Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s political career has been anything but normal. Around this time eight years ago, for example, he was a part of a scandal-plagued Republican National Committee finance team. Three years later, Donald Trump elevated the GOP donor to his leadership position atop the U.S. Postal Service.
DeJoy became controversial for a great many reasons, and many Democrats made little effort to hide their desire to see him go. What was less well known, however, was the president who chose him for the job wasn’t a fan, either: Trump reportedly resented the postmaster general for not doing more to curtail postal balloting during the 2020 election cycle.
Shortly before the president’s second inaugural, The Washington Post reported that Trump’s team was “vetting candidates” to succeed DeJoy, despite DeJoy not having announced any plans to step down and the fact that only the USPS board can oust a postmaster general.
Nevertheless, he apparently got the message. The Associated Press reported:
Louis DeJoy, the head of the U.S. Postal Service, intends to step down, the federal agency said Tuesday, after a nearly five-year tenure marked by the coronavirus pandemic, surges in mail-in election ballots and efforts to stem losses through cost and service cuts. In a Monday letter, Postmaster General DeJoy asked the Postal Service Board of Governors to begin looking for his successor.
The White House has not yet indicated whether Trump has settled on a successor, but it’s a process worth watching — not just because the president is likely looking for a loyalist, but also because the Republican reportedly has broader ambitions for the USPS.
As Paul Waldman wrote in an MSNBC piece published in December:
Donald Trump has never liked the U.S. Postal Service. … His first term featured frequent griping, efforts to undermine its work and threats to its funding. Now, as he prepares to begin his second term, Trump is thinking about privatizing the post office altogether. If that happened, it would be a disaster for the country. And it would hit rural voters — who overwhelmingly supported Trump in all three of his elections — harder than anyone.
For his part, the president hasn’t made much of an effort to deny those plans. Asked specifically during his transition period whether he supports a privatization scheme, Trump said it’s “not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” adding, “It’s an idea that a lot of people have talked about for a long time; we’re looking at it.”
The evidence is overwhelming that such a move would hurt many of Trump’s own supporters the most, but that doesn’t mean the Republican — and his upcoming choice for postmaster general — won’t do it anyway.
Page 2
A few weeks after Election Day 2024, Donald Trump announced his choice to lead the FBI. Implicit in the announcement, of course, was the fact that the services of the sitting, Trump-appointed FBI director, Chris Wray, would no longer be needed.
Wray took the unsubtle hint and said he would voluntarily step down, and his resignation would take effect on Inauguration Day. It meant, among other things, that Trump and his team would need to settle on an acting FBI director as Kash Patel worked his way through the Senate confirmation process.
That position ultimately went to Brian Driscoll, who got the job by accident. As The New York Times reported, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, “the White House identified the wrong agent as acting director on its website and never corrected the mistake.”
It was an early indication of an important problem: The Republican president and his operation don’t exactly excel in personnel matters.
A few weeks later, the Trump administration fired a group of employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), whose job it is to oversee the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile. Soon after, the administration came to realize what these fired workers do and why they are important, and they decided it’d be a good idea to rehire the people they had fired.
There was, however, a problem: Evidently, after the Trump administration carelessly fired these employees, they were no longer able to access their DOE email accounts, and the NNSA didn’t have their personal email accounts on file, making it difficult to ask them to come back to work.
The list is still growing. NBC News reported:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday that, over the weekend, it accidentally fired ‘several’ agency employees who are working on the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak. The agency said it is now trying to quickly reverse the firings.
Oops.
The same report added, “The layoffs concerned a number of Republican lawmakers, who privately warned the Trump administration that such cuts could hamper the government’s bird flu response and asked them to reconsider, according to two Republican sources with direct knowledge of the situation.”
Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska was willing to say on the record, “They need to be more cautious.”
Even if someone were inclined to approve of the White House and the DOGE operation trying to slash the federal workforce, is anyone prepared to defend Team Trump’s increasingly shambolic approach to personnel policy?
