Rep. Comer to Newsmax: DeJoy's Cost-Saving USPS Changes Should be Codified

The changes made to the U.S. Postal Service's procedures under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy have saved the American taxpayers "billions of dollars" and should be kept, Rep. James Comer, who backs a bipartisan bill to codify the reforms, told Newsmax on Tuesday.

DeJoy, a businessman from the private sector appointed under former President Donald Trump in May 2020 by the Postal Service's board of governors, "immediately took the bull by the horns" and made "pretty dramatic reforms," Comer, R-Ky., told Newsmax's "Wake Up America."

"A lot of the Democrats on Capitol Hill said this would be the demise of the Post Office and they had all sorts of skits and soundbites talking about wanting Louis DeJoy, his head on a platter," said Comer. "Fast forward to today, a year later, these reforms are working."

There are four main postal unions, he added, which "have been overwhelmingly Democrat" but support DeJoy's reforms.

The Postal Service Reform Act under discussion would codify the changes so that a future postmaster general can't come in and drop the cost-saving measures, said Comer.

House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., who sponsored the bill, told Forbes it will restructure the USPS retired employee health plans and add Medicare requirements. Both are projected to save the postal service more than $50 billion over the next decade.

DeJoy has pointed to the Postal Service's poor financial condition to justify his changes.

The new legislation will also mandate that mail be delivered six days a week, so services can't be cut in the future and will establish an online dashboard to give weekly updates on the on-time delivery rate for the entire country in a move to increase transparency and to allow customers to easily see if their delivery is being delayed.

Comer told Newsmax that lawmakers are trying to make the USPS "sustainable to not only improve the performance but make it sustainable to work, so Congress doesn't have to come in and constantly bail out the U.S. Postal Service."

DeJoy, a prominent GOP fundraiser, came under heavy criticism for the changes he made before the 2020 election leading to delivery delays, and the Postal Service experienced delays that year because of the crush of mail and packages in the first year of the pandemic.

However, this past holiday season, the service had added dozens of package-sorting machines, allowing it to process 4.5 million parcels, for an 18% increase, every day.

On-time delivery scores in October 2021, meanwhile, climbed to 91%, and revenue rose by almost $4 billion when compared to 2020. Further, the USPS lost $4.9 billion in 2021 but had been projected to lose $9.7 billion.

Comer, who is the leading Republican on the House Oversight Committee, also on Tuesday discussed calls to bring scientists who had warned Dr. Anthony Fauci that COVID had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology to come in and testify about what they'd told him.

"We need to be transparent about what went on in the early days of COVID-19," said Comer. "These scientists, through emails that we've obtained, communicated with Dr. Fauci early on and said that this is obviously a lab leak. The genetic sequence appears to be manmade."

But three days later, Fauci had a conference call with the scientists, said Comer, and two days after that, they all signed a paper from him saying that anyone who suggested a lab leak was behind the pandemic was a conspiracy theorist, said Comer.

"We want to know what happened," he said. "Remember, these scientists rely on grant funding from Dr. Fauci and Dr. [Francis] Collins and several of them received grants after they signed onto this paper, so we just want to be transparent. These are U.S. tax dollars involved. So our committee is very interested in that, or at least the Republicans on the committee."

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