Last week lawyers representing the Alliance and seven other mailer groups submitted a white paper to the PRC. The full text is available here.

The paper concerns the extent of the PRC’s authority with respect to the review the 2006 postal law directs it to perform in 2017, ten years after the enactment of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA). We already have written extensively about how important the 2017 regulatory review described in Section 3622(d)(3) of the PAEA will be to all mailers.

In recent weeks, some in the postal community have expressed opinions about how far-reaching the 2017 review should be. Some have said that the review could include removing or modifying the Consumer Price Index (CPI) cap on postal price increases that is the cornerstone of the 2006 law. We and our allies thought it was important to set the record straight about what the plain language of the law says about the 2017 review: that it clearly does not include the power to rescind or substantially modify the CPI cap established under the 2006 PAEA.

To quote the executive summary: “In sum, PAEA established a system of rate regulation whereby the Postal Service cannot raise rates by more than CPI, as applied at the class level, absent extraordinary or exceptional circumstances. The Commission is not empowered to subvert the judgment of Congress by replacing this constraint with an alternative method of regulating rates.” The paper also notes that in numerous rulings the PRC itself has agreed: “The CPI cap is the linchpin of PAEA. In the Commission’s own words, the role of the CPI cap in the statutory hierarchy is absolute, ‘central’ and ‘indispensable.'” Perhaps our favorite quote in the white paper is from the Supreme Court that said, “Congress…does not alter the fundamentals of a regulatory scheme in vague terms or ancillary provisions—it does not, one might say, hide elephants in mouse holes.”

The Alliance supports this white paper as a very positive attempt to clarify early in the process what the regulator and all other participants will grapple with during the 2017 review.

The contents of the Alliance Report are protected by U.S. copyright law. The Alliance grants its members a limited license to republish or paraphrase portions of the Alliance Report for non- commercial purposes only, on the condition that the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers is credited as the source of the material in any secondary use.