Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has woven a tangled web of financial conflict that is costing taxpayers $120 million over five years.
XPO Logistics, a freight transportation company, pays DeJoy and family businesses at least $2.1 million every year to lease four office buildings in North Carolina, The Washington Post reported.
DeJoy was supply chain chief executive at XPO from 2014 to 2015 after the company bought New Breed Logistics, the trucking firm DeJoy owned for more than three decades.
Since he became postmaster general, DeJoy, his companies, and his family foundation divested between $65.4 million and $155.3 million worth of XPO shares, The Post reported.
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But the family businesses still leases the four North Carolina office buildings to XPO.
Now, the USPS will pay $120 million over five years to XPO to run operations at sorting and distribution facilities in Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
The procurement process for the XPO contract was competitively bid and DeJoy wasn’t involved, USPS spokesman Jeffery Adams said.
And the XPO office building leases were cleared by ethics officials before DeJoy took office in June 2020, because they were rented to a contractor and not the agency itself, The Post reported.
Still, it looks a bit sketchy.
“There’s no question he’s continuing to profit from a Postal Service contractor,” Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel at watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told The Post. “He can comply with these technical legal requirements … but it does create an appearance issue about whether it’s in his financial interest to continue to make policy that would benefit contractors like XPO.”
Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.
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