6/19/25 – NNA – The House Government Operations Subcommittee will be holding a hearing on Tuesday, June 24, 2025, at 2 p.m. ET, entitled: The Route Forward for the U.S. Postal Service: A View from Stakeholders.
National Newspaper Association Executive Director Lynne Lance said this is the first time an industry witness will be included in several years. Association for Postal Commerce CEO and President Mike Plunkett will be a featured witness to speak to mailer concerns. The NNA is also submitting the attached statement for the hearing record.
Witnesses will include:
- Paul Steidler, Senior Fellow, Lexington Institute.
- Jim Cochrane, CEO, Package Shippers Association.
- Mike Plunkett, CEO and President, Association for Postal Commerce.
- Thomas Schatz, President, Citizens Against Government Waste; and
- Elena Spatoulas Patel, Nonresident Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution.
More details on the hearing can be found here, as well as a webcast on the day of the hearing on June 24.
These people aren’t stakeholders. For the most part, their interest is in cheap rates for what they mail or monitoring USPS finances. The real stakeholders are the American people, especially in rural areas, that depend on the USPS daily for medicine and correspondence. They are witness to declining levels of service not seen in their lifetimes, with no end in sight. Often packages and mail are delayed by weeks, with an unresponsive and uncaring management structure deaf and dumb. Until this core service is fixed, please spare me the whining about how much more it costs to mail your newspaper.