WASHINGTON, D.C. — After Ohio lost out on a multi-billion-dollar contract with the United States Postal Service to build new mail vehicles, several Ohio lawmakers are asking the Biden administration to investigate.

Ohio’s Mahoning Valley said goodbye to its Chevy Cruze General Motors plant two years ago this month.

Electric vehicle company Lordstown Motors has since set up shop in the old GM plant and is scheduled to start production of the Endurance electric pickup truck in September.

But for months, there was hope that Workhorse Group, a Cincinnati-based electric vehicle company that owns part of Lordstown Motors, would land a deal with the Postal Service to build a fleet of electric mail trucks in northeast Ohio.

“I thought we had a more than fair shot to get this,” Arno Hill, the mayor of Lordstown, said in an interview last week.

His community has been through a lot in the last few years, so a 10-year government contract with the Postal Service would have been welcomed with open arms.

But on Feb. 23, USPS announced it had chosen Wisconsin company Oshkosh Defense to build the mail trucks “in accordance with competitive Postal Service procurement policies.”

The deal was made by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who has spent much of the last year defending structural changes he’s made to the Postal Service.

“Mr. DeJoy at the Postal Service has, in my opinion, really harmed the Postal Service,” Rep. Marcy Kaptur said in an interview last week. "I don’t think we can completely rely on his decisions at this point.”

Kaptur, a Democrat who represents Toledo and co-chairs the House Auto Caucus, joined northeast Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan (D, OH-13) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) in writing a letter to President Biden and introducing a resolution to pause the deal and open an investigation “to determine: 1) that there was not inappropriate political influence in the process, and 2) that the proposed contract is consistent with [Biden’s] Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.”

The Ohio Democrats have flagged reports of $54 million in Oshkosh stock being purchased the day before the contract was announced.

Congressman Ryan wrote a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission asking for it to be looked into, and the House Oversight Committee has requested documents related to the deal.

The lawmakers are also concerned that the Oshkosh deal will only make 10% of new mail trucks fully electric. They argue Lordstown Motors could have made 100% electric.

In a letter to Congress last week, Postmaster DeJoy wrote the 10% figure “is a floor — not a ceiling — based upon our current financial condition and the resources that we believe we will have available.”

Louis DeJoy Letter to Congress by James Massara on Scribd

He also said there are more than 12,000 postal routes “where distance, environmental conditions, or facility limitations make electric vehicles unfeasible or impractical.”

But there’s bipartisan frustration over the issue.

Northeast Ohio GOP Rep. Dave Joyce (R, OH-14) said in a statement: 

“I was greatly disappointed when it was announced that the USPS Next Generation Delivery Vehicle program contract would not be capitalizing on the expertise we have in the Buckeye state. In Ohio, we know a thing or two about manufacturing, and this $6 billion dollar opportunity would have created a lot of jobs. However, at the moment, we can neither prove nor rule out any inappropriate political influence in the process of awarding the contract. I support a full and fair investigation into the matter and look forward to seeing the USPS continue to upgrade its vehicle fleet and make much-needed improvements in the timeliness and efficiency of their services for the millions of Ohioans who rely on them.”

Sen. Brown, who has criticized DeJoy for politicizing the Postal Service, said Lordstown Motors and Workhorse tried their best.

“We’re just going to keep shining a light on it. I don’t think they could’ve done more. I’d prefer there’d be a new Postmaster General that we could trust, a professional,” Brown said in a virtual interview last week.

In a statement to Spectrum News on March 8, Lordstown Motors spokesman Ryan Hallett said: 

“Lordstown Motors’ business plan was never reliant on Workhorse receiving the USPS contract; if they were awarded it, we would’ve loved to have been a part of the production team, but our focus has always been and will always be to build the most cost-effective, safest, zero emission work vehicles ever made – starting with the over 100,000 Endurances that have been preordered.”

Mayor Hill said the Postal Service contract would have been great for the region, but he’s still optimistic.

Thanks to Lordstown Motors opening, a HomeGoods distribution center being built down the road, and GM helping create a new electric vehicle battery plant nearby, several thousand jobs will soon be available in the Mahoning Valley.

“We’re optimistic that in the long term we should be OK, but you know the belt’s kind of tight right now until we get things ramped up,” Hill said.

Separate from this story, Lordstown Motors saw its stock price drop drastically Friday after a report was published by a short-seller that claimed the company misled investors about the number of pre-orders it has received for the Endurance pickup truck.

A Lordstown Motors spokesman has told several publications the company will refute the report by Hindenburg Research.