Long-running complaints about slow and missing mail across New York and New Jersey have escalated into a fight that now reaches Capitol Hill, with a postal workers union leader accusing the U.S. Postal Service of a deliberate decline in service. What began as frustration at the counter has turned into allegations of an internal policy that leaves letters and packages sitting unprocessed, and into demands from members of Congress for answers.
The concerns did not appear overnight. For months, News 12 has documented customers waiting in long lines at post offices and complaining about packages that never arrived, building a record of grievances that has steadily grown. Those individual complaints have now been folded into a broader warning that the problems are not isolated glitches but symptoms of something larger.
That warning is coming from inside the workforce. Joseph Martier, president of the New York Metro Area Postal Workers Union, which represents nearly 4,000 workers across New York and New Jersey, framed the situation in blunt terms, saying what is at stake is the deterioration of the United States Postal Service on purpose. His remarks cast the delays not as accidental but as the result of decisions being made within the agency.
At the center of his claims is a specific practice. Martier says the Postal Service recently implemented an 8 a.m. hard stop, a policy he describes as requiring clerks to stop processing mail even when first-class mail and parcels still remain to be handled. He warned that the consequences can be devastating, noting that some of those parcels contain medicine that people are waiting on.
The union leader also pointed to physical evidence to back up his account. Martier provided the Turn to Tara investigative team with photographs that he says show mail left behind at a Bronx post office. The U.S. Postal Service has not confirmed his allegations, but the images and claims have moved the issue beyond customer complaints and into the halls of Congress.
Bronx Congressman Richie Torres has taken up the matter, sending a letter to USPS last week demanding answers about the reported hard stop policy. He called the situation scandalous, stressing that delayed medication can be a matter of life and death, and warning that a delay in the delivery of an absentee ballot undermines the integrity of elections. Asked about his next step, Torres said everything was on the table, including oversight hearings and investigations.
The alarm is spreading beyond New York City. Hudson Valley Congressman Pat Ryan has also demanded answers after hearing from constituents about chronic mail delays, widening the political pressure on the agency. The complaints line up with a federal watchdog report from last May, which found that first-class mail performance has declined since 2022 even as the Postal Service lowered some of its delivery standards. The scrutiny comes as USPS has warned Congress that it could run out of operating cash without legislative changes, leaving customers across the tri-state still waiting both for answers and for their mail.