President Joe Biden plans to replace two U.S. Postal Service board of governors members in a move Washington insiders say could be a potential first step to removing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
Derek Kan, an executive with warehouse and delivery startup Deliverr, would replace John Barger, according to a White House announcement on Friday. Kan previously served in the Trump administration in the Office of Management and Budget and as an undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Transportation under Elaine Chao.
Daniel Tangherlini, former director of Washington, D.C.’s, transportation department, would replace Ron Bloom, who is also the board’s chairman.
The Postal Service board can have up to nine governors, who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. To retain political balance, no more than five governors can belong to the same party.
Because the postmaster general can only be replaced by a board vote, Biden’s plan to replace governors considered to be DeJoy allies with those presumably more loyal to Biden’s policy goals could give the board the leverage it needs to remove the embattled DeJoy, according to reports.
A controversial appointment to the postmaster general position in May 2020 by former President Donald Trump, DeJoy has spent much of his tenure defending cost-cutting measures and a long-term strategy for the agency that he has acknowledged would lengthen delivery times and move more first-class mail from planes to trucks.
He has undergone hostile hearings on Capitol Hill among Democratic lawmakers calling for his resignation in the wake of reported drop-offs in service and cutbacks to operations. He has also been forced to defend himself against potential conflicts of interest with his former company, XPO Logistics [NYSE: XPO], as well as Amazon [NASDAQ: AMZN].
The White House noted that in addition to a previous stint as general manager for Lyft, Kan was a director of Amtrak’s board.
Deliverr, his current company, is in advance talks for a $250 million funding round with Tiger Global Management in a transaction valuing Deliverr at approximately $2 billion, according to a Bloomberg report in late October.
