It's going broke, and while Congress has lots of different ideas to fix it, a few solutions have found common ground
Congress is mired in a standoff over the nation's fiscal stability, and once the parties find agreement, lawmakers will head home for August recess. When they come back, they'll have another fiscal crisis to confront: The U.S. Postal Service's pending bankruptcy.
The Postal Service has been going bankrupt for some time now. In the second quarter of 2011 alone, it lost $2.2 billion.
There are two comprehensive bills in Congress aimed at rescuing USPS, one from Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and another from House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). The bills are very different, but Congress will have to make a decision sometime over the next year.
Here are a few proposals pulled from each:
Seemingly everyone but the National Association of Letter Carriers, the main union for postal workers, wants to end Saturday deliver. USPS has been pushing for it and claims it would save $3.1 billion per year, while the administration's Postal Regulatory Commission*, which regulates USPS, estimates ending Saturday service would only save $1.7 billion per year and would take three years to realize that level of annual savings, ABC reported.