Official Congressional Record
Mr. President, I rise today to express my concerns with the U.S. Postal Service operations in South Dakota, my home State. Over the past year or so, my team has heard from thousands of South Dakotans expressing their frustrations and, frankly, anger about poor mail delivery in our State. We have heard from veterans who are not getting their medication on time; we have heard from individuals who are having to pay late fees because their bills arrive the day they are due; and we have heard from people who simply aren't getting their mail delivered, even though they can see on the Postal Service app that they should be receiving it that day. My team wanted to test it for ourselves. We wanted to see how long it would take to send a piece of first-class mail from our office in Rapid City, SD, to Pierre, SD, the capital of our State, which is about 172 miles driving distance away. That would be from Rapid City to Pierre. Instead of taking a direct route, this letter went from Rapid City west to Denver, and then to Des Moines, IA, across Nebraska and then from Des Moines, IA, to Fargo, ND, and then back to Pierre. Let me do the math for you. This letter traveled over 1,800 miles across four different States just to end up back at South Dakota. As soon as we caught wind of just how bad the mail service had gotten in South Dakota, I tried to have an open discussion with the Postal Service leaders. When it became clear to me that they weren't interested in fixing it, I requested an investigation from the Office of the Inspector General of the Postal Service which happens to answer to Congress, not to the Postal Service. The OIG accepted our request and began to investigate the issues with mail service in South Dakota. As a part of their investigations, they were on the ground in South Dakota earlier this year. For evidence of just how deep the problem in the Postal Service runs, the OIG reiterated to my team and to me that they had to do this investigation clandestinely. If Postal Service leaders caught wind of where OIG representatives were going to be on which days, they could try to manipulate the results. Turns out, they were correct. As soon as it was announced that the OIG team would be heading to South Dakota, my team heard from local post office employees that they were being asked to hide piles of mail. As I mentioned, we have also heard countless stories about lifesaving prescriptions not arriving for our veterans who get many of their refills through the mail. In fact, that is the desired route for many of our veterans to get their prescriptions. According to the Black Hills VA, the USPS has lost so many important medications, that the VA has had to repeatedly notify the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Postal Service inspector general. In some parts of the country, the VA tells veterans they should order prescription refills at least 20 days before their supply runs out to account for these delays. By comparison, it only took half that time to put a man on the Moon. I have even heard from the Secretary of the VA Doug Collins who, because of the nationwide postal delays, he directed his staff to look into policies on how the VA can better work with independent community pharmacies to give veterans the prescriptions they need to live a healthy life. It should not come down to this. Five years ago, the Postal Service told Congress that it needed billions of dollars in financial relief to become sustainable. Based on that promise, Congress passed the Postal Service Reform Act. They promised that the so-called Delivering for America plan would cut costs, improve service, and return the Postal Service to profitability. Instead, today Americans face unprecedented costs when they want to mail a letter with delivery times worse than the Pony Express, all while the Postal Service continues to burn through billions of dollars as if money grows on trees. The U.S. Postal Service decided that in order to be cost effective, they should deprioritize rural America. For many years, mail was picked up from post offices and routed to processing facilities at least twice a day, regardless of where you lived or how rural you may be. But under the Postal Service's Regional Transportation Optimization initiative, mail from post offices located more than 50 miles from a processing facility are only sent to processing facilities once in a single morning dispatch, and in many cases, this adds up to a full-day delay before a letter starts its journey to the processing facility. Now, that is bad enough, but it also means that despite a letter being in the post office's legal possession, it is not postmarked until at least the next day. For many, this can be the difference between a tax return being on time or an absentee ballot being counted, simply because of where you live. And despite these cost-saving measures, now the U.S. Postal Service is asking for billions more, all while senior executives receive large bonuses and lavish benefits like wellness reimbursement incentives, financial planning, retirement counseling services, TSA PreCheck-- reimbursement for it--and membership in up to two airline lounge clubs per year. The post office also created a deferred compensation program. Yes, a deferred compensation program to pay its highest paid officers above compensation limits that have been imposed by Congress. That needs to end. And that is the reason that I am introducing the USPS Executive Benefit and Bonus Removal Act. Incompetent bureaucrats should not get bonuses when the mail does not run on time. If the Postal Service were serious about cutting costs, they should have cut costs inside its own ivory tower before passing costs on to the American people who are still receiving terrible service. In addition, I have announced that I am placing holds on every nominee for the Postal Service board of directors until their leaders take steps to fix mail service in South Dakota. I suspect other Senators from rural States may do the same. To lift these holds, I want the Postal Service to commit to making these three fixes in South Dakota at a minimum: No. 1, immediately suspend their Regional Transportation Optimization in South Dakota on a permanent basis; No. 2, start delivering intrastate mail--meaning, mail inside of South Dakota--within 1 to 2 days using our existing facilities that they have already been scaling back; and No. 3, they need to commit fully to implementing all findings of the OIG investigation when it becomes available. Now, I have spoken with some of my Senate colleagues who are seeing the same issues in rural parts of their States. I look forward to working together to find a different model for the Postal Service that actually works for the American people, again, despite the blinders that our Postal Service leadership seem to have on. It is way past time that we put the ``service'' back into the Postal Service.
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