Slide from Jpresentation (click to enlarge)Ī presentation at a meeting at postal headquarters on June 26, 2020, shows that the workhour reduction plan called for removing 30,000 “low volume and multiple pickup boxes” - 7,405 per fiscal quarter. (Three of the presentations can be found at the end of this post.) Details about this “Do It Now” plan, including slide presentations given at the meetings, were made public as evidence submitted in lawsuits against the Postal Service, including Pennsylvania v DeJoy and New York v Trump. On August 21, he told the Senate that removing collection boxes was “routine” and a “normal process that has been around for 50 years.” Due to all the “excitement,” however, he promised to postpone further removals.ĭuring these hearings, the Postmaster General did not reveal that just a few weeks earlier, in late June and early July, he and his leadership team had held meetings about a plan to save billions of dollars by cutting 64 million workhours through a variety of initiatives, such as eliminating overtime and reducing hours at post offices. On August 18, 2020, under pressure from Congress and several lawsuits, the Postal Service announced that it would not remove any more boxes until after the election.Ī few days later, Postmaster General DeJoy testified at hearings in the House and Senate. (There’s more background on box removals here.) Boxes failing the test may be relocated to a potentially higher volume location or taken out of service. To justify its location, a collection box must average 25 pieces a day. As the Postal Operations Manual explains, collection boxes are regularly examined for volume, usually once a year over a two-week period.

The Postal Service said the removals were just business as usual - the routine culling of underperforming boxes. People feared the removals were part of a plan to sabotage the election. Images of trucks carting away blue boxes went viral. It appeared that the Postal Service was removing a lot of collection boxes just when they would be needed most - to handle all the ballots being sent by mail due to the pandemic. In the run-up to the election in November 2020, the iconic USPS blue boxes suddenly became controversial.

Usps blue box