Judge reverses DeJoy's orders
- By FederalSoup Staff
- Oct 29, 2020
USPS employees, unions, consumers and lawmakers pushed back hard late last summer on Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—amid complaints that his orders, purportedly aimed at improved efficiencies, were slowing delivery, potentially leading to uncounted mail-in votes this November.
This week, yet another government official—this time a federal judge, and quite definitively—is legally shutting down DeJoy and those orders.
Judge Emmet Sullivan on the District Court for the District of Columbia has issued an order reversing all of the recent strictures on Postal Service mail collection and delivery activity—along with detailed instructions to staff on how to ensure the reversal is accomplished.
“Defendants,” the judge wrote in a document obtained by Politico, “shall issue a one-page notice to Area Vice Presidents, Managers of Operations Support, and any other [USPS] personnel who were previously informed about the guidelines issued on July 14, 2020”—i.e., the guidelines that led to curtailing late and extra delivery trips.
If that wasn’t clear enough, somehow, to USPS management, Judge Sullivan went a couple steps further in his order.
“USPS personnel are instructed to perform late and extra trips to the maximum extent necessary to increase on-time mail deliveries, particularly for Election Mail,” he directed. “To be clear, late and extra trips should be performed to the same or greater degree than they were performed prior to July 2020 when doing so would increase on-time mail deliveries. Any prior communication that is inconsistent with this instruction should be disregarded.”
To ensure that his orders are carried out consistently throughout the current crucial election period, Judge Sullivan further commanded that USPS provide him daily updates with stats on the numbers of relevant trips are being taken each day—and that USPS engage in daily videoconferencing with the plaintiffs in the legal case that brought the matter to his attention.
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