National Fossil Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, the Postal Service in the United States has always in the past been about great service. Their motto said all: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night shall stop these courageous couriers from swift completion of their appointed rounds. That just rings with the ethic of good service.

But today the Postal Service is run by a man named Louis DeJoy. Louis DeJoy is the Postmaster General, and I am sorry to report that there is no joy in DeJoy-ville.

Smalltown America relies on the U.S. Postal Service. In the Postal Service's own words, it ``operates as a basic and fundamental service provided by the Government of the United States to the American people.''

It continues:

Our basic mission is to provide prompt, reliable, efficient mail and packaging service to all Americans, regardless of where they live and at affordable rates.

So one can understand, then, why so many Members of this Chamber on both sides of the aisle are alarmed by the growing chorus of complaints about the deteriorating quality of service by the U.S. Postal Service.

Postmaster General DeJoy labeled his restructuring plan ``Delivering for America.'' A better name for this plan would be ``Delaying Mail in America.'' You only need to look at what is happening in my home State. Postmaster DeJoy's 10-year ``Delivering for America'' reorganization plan for the U.S. Postal Service calls for consolidating mail processing, which means downgrading regional mail processing facilities, which means sending all the mail to Portland, OR, to be sorted before it is returned to the community it originated in.

Now, my State is 300 miles north to south, 400 miles east to west. That is a very large place, so it takes a lot of time if all the processing occurs in Portland.

Medford in Southern Oregon was the postal sorting facility. It sorted, postmarked, and distributed millions of pieces of mail every year for Southern Oregon. But now, under ``Delivering for America''-- otherwise known as ``Delaying Mail in America''--now all that mail has to be shipped to Portland, OR, 270 miles to the north, and sorted and then trucked 275 miles back to the south even if you are sending a letter just across town. The Postal Service claims that this doesn't delay mail, but they refuse to explain how adding on 500 to 600 extra miles of driving doesn't delay the mail.

Meanwhile, for this deteriorating service, they are raising prices. July 14--a single stamp now costs 73 cents. So, folks, just start to think about, if I want to send a letter, it is going to cost me a dollar, the envelope and the stamp.

The Postal Service says: Our new system is more efficient and more cost-effective.

It is not more cost-effective if people quit using the service because it is so terrible.

You know, these price hikes and these delivery delays--they hit our rural communities the hardest. Smalltown Americans rely on the Postal Service to deliver lifesaving medications, to pay their bills, to run their small businesses. When they get an order, they need to be able to mail out the product. Newspapers in rural and coastal communities rely on the Postal Service for timely delivery. Even large corporations like Amazon and FedEx and UPS rely on the Postal Service to deliver a huge portion of their packages.

Reliable, timely mail service keeps our friends, families, businesses--and in vote-by-mail States like Oregon--keeps them connected.

That is why I have been raising the alarm about this ``Delaying Mail for America'' plan of DeJoy's over this last year. I called him up to discuss it. He didn't call me back, so I called him again, and he didn't call me back. So I organized a bipartisan group of Senators to send him a letter. Hopefully it didn't get delayed because he took away so many processing centers. Well, we know he did get the letter because we sent a bunch of them, and we did get some replies. But these letters are from bipartisan Senators who have been seeing the challenges that his plan is creating in their communities.

The letter said: Stop doing this. Stop taking away our processing centers. That is making mail so much slower.

Do you know what? We won a round. He said he will stop taking away these centers at least for the balance of this year--meaning until after the election. Well, that is politics. That is not good business; that is just politics.

But in States that have already suffered the downgrade of their facilities--places like Oregon, Georgia, Virginia, States all over this country--we need those distribution centers reopened. We need the sorting machinery reinstalled. We need reliable, affordable mail service restored.

The Postal Service has repeatedly said to my team that they aren't hearing about any significant issues for the Delivering for America plan. Well, maybe that is because they are not asking, or maybe that is because the letters of complaint came to us rather than them.

So I have collected some concerns from my Oregon constituents. I asked them--particularly in the Medford and Eugene area, where the two service centers were recently downgraded--if they had been affected.

I didn't receive one or two letters. You know, if you asked DeJoy, apparently, he would only expect me to receive letters that say how great the Postal Service was doing. I didn't receive any letters like that. I received hundreds of pages of responses, and they are describing--these Oregonians--the same problems that the Postmaster General's inspector general found in his recent report on Virginia.

And, right now, the inspector general is preparing a report on Oregon, and I fully expect it will have similar issues documented. But, for now, let me document the issues by citing those letters that my constituents sent to me.

A woman in Medford said:

I am a 71-year-old disabled senior citizen. I order medicine, food, and household items through the mail. It is consistently late.

A constituent in Klamath Falls reported:

It's taking 2 to 3 weeks to send mail from Klamath Falls to Klamath Falls. Ridiculous!

Her comment, of course, is a reflection of the mail having to be trucked almost 300 miles to be sorted and then trucked back.

I have heard from many small-town Oregonians who are concerned about the delivery of their lifesaving medications. An Oregonian from White City shared:

My elderly mother relies on mail delivery of her medications. Twice in the last few weeks she's had to go days without necessary inhalers because of postal delays. Miserable, breathless, dangerous days.

Patricia Coats, in Waldport, on the coast said:

We get our medications through the mail. . . . In some instances it's been delayed to the point that my husband has gone without for up to 5 to 7 days.

Antoinette Corrente Evans, in Grants Pass, said:

My insurance company will not let me order early to compensate for the delays.

So, if I run out before delivery, I need to pay the full price for my expensive medicines.

And these delays can seriously affect medical care as well as the delivery of pharmaceuticals.

Blanche McKenna, in Ashland, a mother, said:

As guardian for my son with severe disabilities, I need to go through mail service to give written consent for his services. . . . It took weeks for a simple consent to get to his provider, delaying much needed services.

Those are services for her disabled son.

These late deliveries risk lives; they risk livelihoods. Businesses of all sizes depend on the Postal Service.

Honora Ni Aodagain, in Grants Pass, said:

I depend a lot on the mail as part of my business. . . . Packages are not showing up when they are supposed to. Payments for bills are not getting to the vendor on time. It's a source of major frustration.

And that word, ``frustration,'' showed up time and time and time again.

Carolyn Rust, in Eugene, described how hard it is to keep the books balanced:

Our company has seen our accounts payable deliveries delayed by 5 to 10 days. This has resulted in late fees.

We finally resorted [to] paying all of our vendors a week early so . . . our payment would be received within a day of being due.

We also have seen checks from our customers take 3 to 4 weeks to be delivered.

Now, businesses aren't the only ones getting smacked with late fees for bills they have paid on time; ordinary folks are as well.

Nadya Geras-Carson, in Eugene, told me:

My bills arrive basically a day before they are due. . . . Which means, even if I mail the payment back on the next day, it is already late, and I am charged a late payment fee.

Diana Dillard, in Brookings, said:

On March 27, we mailed our Verizon and Geico payments as usual.

On April 10, we received notification that our payments had not been received and . . . we were facing [a] cut-off of services.

We made arrangements to pay over the phone and were shocked and angered when Verizon charged us $10 to speak to a customer service agent. . . . Extremely frustrating.

A woman in Baker City said:

I pay my estimated taxes quarterly. . . . More than one time, checks I have mailed never reached their addresses. . . . Local services recommend using a credit card to avoid late payment because of poor USPS service--even just across town.

Another constituent, Denise Brooks, wrote to say:

I work with a non-profit organization in Medford that provides assistance to the working poor and [to the] homeless. The one-week delivery time can have catastrophic outcomes to families [who are] already struggling.

The delays cause late fees of $75 added onto . . . families' rent obligations and the potential for eviction from their rental.

Late deliveries are a massive problem for one of the Postal Service's most important customers: newspapers. Timeliness is essential for newspapers. In this fast-changing world, nobody wants to read news that happened 3 or 4 days earlier. That seems like it is almost a month old. It just feels that way. But most small, local, and regional newspapers can't afford to hire a delivery service. So they rely on the Postal Service to deliver the papers.

But since July of 2022, the Postal Service has jacked up the delivery prices for newspapers by about 42 percent. It makes it a lot more expensive for small newspapers that are often already struggling from the loss of advertisements for local goods in this electronic age, the loss of classified ads. It makes it much more expensive to deliver their newspapers.

We need these smalltown newspapers to thrive. But if the newspapers are delivered late and if the cost of delivery is going up, that is just one more challenge affecting them and making it harder for them to thrive.

And when people get their papers late, it isn't just that they are frustrated; it is that they start canceling their subscriptions--again, hitting our small newspapers hard.

Publisher Joe Warren, with Country Media, which has community papers up and down the Oregon coast, told my team:

Delivery is sporadic. Some weeks local mail--which is guaranteed the same day if we get papers to them by a certain time [of day]--is not happening. . . . Some weeks it's the next day or two.

Other publishers have told me that they have taken it upon themselves to hand-deliver papers to some subscribers because the Postal Service simply did not deliver, while still charging them an arm and a leg.

Perhaps Matt Hall, who has multiple newspapers in Southern Oregon, said it best when he said to my office:

The USPS treats newspapers like a mine.

They know we are a reliable source of revenue, but they keep extracting, and soon there will be nothing left.

Postmaster DeJoy claims that their service changes are necessary to run the Postal Service like a profitable business. But here is the thing: Profitable businesses thrive by delivering good service. If they don't deliver good service, they don't stay profitable, and, very soon, they are out of business.

That is the challenge. This is not a sustainable situation. The challenges reported by my constituents back home in Oregon: late deliveries of lifesaving medications; small businesses and individuals struggling to pay their vendors, struggling to get their checks delivered on time to avoid late fees; newspapers losing subscribers; mail taking weeks to go to a house just down the street because it has to go hundreds and hundreds of miles to be sorted, instead of going to a more local regional sorting facility.

Now, we need to reverse DeJoy's downgrades. Now, we need to restore reliable, affordable mail delivery. Now is the time to take the Delivery for America plan and return it to the sender.

Let's restore the vision that is so powerful in the USPS--U.S. Postal Service--motto: that rain nor heat nor gloom of night shall stop courageous couriers from swift completion of their appointed rounds.

Let's not accept a world where there is no ``joy'' in ``DeJoyville'' and our constituents are so poorly served.

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