Postage rate increases draw criticism
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A House Committee that oversees the U.S. Postal Service May 31 received a statement from the National Newspaper Association and others in a broad coalition of mailing and package shipping groups that criticizes the twice-yearly postage increases implemented by USPS. The Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service (C21), a group to which NNA has belonged since C21’s founding, issued a statement for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in response to a May oversight hearing in which only Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was invited to testify. C21 represents organizations that amass more than $1.6 trillion in annual sales from mailing- related activities, which amounts to about five percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product. The Postal Service’s Delivering for America plan has driven total increases in Periodicals postage of around 35 percent since January 2021. Any good news from the plan has been overshadowed, C21 told Congress, by “relentless, twice-yearly, postage rate increases endangering the Postal Service’s mail business and destructive to small and medium-sized businesses and consumers often considered the backbone of American employment.”
