During a hearing with the House Oversight Committee, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy admitted he was not aware of the different prices of sending mail through the postal service.
Representative Katie Porter asked DeJoy if he knew the price of a first-class stamp. Dejoy confidently answered 55 cents.
Rep. Porter followed up by asking DeJoy if he knew the price to send a postcard. DeJoy paused, stumped by the question. “I don’t,” he responded. It’s 35 cents.
She then asked how much it cost to send “one of those square cards.”
“I’ll submit that I know very little about a postage stamp,” DeJoy said.
The Congresswoman then asked about how many people voted by mail in the 2016 election. DeJoy said he did not know, and did not want to guess.
Rep. Porter told DeJoy she was “concerned about your understanding of this agency,” because “you started taking very decisive action when you became postmaster general.”
DeJoy has been the postmaster general for about 70 days.
Rep. Porter’s quiz came toward the end of a multiple-hour House hearing in which DeJoy answered questions about his qualifications to be postmaster general, the removal of blue mail boxes, a policy about truck schedules, and observations about slow mail delivery this summer.
This is not the first time Rep. Porter has stumped a witness during a hearing with a math problem. She got a lot of attention earlier this year when she asked representatives of the coronavirus task force the price of a full battery of coronavirus testing. She then got out a white board and wrote out the costs.
After doing so, Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, agreed to cover the costof testing.