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If I am writing a letter and I use an office title for the first time, I will include the acronym, but if the office title has a possessive, apostrophe s, will the acronym have the apostrophe s within the parenthesis, outside the parenthesis, or not at all? Examples:

Maintain oversight functions over U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP)’s $13.6B budget.

Maintain oversight functions over U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP's) $13.6B budget.

Maintain oversight functions over U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) $13.6B budget.

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    I cannot substantiate my preference, but your second example reads the best to me (CPB's).
    – Mark Hubbard
    Jul 29, 2016 at 18:21
  • This does not answer the question, which has been flagged as a duplicate, but from your point of view of writing a letter, my advice is do not use any of the three, all of which look clumsy. You can avoid this by making the possessive with "of": “Maintain oversight functions over the $13.6B budget of U.S. Customs and Border Protection”. ("Maintain oversight functions over" is horrible too. Would "Continue to oversee" or something similar convey the same meaning?)
    – David
    Jul 7, 2017 at 12:30

2 Answers 2

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It's a matter of style.

If you are writing as an employee of an organization, you may have a style guide that dictates such constructions. As an editor for The Boeing Company, I have a rather thick style guide that directs how we use acronyms; as a rule, we do not use possessives with acronyms - in fact, we avoid using possessives as much as possible.

If this is a personal letter, I would suggest that you define your first instance of the acronym simply, without the possessive form. You can treat subsequent uses of the acronym as nouns, meaning they could take the possessive.

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Once you have declared the acronym a noun in your sentence, its possessive apostrophe should follow it immediately. In your example, the second is the most easily interpreted because it both defines CBP in the singular and provides the possessive in the expected manner.

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