Government affairs
Legislative Updates
Today, a bipartisan group of senators led by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) introduced a Senate Resolution (S. Res. 633) calling on Congress to take all appropriate measures to ensure that the Postal Service remain an independent agency of the federal government and not be subject to privatization.
The introduction of this bipartisan resolution follows an identical House resolution (H. Res. 993), introduced July 16, 2018, which has accumulated 190 cosponsors as of press. Both resolutions were introduced in response to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) government reorganization and restructure plan, which calls for privatizing the Postal Service and ahead of the Postal Task Force report, which is unlikely to be released to the public ahead of the midterm elections.
The list of cosponsors is as follows:
- Sen. Angus King (I-ME)
- Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
- Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE)
- Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD)
- Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ)
- Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK)
- Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL)
- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)
- Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI)
- Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)
- Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI)
- Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)
- Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS)
- Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT)
- Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA)
- Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
- Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH)
- Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI)
- Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO)
- Sen. Shelden Whitehouse (D-RI)
- Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)
- Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
- Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)
- Sen. Thomas Carper (D-DE)
- Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA)
- Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN)
- Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM)
“NALC is proud to see such a strong bipartisan defense in both the House and Senate against what amounts to an attack not simply on letter carriers and other postal employees, but the American people as well. Privatization of the U.S. Postal Service would hurt both low-income and rural Americans especially who live in areas where it might not be profitable to deliver to them.”
“NALC’s hope is that Congress progresses with sensible postal reform that would improve the establishment’s finances instead of resorting to hack-and-burn privatization policies.”
In the effort to reach a bipartisan majority in both the Senate and the House (51 in Senate, 218 in House), NALC encourages all letter carriers to contact their Senators to become cosponsors of this new resolution and to contact their members of Congress to become cosponsors of H. Res. 993, if they have not yet done so.
