ATLANTA — U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was back in the hot seat Thursday as senators grilled him once again about mail delays and the postal service’s projected $9.5 billion in losses this year.
It’s a cause Sen. Jon Ossoff has been passionate about after a Channel 2 Action News investigation on major delays from mail coming out of the USPS facility in Palmetto.
“Postmaster General, you’re not meeting your financial targets, you’re hemorrhaging cash when you said you’d be making money,” Ossoff told DeJoy during the Senate hearing on Thursday. “Delivery in Georgia has been abysmal this year. You have not recovered as you said you would. You need to do better for my constituents in Georgia.”
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During his opening remarks, DeJoy said that significant progress had been made to rein in costs and make the USPS more efficient.
“When I agreed to take the role as postmaster general, the nation was at the beginning of a pandemic and the Postal Service was an organization in crisis, facing a diverse array of challenges that put the organization on a near-term trajectory to financial and service collapse,” DeJoy said.
DeJoy said on-time delivery in metro Atlanta and North Georgia has made significant progress, up from 36%.
“Let me assure you the mail being delivered on time 75% of the time in Georgia is not where we need to be when you said we would be where we needed to be in 60 days,” Ossoff told the Postmaster General.
At one point, DeJoy went after Ossoff, telling the Senator that the issues have become a personal agenda against him.
“I know how you feel about me. You’ve been quite public, OK,” DeJoy said. “So, I’m not going to debate that you think I’m a failure.”
“It’s not about how I feel about you, postmaster general,” Ossoff said. “It’s about whether or not seniors in Georgia are receiving prescriptions. It’s the stacks of boxes of mail from courts that never arrived to their destination. It’s the small businesses who are not able to get products to market and its small businesses (that) can’t operate.”
The Palmetto postal facility is the hub for the USPS in metro Atlanta. Ever since its opening in February, Channel 2 Action News has detailed many of the problems plaguing the facility, including video showing a sorting machine flinging packages onto the floor.
The Palmetto facility was supposed to make operations more efficient, but management became an issue to get the place to run smoothly.
Ossoff said he plans to continue to put pressure on the Post Office to fix the problems, and if it doesn’t, he has threatened to demand the Post Office Board of Governors fire DeJoy.personal