The Postal Service should only be permitted to raise postage rates annually, the National
Newspaper Association told the Postal Regulatory Commission.
NNA is responding to a request by the PRC for comments on proposed new rules that would
stop the semi-annual increases that publishers have seen most years since 2021.
Matthew Paxton IV, NNA’s senior delegate to the USPS Mailers Technical Advisory
Committee, commented in a letter to the PRC that some NNA members had previously
thought dividing USPS’s hefty price increases into two segments might help publishers to
absorb the new costs. But, he said: “We have concluded that the disruptive effects of semi-
annual increases outweigh whatever flexibility it provides our smaller members in
absorbing the increases.”
He cited the costs of software updates, USPS’s own inability to keep its internal software in
sync with new rates and the disruptive effects of higher prices in general as factors that lead
NNA to support the PRC’s proposal to limit the increases to once a year. But, he warned,
unless the scale of recent increases is tempered by PRC regulation, the impact upon
newspapers will continue to be harmful.
