Rural Americans Are Losing Their Mail. You Could Be Next.

Louis DeJoy’s ten-year plan is closing rural post offices and slowing down the mail.

By Brooke Darrah Shuman, More Perfect Union

Four years in, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has had one of the most controversial and high-profile tenures in the office’s history. 

DeJoy was put in place by a Trump appointee-led Board of Governors in 2020 while under scrutiny for securing lucrative contracts for his former transportation company XPO Logistics, as well as for his investments in 14 companies with financial ties to USPS. During the COVID pandemic in 2020, DeJoy’s cost-cutting slashed the number of mail sorting machines and restricted postal workers’ ability to make extra trips, which a federal judge later found hurt both the Postal Service and states and localities by “impeding their ability to provide safe alternatives to in-person voting.” 

But despite calls for his resignation, DeJoy has remained in the position during the Biden administration. “Get used to me,” he told congressional lawmakers during a 2021 hearing. 

And now he’s rolling out his 10-year plan, “Delivering for America,” one of the most significant restructurings of the Postal Service in decades—and residents in several states are already feeling the impact. 

DeJoy has said his new strategy will make the Postal Service more efficient and profitable, and to that end, the plan involves two major changes to how mail moves in the United States. 

First, regional processing centers that handle incoming and outgoing mail will either be downgraded to local centers or consolidated into 60 mega-centers, where mail from different regions will travel and be sorted together. 

This will impact rural areas the most, where towns will also face the second big change: the loss of their evening pick-up service, a shift that DeJoy dubbed “Local Transportation Optimization.” Mail that is usually picked up and processed that night will now be dropped off in the evening and sent out the next day, adding an extra day to delivery.  

Cheyenne, Wyoming is one of the cities that will lose its processing center in June, and a growing movement of postal workers and residents are pressuring state legislators to stop the changes. In October 2023, USPS announced Cheyenne’s local processing center would close and move 104 miles to Denver, Colorado. Wyoming’s other processing center, in Casper, would move 254 miles to Billings, Montana. 

If the plan goes through, Wyoming will be one of a handful of rural states that has no mail processing centers at all. 

Watch our full investigation into the impact of DeJoy’s reforms on rural America:

Wyoming is the most rural state in the country, and it’s home to a relatively high proportion (9 percent) of residents who are veterans, many of whom rely on medication mailed from VA medical centers. 

Residents who spoke with More Perfect Union are concerned about medication, bills, and livestock like baby chicks arriving on time. Many also worry that the new distribution system will delay mail-in ballots in November. (A federal ruling in 2022 ordered DeJoy to seek approval from the Postal Regulatory Commission before barring workers from making late and extra deliveries.)  

One survey conducted by the University of Wyoming found that 34 percent of Wyoming voters submitted ballots by mail in 2022—down from the election that took place in the middle of the pandemic in 2020, but still significant.  

Cheyenne will be downgraded to a local processing center, meaning incoming mail will be sorted and then sent to the regional center in Denver. Postal workers told More Perfect Union they worry about the extra miles on the road for delivery trucks. 

“Wyoming is known for its wind,” said Bob Jacknitsky, a mail handler in Cheyenne. “I-25 South from Denver to Cheyenne will shut down several times a year and that wind is year-round.” 

Letter carriers in neighboring towns will move to the Cheyenne branch, which has caused some workers to worry these more remote post offices will lose clerks, reduce hours, or even be forced to close. Steve Hutkins, a former NYU English professor who has been analyzing the progression of the 10-year plan on his website Save the Post Office, says up to 6,000 post offices nationwide could lose their letter carriers, and that carriers will see their routes increase by an average of 13 miles on impacted routes.

DeJoy claims no career jobs will be lost, but at least 15 mail handlers at the Cheyenne center will have to be relocated. DeJoy’s previous public comments haven’t given workers much encouragement—he told the American Enterprise Institute’s Kevin Kosar, a longtime booster of conservative reform to USPS, that he hopes to shed 50,000 employees nationally through attrition.

 “Even if 16 people in each town have to go somewhere else, you're talking about $2.4 million of economic impact in that city, that's gone,” says Paul Davis, a city carrier. “And these are good jobs. They’ve provided for my family and I’m grateful for that.” 

A few other regions have already consolidated their processing centers and ended evening service. DeJoy is proud of these new centers and is pouring $4 billion into upgrades and renovations, but so far the new centers have caused chaos and delays. In the region surrounding the Richmond, Virginia center, nearly 1 of 5 deliveries are arriving late, and mail is sitting in boxes or on the floor. 

In Atlanta, outside of the new Palmetto, GA center, mail is arriving as slowly as 43 percent on time.

Before these changes took place, the delivery time for mail was slower than it had been in years.

USPS is now delivering just 83 percent of First Class mail on time, down from 92 percent before DeJoy took office. But even that number is deceptive. In 2021, DeJoy also changed the rate of delivering First-Class mail from 1-3 days to 1-5 days, meaning more deliveries are late even based on the new standard. 

DeJoy claims the 10-year plan will save money in labor and transportation, and that these initial investments in processing centers will yield profits in the long term. Hutkins says this might be possible, but it’s hard to verify because much of DeJoy’s plan has yet to be made public or reviewed by the Postal Regulatory Commission. And so far, DeJoy’s changes have had the opposite effect, making service slower while increasing costs. 

“The system is less resilient if you're putting all your eggs in 60 baskets,” Hutkins says, “So if anything goes wrong at one or two of these centers, it gets contagious. When things go wrong in Atlanta, it spills over into Tennessee or South Carolina.”

Chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission Michael Kubayanda said the same in his testimony to Congress in April, after decrying DeJoy’s lack of cooperation with the agency. “One might assume that relaxed standards, operational changes, and slower service have allowed USPS to cut spending, be more efficient, and be ‘self-sustaining’ as [Delivering For America] calls for,” Kubayanda said. “Up to this point, they have not.”

Hutkins says some of these problems don’t begin with DeJoy. Mail volume in America peaked in 2006, before the rise in e-commerce and e-mail made physical mail less relevant. The Postal Service is a break-even proposition and doesn’t receive any tax dollars, but for the most part, it has maintained solvency even as sales declined. 

But in 2006, during the George W. Bush administration, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act was passed, which made the USPS pre-pay for health and retirement benefits for all employees. The Act was a disaster and saddled the Postal Service with billions of dollars in debt. 

To meet the costs, USPS negotiated with the unions to increase non-career employees to about 20 percent of the workforce. Non-career employees didn’t have the same guaranteed hours or benefits as career staff, and retention plummeted. In 2012, in another act of financial desperation, USPS reduced hours at 12,000 rural post offices and bought out 24,000 employees to take an early retirement.

In 2022, this Act was repealed under the Biden administration, and the multi-billion dollar burden was lifted–freeing the Postal Service to make more investments in the fleet and return to solvency. DeJoy made it one of his goals to convert non-career employees to career status and is currently electrifying the fleet. This update is badly needed; if one-third of postal trucks are converted, it will save 6.4 million metric tons of CO2 and lower fuel costs by 11 percent. 

Besides that, a lot of the trucks you see delivering mail, the Grumman LLV, were first designed in 1987. They’ve been on the road for over 30 years and don’t have air conditioning, airbags, or even anti-lock brakes. Just last year, Eugene Gates, a 66-year-old mail carrier in Texas, collapsed and died on the job during a day when the National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning; the Occupational Health and Safety Administration later issued a fine to the USPS for failing to protect its workers, and the National Association of Letter Carriers accused the agency of falsifying safety and training records. 

There’s an alternate history that could have unfolded in the early years of the Internet, if we hadn’t had a Congress hostile to expanding the Postal Service, or private companies who felt threatened by competition from a government agency. The Postal Service could have been tasked with providing free internet, online billing, photocopying services, and public banking—any of those services would benefit communities and provide extra revenue for USPS. 

But in the timeline we’re on, the Postal Service lost $6.5 billion last year, even as it raised prices on First-Class and marketing mail five times. We’re about to see prices go up for a sixth time in July. USPS also delivered less mail overall. 

In April, a group of 20 Democrats in the Senate asked DeJoy in a letter to halt any part of the plan that would close post offices, slow service, or terminate employees. But so far DeJoy is resolute; the plan will go forward. DeJoy can only be replaced by the Board of Governors, and Biden hasn’t signaled that he will replace or add any members to oust DeJoy. Ed Johnson, an expediter in Cheyenne, said it’s hard to measure the impact the slowdowns will have in Wyoming; customers may lose faith in the institution. 

“The post office, for the longest time, has been the number one trusted federal entity,” he said. “We feel like they’re saying that the rural communities don't matter. And that really hurts our heart.”