Bloomberg View: Congress Delivers for the Postal Service

Like a Pony Express rider wobbling toward Fort Laramie with an arrow in his hat, the Senate bill passed on April 25 to reform the U.S. Postal Service is far from its goal and facing attack from all sides.

The ambush—led by House Republicans, postal-worker unions, and the service itself—seems overly aggressive: The bill is Congress’s first earnest attempt to stop the impending meltdown of the Postal Service, which loses $25 million a day and says it might have to close thousands of post offices and hundreds of distribution centers in the next few months. The legislation also gets several issues right. First, it would revise payment schedules to two federal worker retirement funds, allowing the service to offer retirement incentives and trim the workforce by 100,000 jobs.