It could be said Postmaster General Louis DeJoy did stick to his pledge last May to delay plans to move a portion of Kingsford U.S. Postal Service processing operations to a facility in Green Bay, Wis., until at least after Jan. 1.

Now items are going to Milwaukee instead.

Some of the region’s mail apparently is being routed to the USPS Processing and Distribution Center in Milwaukee, according to a letter U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman sent DeJoy last week.

Bergman, , R-Watersmeet, wrote he had learned from constituents all outbound mail from the Oscar G. Johnson VA Medical Center in Iron Mountain was being routed to Milwaukee, “including vital prescriptions and documents for Veterans.”

Bergman requested an explanation for the shift, also chiding DeJoy for making the change without notifying his office.

“This lack of communication from your agency is entirely unacceptable, particularly when an operational change of this nature — affecting the delivery process for prescriptions — could have significant impacts on the health and wellbeing of Veterans in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Northeast Wisconsin,” Bergman stated in the letter.

When DeJoy supposedly put the USPS’s Delivering for America plans on hold in May, he also told U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Michigan, in a letter that even if the shift resumes, “we will not advance these efforts without advising you of our plans to do so, and then only at a moderated pace of implementation.”

So much for notification.

The USPS’s $40 billion Delivering for America plan — which officials claim “will upgrade and improve the postal processing, transportation, and delivery networks” — drew widespread, bipartisan criticism early last year that it instead had resulted in slower processing and delivery across the country.

The plan relies on creating regional processing and distribution centers and converting a number of other existing PDCs — like the one in Kingsford — into local processing centers that send all mail to that regional PDC.

The effects already could be seen in early 2024 when USPS cut the number of daily truck trips and collections made by the Kingsford facility, the U.P.’s only PDC, causing mail to sit overnight in local offices. That change all but eliminated USPS next-day service in the Upper Peninsula and northeastern Wisconsin. It affected delivery of vital items such as prescription medicines and water testing that require a one-day turnaround, Peters said in a May 2024 written statement.

Now the region’s mail is going even farther away into Wisconsin.

In his letter to DeJoy, Bergman requested his questions be answered no later than Monday. Bergman’s office has yet to say whether DeJoy has responded or indicated what the future holds for the Kingsford facility now that the elections have passed.

Hopefully, the congressman and other state and federal lawmakers will continue to press DeJoy and USPS officials on these changes that have so downgraded what is an essential service in a region as rural as the Upper Peninsula.