The United States Postal Service is the nation’s most popular federal agency by a mile—91% of Americans have a favorable opinion of it. Or at least, 91% of Americans (as close as you can get to unanimous in public opinion) loved it before Trump turned it over to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and his enabler, Board of Governors Chair Ron Bloom, and they started doing things like killing baby chicks and delaying prescription drug and utility bill deliveries, and flirted with sabotaging the elections.

The Bloom/DeJoy team decided to follow up the debacles of 2020 by adopting DeJoy’s 10-year plan to slow down the mail, reduce local post office hours, and make it cost a lot more to send mail, just in time for the holidays. Given how much the public loves the Postal Service, it sure seems like it would welcome President Joe Biden saving the institution as his gift to the nation.

Just in time for Christmas, Bloom’s extended term on the board is going to expire. As of Dec. 8, he’s out of there unless Biden does something to piss off a great many of his allies and renominates Bloom. The Trump appointee was named to serve out the remainder of a seven-year term, left vacant (as most of them were, during the Obama administration) for Trump to fill. That term officially ended one year ago, but he’s been in a one-year holdover term, courtesy of Trump, where he has pushed DeJoy’s plan of slowly killing the public mail system in favor of the private companies they are allegedly profiting from.

The current board, still heavily laden with Trump appointees and with Bloom’s thumb on the scale, met last week and voted to extend Bloom’s term for another year. Note, that decision is not up to them—it’s Biden’s to make, but they were sending a message—and shutting out the opposition. Literally. Two of the Biden appointees on the board were not allowed to voice their objections to Bloom, and were ruled out of order when they tried.

That didn’t go over well with Save the Post Office, the coalition of consumer advocacy, civil rights, and labor groups that has formed to, well, save the Postal Service. They attended the public meeting of the board, and participated in the following public comment period. It didn’t go well.

“Whenever we are given the opportunity to ask if USPS leadership has done any impact analysis for any of their changes,” said Porter McConnell, co-founder of the Coalition, “the answer is always no. This board needs to start engaging meaningfully beyond hard-to-access technical comment sessions designed for industry, and start listening to the American public when they make changes to a vital public service that affect all of us.”

McConnell continued, “The fact that they re-elected Ron Bloom as Chair of the Postal Board today is proof that they are not listening to postal customers at all.” Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, added “Re-electing Ron Bloom as chair of this board is an endorsement of the 10 year plan that will wreck the postal service and put this board on the wrong side of history. […] If the current USPS leadership cannot fulfill its basic mission of ensuring prompt, reliable, and affordable service—indeed, it appears bent on making things worse—it is long past time to provide new leadership and give the Service the resources it needs to rebuild public trust and make things right.”

Layla Soberanz, senior government relations representative for the National Farmers Union, said, “Reappointing Ron Bloom as Chair of the USPS Board of Governors goes against advocating for America’s family farmers and ranchers who depend on USPS for on-time mail delivery.” Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, echoed that concern.

“Every mail slowdown is an attack on seniors and people with disabilities. The Postal Service delivers over a billion prescriptions a year. Mail slowdowns mean that people aren’t getting their life-saving and life-sustaining medications on time,” Altman said. “Millions of seniors and people with disabilities, especially those living in rural areas, do not use the internet. They rely on the postal service to pay bills, and to communicate with friends and family. For these Americans, fast and reliable mail service isn’t simply a convenience—it’s a necessity.”

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During that meeting DeJoy said the USPS is “ready” for the busy holiday season. “So send us your packages and your mail—and we will deliver timely,” he exclaimed.

He sits on a throne of lies.

Last month, the first full month of the new, slower delivery standards, USPS didn’t even meet them. Instead of delivering 95% of mail on time, as the plan demands, just 91% of it was delivered when it was supposed to be. That, says Paul Steidler, senior fellow at the Lexington Institute and an expert on the postal service, “underscores they aren’t performing and doing what they said they were going to do.”

“It’s especially not great for October because it’s a slow month for mail, so it’s not a good barometer” for the rest of the year. “I would take whatever the standards are for what you are mailing—it’s now 5 business days coast-to-coast—and I’d add two days onto it,” said Steidler. “It’s important to know that, not only for the holidays but for end-of-year bills.”

Robert Shapiro, a postal expert and founder and chairman of economic advisory firm Sonecon, added, “There is every reason to believe mail delivery will deteriorate badly in the holiday season, and we’ll see what happens with package delivery.” Not just this year, either. “Unless either Congress or new leadership at the USPS says, ‘We are recommitting to our public mission [of mail delivery],’ this will just continue and I think will likely get worse,” Shapiro said.

This is all being done on purpose, and possibly for private personal gain. The leadership of the United State Postal Service is choosing to violate the agency’s mission statement as established by Section 101(a) of Title 39 of the U.S. Code: “The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities.”

Trump picked Ron Bloom and Louis DeJoy to destroy that, to diminish it to the point that private companies take over, stealing the oldest and most revered of our institutions away. To make a buck. There’s absolutely no good reason for Biden to let this continue. He probably can’t save this Christmas from Bloom and DeJoy, but he can save the post office.