The House previously wasn’t scheduled to return until September.
Democrats also warn that slowed postal delivery is delaying prescription medicines mailed to veterans and Social Security checks for the elderly.
“Alarmingly, across the nation, we see the devastating effects of the president’s campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters,” Pelosi said in a letter to colleagues.
She warned that the “lives, livelihoods and the life of our American democracy are under threat.”
Pelosi wants the chamber to vote on a bill sponsored by House Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) that would require the Postal Service to keep up its current delivery standards until the end of the year.
Pressure on Democrats to block Postal Service changes intensified after President Trump said Thursday that he opposed boosting postal funding because he wanted to restrict expanded mail voting. White House officials appeared to walk back those claims over the weekend.
“The president of the United States is not going to interfere with anybody casting their votes in a legitimate way whether it’s the post office or anything else,” Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said on CNN’s “State of the Union.
Trump has attacked mail voting since the early days of the pandemic but more recently he’s praised the process in some states where he’s in a tight race with presumptive Democratic nominee former vice president Joe Biden. Those states include Florida, where Trump voted by mail himself this year, Arizona and North Carolina.
Policy changes implemented by DeJoy include banning postal workers from making extra trips to ensure on-time mail delivery and cracking down on overtime hours. That’s caused mail backlogs of up to a week across the country.
The Postal Service has also removed high-speed mail-sorting machines and public collection boxes in numerous states, but officials said this weekend they would halt both practices until after the election.
