USPS to hack the November election.

But talk about “unsubstantiated,” as the press likes to call Donald Trump’s Twitter emissions. Democrats should be deeply embarrassed that their leadership has embraced such claims. Two Congressmen, including Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries, wrote to the FBI on Monday to urge, if you can believe it, a criminal investigation of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.

“This conspiracy theory is the most far-flung thing I think I’ve ever heard,” says Stephen Kearney, who worked at the USPS for 33 years, including as treasurer and a senior vice president. “DeJoy was not appointed by President Trump,” but by the USPS’s bipartisan governors. (Who, as it happens, selected him unanimously.)

“You can find valid operational reasons for the actions taken by the Postal Service so far,” says Mike Plunkett, another longtime USPS executive who now leads the Association for Postal Commerce. “In no way do I detect any criminality behind them, and I’m at a loss as to how one would reach that conclusion.”

The Democratic letter to the FBI cites news reports that the USPS is decommissioning hundreds of mail-sorting machines. But the context is that overall mail volume has fallen 33% since 2006. “They’ve been taking machines out of service for years now, and I’ve been encouraging them to do it more aggressively,” says Hamilton Davison, the president of the American Catalog Mailers Association. “I think that’s a good thing for America, because we don’t want to pay for stuff that we don’t need.”

Mr. Kearney, who now runs the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers, concurs. “It’s obvious, to be efficient and not waste money, you need to take out some of that capacity,” he says. His group has similarly been urging productivity improvements, “because if they don’t do that, our postage rates are going to go way up.” A leaked USPS document floating in the online ether is titled “Equipment Reduction.” But it’s dated May 15, and Mr. DeJoy took over June 15.

Another claim is that the USPS is pulling blue collection bins off the street en masse. “They’re going around literally with tractor trailers picking up mailboxes,” Joe Biden said last week. “I mean, it’s bizarre!” The USPS says it has nearly 142,000 boxes across the country, which are adjusted as volume and costs dictate. In August 2016, the USPS’s Inspector General said that “the number of collection boxes declined by more than 12,000 in the past 5 years.” Voter suppression by the Obama Administration?

Alarmed Twitter users last week posted a photo of mailboxes on a flatbed truck in New Jersey. Oops: “Morristown Mayor Tim Dougherty said the mailboxes were being replaced with new anti-fishing boxes,” the local newspaper explained. On Monday the USPS said it would postpone this security upgrade for 90 days “while we evaluate our customers’ concerns”—in other words, to keep jittery partisans on the internet from losing their minds before Nov. 3.

Mr. DeJoy is being knocked for trying to cut overtime costs. But is it any wonder? The day he was sworn in, the Inspector General reported that in 2019 the post office “spent $1.1 billion in mail processing overtime and penalty overtime, $280 million in late and extra transportation, and $2.9 billion in delivery overtime and penalty overtime costs.” For context, the USPS’s overall loss that year was $8.8 billion.

Mrs. Pelosi is trying to put on a political show, starring Democrats as the saviors of the post office. She says she wants to pass a bill that “prohibits the Postal Service from implementing any changes to operations or level of service it had in place on January 1.” Also in the mix may be a $25 billion cash infusion. Then Chuck Schumer will demand that the Senate come back to town for the same vote. By the way the letter-carriers union endorsed Joe Biden on the weekend.

***

This is a made-for-TV phony political crisis. The USPS has long-term challenges, but enough money to last into 2021. Mr. DeJoy says there’s “ample capacity to deliver all election mail.” Some states have startlingly lax ballot deadlines, but nobody can pretend with a straight face that it’s the post office’s fault. Democrats have also scheduled a hearing for next Monday so they can yell at Mr. DeJoy in person. How long before Rep. Adam Schiff says it’s another Russia-Donald Trump conspiracy to steal the election?