House Democrats set to subpoena USPS chief Louis DeJoy for documents related to mail delays

U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testifies before a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on slowdowns at the Postal Service ahead of the November elections on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., August 24, 2020.

Tom Williams | Reuters

House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said Monday that she plans to issue a subpoena to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for documents related to mail delays at the U.S. Postal Service.

The Democrat-majority Oversight panel said in a statement that DeJoy is "withholding from Congress" materials that had been requested during his testimony before the House and Senate earlier this month.

"DeJoy has not produced a single additional document since the House and Senate hearings were held," the statement said.

Maloney also sent a document request to Robert Duncan, the chairman of the Postal Service Board of Governors, which has also been accused of withholding documents.

DeJoy, a supply-chain CEO and major Republican donor who began as chief of USPS in June, has come under fire for pursuing a slew of significant cost-cutting measures at the government agency in the months before the presidential election between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Those measures, which included crackdowns on overtime pay and late trips from mail deliverers, have been blamed for reports of widespread mail delays across the country. Critics have also raised concerns amid reports of mail-sorting machines across the country being removed from facilities.

The delays come as lingering fears about the coronavirus pandemic are expected to lead to a record-shattering number of Americans casting their ballots by mail. Some state leaders are pushing to expand voting access in order to accommodate the expected flood of mail-in votes — a scenario that Trump, without evidence, has aggressively decried as a recipe for massive amounts of voter fraud.

DeJoy defended his changes to the agency in testimony before the Oversight Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Days before the first hearing, DeJoy said he would suspend some changes until after the Nov. 3 election in order to "avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail."

But he told the Senate panel on Aug. 21 that he had "no intention" of bringing back the mail-sorting machines that had been removed from service.

DeJoy also reiterated that many of the changes under the most intense scrutiny at USPS predated his tenure. He said that he has implemented just two major changes since taking over: working within the agency to find ways to improve operations and cutting back on late deliveries.

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