Plans to streamline the U.S. Postal Service are drawing the ire of lawmakers from both parties.

This month, members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the House Oversight and Accountability Committee questioned and censured Postmaster General Louis DeJoy over his 10-year reform plan.

Delivering for America aims to cut costs and increase efficiency as the Postal Service strives to break even Loss of $9.5 billion last year, due in part to declines in mail volume and inflation.

However, several lawmakers, including Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), expressed concerns about how the changes will affect rural areas in their districts.

Rici Roberts shares these concerns. She is a mail handler and union president at the Cheyenne, Wyoming, plant. Operations there are set to be downgraded as most mail processing moves 100 miles south to Denver.

“They’re going to rip out all the machines that we currently use here to process mail,” said Roberts, who, along with several family members, has worked for the Postal Service for about a decade.

She fears jobs will be lost and local mail deliveries will be delayed on the way to the city and back.

“Here our geography is so different than the East Coast, and we have such great distances – we have the weather; We have terrain,” Robert said.

Other changes planned or already implemented as part of the USPS reform plan include lowering mail delivery speed standards, slowing mail pickup at more distant post offices and reducing the number of truck trips.

James Boxrud, a spokesman for the USPS in Denver, said no “career employees” will lose their jobs as a result of the shifts. However, temporary and not fully subsidized jobs could be eliminated. The agency has said other employees may be offered transfers.

Additionally, Boxrud said, while mail originating from Cheyenne and returning to Cheyenne would have to go through Denver first, it would still be held to a two-day delivery standard. The main change is that outgoing emails are not processed in Cheyenne first.

“With this change, we are simply eliminating expensive and inefficient first clearance,” Boxrud said.

A Verification by the Postal Service Last year it was determined that downgrading the Cheyenne plant could save $2.5 million to $3.3 million in the first year.

The agency agreed to suspend all consolidations through January to avoid problems during the election and holiday seasons, but they could resume early next year. That could mean more locations in the Mountain West are likely to shift most operations to larger hubs, called regional processing and distribution centers, in Boise, Billings, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Denver.

This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from partner stations throughout the region. The Mountain West News Bureau is funded in part by Society for public broadcasting.