President Bush recently established a commission on the United States Postal Service, whose final report in August 2003 may lay the groundwork for the first major reform of the Postal Service in thirty years. Mirroring the administration’s initiative, AEI is sponsoring its own Postal Reform Initiative-a series of conferences and publications to assess the mission and operations of the Postal Service, propose a vision of a modern postal industry, and suggest how the U.S. could arrive at this destination. The AEI project will focus on the potential of modern communications technology and a more open and competitive market environment to solve the problems that have bedeviled the U.S. postal industry, and it will review the experiences of other countries that have enacted postal reform in recent years.

This opening session of the AEI Postal Service Initiative will suggest key objectives that the President’s Commission should strive for and how those objectives can be realized. Discussion will focus on the industry as a whole. The objectives for postal reform established at this conference will form a framework for the entire series. Future conferences will address competition issues arising in postal reform and the Postal Service’s mission in the context of its universal service obligation.