A new strategic plan from the Postal Service Office of Inspector General is out. The five year plan comes during a turbulent time for the agency with tight budgets and a dire need for efficiency. The IG’s office hopes to help with that by making a few updates to it’s mission. To learn more, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin welcomed Postal Service IG Tammy Hull.

Interview transcript:

Eric White What does this plan actually contain and how did it come together? I know that you are required by law to provide this kind of plan, but how do you all plan to utilize it going forward?

Tammy Hull The plan is basically our high level blueprint on how we plan to move forward over the next few years. You can see if you go back and look at our old strategic plans, we’ve updated our mission to include some of our new responsibilities, and also to define our overall purpose a little more clearly, which is promoting the integrity, accountability and efficiency of the United States Postal Service and its regulator, the Postal Regulatory Commission. The Postal Reform Act of 2022 expanded our oversight mission to include the PRC. So we added that into our strategic plan. It also includes our vision, describes how we plan to meet our mission, pursuing innovative oversight to advance the value of the U.S. Postal Service for all. And then it addresses our values, our key values, respect, impact, innovation and resilience. And resilience is really critical in the time that we’re in right now. And we emphasize that in our strategic plan. And then it lays out our three main goals. Promoting efficiency, effectiveness and transparency of postal operations; foster integrity by detecting and preventing fraud, waste and abuse in postal programs; and then finally pursuing excellence through developing our people and advancing innovations. The entire executive team was involved in creating this strategic plan from the beginning to the end. I want to give a big shout out to our planning and special projects team. They helped us with that, they kind of led the way and they’re a great little tiny team in our front office and they brought it on this. So I really appreciate what they did. I think the challenge in a strategic plan is you spend some time and you come up with really good thoughts and ideas, and you incorporated into a plan the challenges in executing the plan and sticking to kind of those key values and objectives and goals that we’ve laid out. The Postal Service, as you mentioned, is in the midst of a great deal of change. And so oversight of that change is really important for us right now.

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Eric White Was there any difficulty in formulating the plan? As you mentioned, there are so many changes going on at the agency. Was there a worry of coming up with the plan taking too long and changes occurring that needed to be incorporated in the plan? And then you’re just kind of stuck in this cycle? Was that at all a concern for the executive team?

Tammy Hull Probably, we thought about that as we went through. I think the  strategic plan is at a high enough level that the concepts are translatable regardless of where the Postal Service is in their plan. I think one of the things that you see in this plan that has been emphasized over our prior plan is an increased focus on transparency and in our oversight mission, which encompasses transparency. We wanted to focus on providing transparency into the changes the Postal Service is making as they impact the American public. If you look back on our prior strategic plan, it was released right after the Postal Service released its Delivering for America plan. So we weren’t really at that time quite sure what this was going to look like. I think clarity is coming and additional clarity has as occurred since that initial plan was released. And so it was a little bit easier probably at this point to put together the strategic plan than it was three years ago when we did our last strategic plan.

Eric White We’re speaking with Tammy Hull, the Postal Service inspector general. And I want to harp on one of the things that you also mentioned that seemed to be a key aspect of the added missions, and that is innovative ways to regulate the Postal Service. What sort of innovative ways can you tell us that are coming down the pipeline as far as where your role is or that you’re going to be using new tools to make sure that all these moves are transparent? Or what do you all mean by innovative?

Tammy Hull One of the things that you can see if you go out to our website is how we’re really looking at different ways to provide transparency into postal operations and to use 21st century technology to showcase that. We do things like telling our report using stories, visual storytelling and using the Internet to do that for us in ways that we haven’t done before. So using technology has always been a key focus of ours. And this strategic plan, you can see innovation through out in  our focus on innovation. We have an incredibly strong office of chief Information officer. Our CIO office and our data analytics staff are just really good, and the tools that are out there now are very relevant in the oversight mission. We also have a very strong, small but mighty research team that tackles some really interesting issues that are kind of unique to the Postal Service. And so telling those stories in unique ways on our website is something that we’re very focused on. And you can see that throughout our strategic plan on how we use innovation.

Eric White Yeah, I actually do have to agree with you on that. As somebody who has to look at almost every inspector general website, the audits that you all do, they are written up sort of in an article manner almost. The titles are different, it’s not just straightforward like the other inspector general’s office. Is that part of what you’re hoping to increase more of to kind of engage folks that are interested in this?

Tammy Hull Very much so. I think we do our best to make our work as accessible as possible. We have the interesting mission of conducting oversight for an agency that touches every household every day in every business. So we want to make our work as accessible as the mail is to the people that use it. And so it’s really important for people to be able to understand our work.

Eric White All right. And you said the hard part is going to be actually implementing the strategy. Can you just give us your first couple steps? Is there a cultural aspect to things in how you want to update your office’s mission? What is going to be your first couple of moves there?

Tammy Hull Yeah. One of the things that I’m really excited about in this version of our strategic plan is our focus on the employees. We’ve always focused on our employees, but it hasn’t been nearly as clear in our strategic plans as it should be. We’re only as good as the people that we have that engage, and we’ve got great people that are very, very engaged. And so we owe them the focus on their work, what they need and how they need to have a good balance in their lives so that they can engage. I tell our people when you’re here, we want all of you, but when you leave, we want you to be able to not be engaged when at the end of your day, we want you to have a very useful life outside of this office because that makes you better when you’re here.

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