39 U.S.C. § 414 — Special postage stamps

(a) This subsection lets the Postal Service give people an easy way to help pay for breast cancer research. The Postal Service must set up a special postage rate for first-class mail to do this. (b) How the special rate works: (1) The rate equals the regular first-class rate plus an extra amount of at least 15%. (2) The Postal Service's Governors set the rate by making their own regulations, instead of using the normal rulemaking process in chapter 36. (3) The special rate is offered as an alternative to the regular rate — it doesn't replace it. Using the special stamp is voluntary for postal customers. The price of one special stamp must be a number evenly divisible by 5. (c) Where the money goes. (1) Of the money that becomes available for breast cancer research under this section, the Postal Service must pay 70% to the National Institutes of Health and the rest to the Department of Defense. The Postal Service works out the payment arrangements with each agency by mutual agreement, but it must pay each agency at least twice a year. Any agency that gets this money must use it for breast cancer research. (2) "Amounts becoming available for breast cancer research" means: the total extra money the Postal Service takes in that it would not have received but for this section, minus enough money to cover the Postal Service's reasonable costs of running the program — including printing, selling, and distributing the stamps. The Postal Service decides what counts as a reasonable cost, under regulations it prescribes. (d) Congress's sense — a statement of intent, not a binding rule — is that nothing in this section should: (1) directly or indirectly cause the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, or any other government agency to end up with less total money than they would have gotten without this section; or (2) change the regular first-class postage rate or any other regular postage rates. (e) The Postal Service must make the special stamps available to the public by a date it sets in its own regulations — but no later than 12 months after this section's enactment date. (f) The Postmaster General must include information about how this section is working in each report required under section 2402, for any period the section was in effect. At a minimum, each report must include: (1) the total amount described in (c)(2)(A) that the Postal Service received during that reporting period; and (2) how much of that money, in total and broken down by category, was needed for the costs described in (c)(2)(B). (g) For purposes of section 416 (including any regulation issued under that section's subsection (e)(1)(C)), the special stamp created by this section does not count toward the rule about whether more than one "semipostal" stamp can be offered for sale at the same time. (h) This section stops being effective after December 31, 2027.