Post Office Board Diversity Faces Same Scrutiny as Corporate America

U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s 10-week tenure as head of the 500,000-employee federal agency has been fraught almost from the start.

He was installed by an all-male, mostly white board of governors dominated by President Donald Trump’s appointees. He presided over a series of controversial moves — moving to cut overtime hours while removing blue mailboxes and trimming mail-sorting capacity as part of a reorganization plan. Democrats accused him of taking steps that could hinder mail-in voting ahead of an election in which the public is nervous about voting at polling places because of the coronavirus. Even as DeJoy  agreed under pressure to postpone the restructuring, saying he wanted to avoid any appearance of an impact on the election, criticism has mounted.

DeJoy at a Senate hearing Friday defended his management of the agency. He said there’s been no attempt by Trump or his administration to interfere with Postal Service operations in order to thwart voting by mail.

“As we head into the election season, I want to assure this committee and the American public that the Postal Service is fully capable and committed to delivering the nation’s election mail securely and on-time,” DeJoy told senators.  “This sacred duty is my number one priority between now and election day.”

The service on Friday announced a bipartisan committee led by Democratic board member Donald Moak to oversee mail-in voting. The panel will “reinforce the strong commitment of the Postal Service to the mail as an important part of the nation’s democratic process,” the agency said in a news release. DeJoy is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee today.

The swirl of events has cast a harsh spotlight on the usually obscure USPS board of governors, subjecting it to the sort of scrutiny that corporate America has long faced — defending controversial decisions against a barometer that measures the diversity, transparency and biases of the decision makers. The Republican-controlled board leads an organization that is 40% minority, 40% female and is one of the nation’s largest employers.  

“The postal service is literally like America” in the makeup of its work force, said U.S. Representative Brenda Lawrence, a former letter carrier.  “We have been challenged in diversity in our upper ranks.” She said Trump filled senior positions with Republican loyalists, rather than with “people who could actually do the job.”

The U.S. Postal Service, enshrined by the U.S. Constitution as vital to a strong nation, and later given a monopoly and a mandate to serve all citizens, has been subject to attacks from Trump because of what he says are over-generous shipping rates for Amazon.com Inc., headed by Jeff Bezos. Bezos owns the Washington Post newspaper, and its editorial stand has been highly critical of the president.

More recently, Trump has claimed — without proof — that the post office won’t be able to process millions of mail-in ballots amid the pandemic, tainting the outcome of the presidential election. As the controversy has grown, social media has focused on the homogeneity of the postal board, plastering their faces and contact information across the internet.

The 1970 Postal Act took the U.S. postmaster general out of the president’s cabinet and placed the role under the jurisdiction of the Postal Service’s board, whose members serve on staggered terms in an attempt to limit the influence of any one president. The nine-member USPS board is appointed by the president, but the nominees are traditionally selected by Senate leaders, with no more than five affiliated with one party. The board selects the postmaster general and, in conjunction with the postal chief, appoints the deputy postmaster, which brings the full board to 11 members.

When Trump took office, he inherited a unique opportunity to reshape the service: The board had no presidential appointees for the first time since its formation in 1971. That was in part because U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders had been blocking some of the proposed new members in protest over the appointees’ positions on privatization of the post office. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would only bring forward a full slate at that time, with unanimous approval, so the seats stayed vacant, said Sander’s staff director Warren Gunnels. Once Trump was elected, McConnell brought his nominees to a vote and the quorum was possible, Gunnels said. The difference was that Senate rules changed and made it much easier for candidates to be approved by the Senate, even with objections, said a senior leadership aide who asked not to be named in order to speak about sensitive negotiations.

The last time the board had six members, in 2012, there was one woman and one Black governor — Thurgood Marshall Jr., the son of the former U.S. Supreme Court justice.

“Over the last 10 years, to the extent that there’s been a board at all, most of the time it has not had a quorum and has been highly dysfunctional,” said Paul Steidler, a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute who writes about Postal Service operations. 

The board now has six Senate-approved members in addition to DeJoy: five White men and one man who was born in Cuba. DeJoy, a wealthy businessman and major Trump campaign donor, has not selected a deputy.

Robert Duncan, one of four Republicans appointed by Trump now heads the board. The other Republicans are John Barger, an investment banker; Roman Martinez IV, a former Lehman Brothers managing director; and William Zollars, the former head of logistics company YRC Worldwide Inc. The two Democrats, appointed with input from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, are Ron Bloom, an investment banker who specialized in representing unions; and Moak, a former member of the AFL-CIO executive council. Schumer’s staff did not respond to a request for comment on the appointments.
 

The absence of women stands in stark contrast with the boards of major U.S. corporations. Women last year made up about 26% of the directors at S&P 500 Index companies, while people of color held about 19% of the board seats, according to executive recruiter Spencer Stuart Inc. The USPS referred reporters to the biographies of the board of governors and the statement on the hiring of the postmaster general when asked about the board diversity. The board members did not respond to requests for comment. 

The board’s lack of diversity is “a concern,” said Henry Gibson, national president of the African-American Postal League United for Success, a group that says it mentors Black and other postal managers. “We do believe there are a lot of qualified minorities that would be able to do an outstanding job on the board.”

The barrage of criticism about the Postal Service has not been lost on America, said Victoria Sakal, managing director of brand intelligence at Morning Consult, which measures affinity for 4,000 brands, including the USPS. The USPS ranked first in 2020, up from sixth place in 2019. But in the past several weeks, as DeJoy implemented his proposed changes and Trump upped his attacks, favorable sentiment has shown signs of eroding, particularly among people who identify as Democrats.

“It can lead to this unraveling of strength of sentiment of the brand if you start to be seen as aligning with one party or another,” Sakal said. Trust in the Postal Service has fallen among all Americans, but has declined more among Blacks and Hispanics.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi voiced concerns about disparate election impacts in a statement last week. “All of these changes directly jeopardize the election,” she said, “and disproportionately threaten to disenfranchise voters in communities of color.”

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