For the first time since they were created in 2002, a Negotiated Service Agreement (NSA) has been rejected by the Postal Regulatory Commission. Yesterday the PRC turned down the Postal Service’s request to add a NSA with Discover Financial Services to its market-dominant list.

This is quite an unusual event.  Since the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, the PRC has reviewed about 500 NSA requests.  (According to this PRC presentation about NSAs, as of May 2014, that number included 446 competitive and 24 market-dominant NSAs.)

Every one of the requests was approved, including previous NSAs with Discover.  In yesterday’s order on the Discover NSA, the Commission pointed out that this was the first NSA it had been unable to approve, “and it is not a decision the Commission takes lightly.”

Read more:  PRC rejects Discover NSA and the Postal Service’s “subjective intuition” | Save the Post Office.