Postmaster General of the U.S. Postal Service: Who Is Patrick Donahoe?

Sunday, January 09, 2011
Patrick Donahoe assumed the office of Postmaster General of the United States Postal Service (USPS) on December 3, 2010. He oversees an agency that has about 580,000 employees in more than 33,000 facilities, delivering nearly half the world’s mail and with an annual revenue of $68 billion.
 
Donahoe grew up in Whitehall, Pennsylvania. He attended Pittsburgh’s South Hills Catholic High School and held a job at White Cross Drug Store. In 1977, he earned a B.S. degree in Economics from the University of Pittsburgh, followed by an M.S. degree as a Sloan Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
 
Donahoe first joined the Postal Service as a clerk in Pittsburgh in 1975. He later managed its local vehicle maintenance division, and eventually became Vice-President of the Allegheny Area Operation.
 
During the mid-1990s he served a stint in Washington D.C. as District Manager of Customer Service and Sales for the Capital District.
 
After 2000, his positions at USPS in Washington, D.C. included Senior Vice-President of Human Resources, Sr. Vice-President of Operations, Chief Operating Officer (2001-2010) and Executive Vice-President (2003-2005). He was the Postal Service’s COO at the time of the September-October 2001 anthrax letter attacks that killed five people, including two postal workers in D.C.
 
Donahoe was appointed to the Postal Service’s number two position, Deputy Postmaster General, in April 2005, and as is a member of the Postal Service Board of Governors. He also continued to serve as Chief Operating Officer.
 
In FY2008, as Deputy Postmaster General, Donahoe’s total executive compensation was $600,026. He dropped to $597,129 in FY2009 and $481,088 in FY 2010.
 
Donahoe is married with two children.
                                                                        -Danny Biederman, David Wallechinsky
 

Comments

diana pfeifer 13 years ago
The staff at my local post office are usually goofing around in the back while we wait in a 15 person line for a book of stamps. Further, employees are rude,unfriendly (ie. Deana at the main off on Grand Ave. in Corona, CA)and seem to enjoy making things difficult. The reason the USPS has problems is because they continue to keep the dead weight and un-needed employees. Due to the internet, cell phones/texting and email, their services are not demand as much as in the past. Instead of getting rid of employees like a private business would, they keep everyone, spend the taxpayers money needlessly and continue to insist on raising the cost of USPS services. It is definitely time to turn the service over to UPS, Fedex or contract the services out to a private business of some kind. They just aren't a viable service any more and everyone seems to have accepted that fact, except for the postal service.
debra camus 14 years ago
The reason the post office continues to operate in a deficit is lack of customer service. One cannot buy a single stamp in our local post offices in Shreveport. Each customer must choose to wait in line with 10 or more people who are serviced by one postal employee or buy a whole book of stamps from a machine. What happened to smaller denomination purchase machines?

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