Maryland congressional Democrats are urging the leadership of the U.S. Postal Service to step in amid a flood of constituent concerns about mail delays, they said Thursday morning.
The state delegation, led by Sen. Chris Van Hollen, has sent a letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, urging him to walk away from cost-cutting measures that have brought mail delivery problems into the headlines several times over the past year.
"Recently, our offices have received a significant increase in complaints from constituents who have gone weeks without receiving mail, similar to the surge of complaints we received last summer in the wake of USPS cuts and policy changes," the letter reads.
The senator's office has received more than 200 messages from constituents about USPS issues so far this year, a spokeswoman said.
A representative for the U.S. Postal Service could not immediately be reached for comment.
Prescription medications, gifts and bills are still stuck in a clogged postal system, Van Hollen said, more than a month after a USPS cited a historic deluge of holiday mail as the reason for widespread delays.
"Based on the reports and information we have received, these delays appear to be the result of delayed processing times and staff shortages," Van Hollen wrote.
One Maryland entrepreneur reached out to Van Hollen's office to say that the mail delays, coupled with the pandemic, could spell the end of their business.
"We currently have 49 orders that are in limbo with the United States Postal System" the constituent said, according to Van Hollen's letter. "I check the tracking numbers multiple times a day but they are not even updating and some have been sitting since December 1."
Another constituent reached out to say their medications took three weeks to arrive. Another said they'd incurred late fees for bills that were paid on time but got stuck in the mail, damaging their credit score, the letter reads.
From postal clerk Courtney Jenkins' perspective, things have improved since the holidays, when mail was piled high at the Postal Service facility in Linthicum, but the difficulties of working during the pandemic remain.
"It definitely looks like a lot less mail than Christmastime, that's for sure," Jenkins said. "Of course there are staffing issues due to COVID. ... But on the ground level, we just have been moving the mail."
There have been additional COVID-19 cases in his workplace since the holiday season, Jenkins said. And all the while, postal workers feel the pressure of public outcry, Jenkins said.
"This isn't normal for the Postal Service, you know? And I think that's part of why the frustration is so strong," said Jenkins, the director of organization and legislation for Local 181 of the American Postal Workers Union.
As part of their letter, the congressmen opposed any further cuts to USPS, and called for DeJoy to "return to the 2012 service standards, which would reinstate overnight delivery or shorten delivery time by a day."
The letter also calls on USPS to use a $10 billion grant from Congress to improve service and minimize delays.
"Please detail how the USPS plans to use this funding by February 28th," the letter reads.
DeJoy, a Trump loyalist, initially attracted controversy over the summer, when he sped removal of equipment such as mail sorting machines and collection boxes, slashed overtime, and cut down on early-morning and late-night deliveries.
Officials feared that the cutbacks, which DeJoy lauded as helping efficiency, could negatively affect the election, since many Americans were voting by mail due to the pandemic.
The courts stopped many of the changes, but a rush of holiday mail still caused a mail slowdown across the U.S.
An October report from the USPS Office of the Inspector General concluded that the implementation of DeJoy's initiatives, combined with the pandemic, "negatively impacted the quality and timeliness of mail delivery nationally."
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