NATIONWIDE — The House of Representatives is expected to vote Saturday on a bill to help the ailing U.S. Postal Service ahead of an Election Day that will lean heavily on mail-in voting

What You Need To Know

  • The House bill would roll back any changes made to the USPS since Jan. 1

  • McConnell says he won't call the Senate back from summer recess

  • The postmaster general agrees to testify before the House Oversight Committee

  • Trump again blames Amazon for the Postal Service's financial struggles

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) confirmed the plan Monday, a day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to fellow Democrats saying she was calling the House to return from their vacation to address what she described as “the devastating effects of the President’s campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters.”

Mail-in balloting will be prevalent this year as voters try to avoid crowds at polling places due to the coronavirus pandemic. President Donald Trump, however, has railed against widespread voting by mail, saying, without evidence, it would lead to a fraudulent election result. He also tweeted in April that voting by mail “for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”

Last week, Trump said he would block additional funding for the USPS, acknowledging that doing so would make mail-in voting more difficult. He has since backtracked from those comments some.  

With 78 days to go until Election Day, Democrats say their constituents are alarmed about the recent changes at the Postal Service.  

Since taking over the USPS in June, new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a top Republican donor, has implemented sweeping changes — including cutting overtime, freezing new hires and removing public-collection mailboxes  — that have been blamed for mail delays.

Last week, the USPS sent letters to 46 states and the District of Columbia warning them that they cannot guarantee all ballots sent by mail will be counted.  

The Democratic bill is still being written, but Pelosi said in her letter that it would prohibit “the Postal Service from implementing any changes to operations or level of service it had in place on January 1, 2020.”

Also, House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) has asked DeJoy to testify before her panel on Aug. 24. DeJoy has agreed to appear, Maloney said Monday.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Monday he won’t recall senators from their summer recess to address the matter, adding the Post Service “is going to be fine.”

“We’re going to make sure that the ability to function going into the election is not adversely affected,” McConnell said.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told CNN on Sunday: “I'll give you that guarantee right now: The president of the United States is not going to interfere with anybody casting their vote in a legitimate way, whether it's the post office or anything else."

Meadows also denied reports that the USPS is decommissioning hundreds of high-volume sorting machines before Election Day.

The USPS inspector general has launched an investigation into the recent policy changes at the agency and into DeJoy’s compliance with federal ethics rules. The review comes at the request of a group of Democrats led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.  

Meanwhile, attorneys general from at least six states are discussing possible lawsuits against the administration to block it from reducing mail service between now and the election, The Washington Post reported.  

On Monday, Trump repeated a favorite claim of his that Amazon is a big reason the USPS is losing so much money.  

“Amazon and other companies like it, they come and they drop all of their mail into a post office,” Trump told “Fox & Friends.” “They drop packages into the post office by the thousands and then they say, ‘Here, you deliver them.’ We lose $3 and $4 a package on average. We lose massive amounts of money.”

A CNBC analysis, however, found that Amazon might actually be saving the Postal Service from its financial demise due to the volume of business it gives the agency.