U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s 10-year plan for reforming the Postal Service, “Delivering for America,” is not the usual meaningless bureaucratic sloganeering.

For many residents in Northeast Oregon and other rural parts of the state, the boast is downright offensive.

What the newest Postal Service policy delivers for those residents is delayed collection of the letters and packages they send.

For some post offices, the Postal Service no longer is sending a truck in the evening to pick up outgoing mail. That mail now sits overnight in the office and is hauled away the next morning.

At other offices, the one daily truck is leaving earlier in the day, which means residents have less time to ensure their outgoing mail gets on the truck that day.

Inexplicably, the Postal Service refused to give EO Media Group a list of the affected post offices. A spokesperson for the agency said such a list is not “publicly available.”

A critic of Postal Service reforms compiled a list that he said is based on the agency’s documents. That list shows more than two dozen post offices in Northeast Oregon, mostly smaller offices, are subject to the new policy.

A Postal Service spokesperson said the policy, by reducing the number of truck trips, will “reduce costs and carbon emissions.”

The Postal Service’s financial struggles are hardly new, to be sure. The agency lost $6.5 billion in fiscal 2023.

But the agency has not provided projections that show the potential benefits, by any reasonable standard, outweigh the obvious effects on its customers.

Both of Oregon’s U.S. senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, have criticized the new policy. Both senators signed a March 13 letter to the postmaster general urging him to halt any policies that would eliminate Postal Service jobs or slow mail delivery.

Molly Prescott, Merkley’s press secretary, said the senator is looking at potential ways to reverse or mitigate the negative effects of the new policy. One possible option is to attach to a federal appropriations bill a moratorium on any change that slows mail delivery, retroactive to before the policy took effect in Oregon.

We hope the senator succeeds.

Northeast Oregon residents have already suffered from Postal Service reforms, notably the closure of the mail processing center in Pendleton in 2013. That resulted in mail from the region being hauled to Portland.

More truck trips, and more carbon emissions, on other words.

And now, a decade later, that’s the Postal Service’s justification for reducing service even more.