Statement from NRLCA President Don Maston on the Postal Service Suspension of Employer FERS Contributions
April 9, 2026 – The National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association (NRLCA) was informed on short notice of the
Postal Service’s decision, approved by the Board of Governors, to temporarily suspend USPS
employer retirement contributions to FERS. Let me be clear: this was a unilateral action by
USPS management, and not something negotiated with the NRLCA. Rural carriers should be
aware that this does not impact TSP contributions or matching funds.
While there is precedent for this type of move, concerns remain, and we will continue monitoring
the situation and will keep the membership informed. USPS previously suspended employer
FERS contributions in June 2011 as a cash-conservation measure during another period of
severe financial stress. That suspension lasted for several months, and USPS later resumed the
regular biweekly payments and remitted the withheld amounts after legal guidance indicated
that employees would continue to receive service credit during the suspension.
This move by Postal Service management and the Board should not be taken lightly—Congress
needs to take action to address the Postal Service’s financial challenges. We were encouraged
by the bipartisan tone from the House Subcommittee on Government Operations during
Postmaster General David Steiner’s March 17 hearing, where he laid out the options for USPS’s
future.
Chairman Pete Sessions said,
“The postmaster general laid it on our doorstep, and we’re not going to kick the can
down the road. We’re going to put these directly in front of us, and then we’re going to
have to figure out how we’re going to go to our colleagues and pull it off.”
And Ranking Member Kweisi Mfume said,
“We’ve tried to approach this as a bipartisan effort and have left out, to the extent we
can, anything that sometimes creeps in as partisan because, at the end of the day, it’s
the service and the people who deserve the service more than anything else that we’re
all assembled here for.”
The rest of the House and the Senate now need to take notice and act. The NRLCA supports
common-sense solutions that strengthen the Postal Service without undermining service or
earned benefits, including additional USPS borrowing authority; broader, prudent investment
flexibility for CSRS and FERS funds, with an oversight board; and correcting the allocation of
CSRS liabilities.
The Postal Service is a public institution with a universal service obligation, and postal
employees deserve transparency, stability, and leadership—among management and in
Congress—equal to that mission.
—
Established in 1903, the NRLCA represents approximately 130,000 career and non-career rural
letter carriers that operate out of more than 10,500 rural and suburban postal delivery units,
serving over 85,000 rural routes
