Chris Van Hollen

I know that if confirmed, her experience, her character, and her values will be a great benefit to the Department of Education and to our Country at this pivotal moment in our history.

These are deliberate changes that were made that have these harmful consequences on delivering the mail, which is why we need to make changes in the management of the system.

The Postal Service remains a bedrock of public service and must be protected from misguided managerial attempts.

USPS must stop slowing down the mail and begin the process of returning to its 2012 service standards.

These delays have really harmful impacts on people's lives.

Thank you for being here.

This is broad bipartisan legislation, and the American people deserve this to be implemented as soon as possible, in my opinion.

We need to get back to those, you know, 2012 standards.

I have heard from others who just, you know, discontinued their relationship, and because they didn't fully recognize that it was not the fault of the----

We need to pay for our mail to be delivered on time.

I want to thank you, Inspector General Whitcomb, for your testimony today. I thought it was very enlightening and provided, I think, important questions for the subcommittee to pursue.

I was proud to vote for the President's three Board of Governors nominees, and I am hopeful they can have a real impact on restoring service delivery standards.

No analysis of the service impacts of these various changes was conducted, and documentation, and guidance to the field for these strategies was very limited and almost exclusively oral;

The Baltimore District has really, among the worst mail performance when it comes to delivery in the country.

I think it is a very important transparency tool for all of us.

It is unacceptable. It needs to change.

I have called for the replacement some time ago of the current Postmaster General.

I can assure you that we are going to be pursuing that as well.

We are going to continue to pursue this issue because they are telling us one thing, but your real-world experience, and other real-world experience is obviously dramatically different from their policy.

I would be interested in your view on exactly why delays have continued so long after the holiday season.

I have gotten 3,500 messages in the last year, complaining about delays in postal delivery.

The critical role that small businesses play, and the critical needs they have, they have always had, but particularly as we emerge from this pandemic, small businesses have been the ones that have been devastated in ways that are quite…

I appreciate you mentioning those other agencies, because I think this does really require teamwork, and everybody around one table.

I can commit to you that if confirmed, indeed one of my priorities is to expand and double down on the work the Global Markets team and the Foreign Commercial Service and the Domestic Commercial Service is doing with small companies.

It seems we can do a lot better, given the fact that the younger population in Africa is one of the fastest growing in the world.