National Postal Policy Council, et al. v. Postal Regulatory Commission, et al.

Congress has long established the legal requirements for the postal rate-setting system, a quintessentially legislative task with vast and important policy implications for the country. In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which imposed various requirements that the system had to meet, including an inflation-adjusted price cap that reflected Congress’s policy judgment that preventing rates from rising faster than inflation would maximize incentives for the Postal Service to reduce costs and increase efficiency. The Act tasked the Postal Regulatory Commission with filling in the system’s details, subject to the statutory requirements. As interpreted by the court below, the Act also gave the Commission power, ten years later, to throw out the statutory requirements and to rewrite the system from scratch, subject only to broad, open-ended, and often competing goals. The Commission-crafted system subjects mailers to price increases that vastly exceed the rate of inflation and imperil many mailers’ very existence—a result for which Congress has no accountability in light of its having “throw[n] the mess into the lap of an administrative agency.” James Skelly Wright, Beyond Discretionary Justice, 81 Yale L.J. 575, 585-86 (1972). The question presented is whether the nondelegation doctrine should be strengthened to disallow Congress from transferring to a federal agency the power to rewrite the postal rate-setting system without establishing any requirements that the system would have to meet.