Complete Story
04/18/2018
USPS Task Force
From Lisbeth Lyons, Vice President, Government Affairs, Printing Industries of America, April 13, 2018
As you may have seen in the media, on April 12th, President Trump signed an Executive Order establishing a Task Force assigned the responsibility of coming up with structural changes for the United States Postal Service (USPS). It’s required to report back in 120 days. The only mention of stakeholders is in paragraph 4, where our views are supposed to be taken into consideration in the Task Force recommendations. Trump has put Treasury Secretary Mnuchin in charge of this Task Force, clearly elevating it to a high level of attention.
Documents from Treasury are here:
USPS EO Factsheet USPS Executive Order 2018
As you also may know, this is not borne out of some new inspiration of Trump’s that the USPS and mail system is incredibly valuable to the nation’s economy and commerce delivery but, rather, it is an escalation of his personal animosity toward Amazon (and Washington Post) CEO Jeff Bezos and his insistence (with all evidence to the contrary) that Amazon is bilking the USPS and hurting taxpayers. However, it has certainly elevated the issue to the highest levels.
So…in playing the hand that we are dealt, PIA and its allies in the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service are meeting this afternoon to huddle on a media response and stakeholder strategy. Also, please note: PIA is requesting a meeting with the Treasury Secretary as part of our fly-in on June 20th (in addition to our constituent lobbying meetings on Capitol Hill). I suspect we will get top staff and not Mnuchin himself, but this will be an important meeting. I would encourage PIA Board Members with operations focused on mailing, in particular, to register for the Print & Packaging Legislative Summit (fly in).
Here is the registration link: http://www.printpackagingsummit.com/#price.
PIA will be sure to inform the wider membership as to our response to the Trump USPS Task Force as part of our overall advocacy on postal reform. I’m also including links to news clips on this topic below.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-orders-review-of-postal-services-finances-1523591727
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/12/trump-issues-executive-order-to-reform-usps.html
