New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on Thursday evening ripped into Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, calling him a “political hack,” the day before he is set to testify before a Senate committee on service reductions to the United States Postal Service he ordered ahead of Election Day.
“The postmaster general has shown he’s a political hack who supports President Trump at all costs, and I don’t know how he got the job in the first place. He certainly didn’t have the qualifications that’s necessary,” Gillibrand said in an interview with Inside City Hall Anchor Errol Louis.
Gillibrand, who is not a member of the Republican-led Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee the postmaster general will appear before, hammered DeJoy for the operational changes he recently implemented.
Before DeJoy said he would reverse the policies, hours at post offices were set to change, mail-processing equipment and public-collection boxes were to be removed, processing facilities would close, and overtime would not be approved.
New York’s junior senator deemed the changes he wanted “disastrous,” citing seniors in her home city of Troy fearing that medicine would not be delivered on time due to service reductions. She said local postal workers also slammed the planned changes, noting more people are using the Postal Service during the coronavirus pandemic. In New York City, the postal workers’ union is already raising red flags about delays in mail delivery.
Many states, including New York, are trying to increase mail-in voting so more voters can cast their ballot without risking going outside during the pandemic. But the changes came as President Donald Trump has claimed, without evidence, Democrats want to use mail-in voting to steal the election. Adding to concerns, Trump said last week he would seek to block funding for the Postal Service, acknowledging that his position would make voting by mail during the pandemic more difficult.
Gillibrand told NY1 she supports Democrats’ efforts to bolster the Postal Service to combat the actions viewed as voter suppression. She hopes the next COVID-19 relief package includes $10 million for postal services. And the senator says she supports including banking services, such as acquiring loans and conducting checking transactions, at post offices. Gillibrand estimated such a move would raise $9 billion a year for the Postal Service to make it solvent long term.
Optimism for Biden’s Presidential Platform
The Democratic National Convention has projected a message of unity, and attempted to create a broad coalition that includes moderates and even Republicans for Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential run. Gillibrand praised the platform for rolling in some of the progressive goals she pushed for. Despite progressives’ concerns that the Democratic Party’s platform is not liberal enough, several of the major policy pegs the senator campaigned on, including paid family leave and universal pre-K, are included.
“Joe Biden and I are 100 percent in alignment when it comes to these issues of women and families,” said Gillibrand, who endorsed Biden after they were rivals in the Democratic primary.
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