USPS is already the world's least expensive postal operator.
Now, first, to correctly inform everyone, IBD, much like the US Senate imagines that USPS consists mostly of thousands of small post offices ~ which it doesn't.
Worse, the Senate imagines those little post offices are the most important part ~ which they aren't.
The deal is the folks who SEND MAIL pay all the costs. The recipients get their service for free.
Those little post offices serve mostly as delivery units ~ EXPENSIVE delivery units in fact ~ fully manned with a postmaster and a relief clerk, or maybe even up to 5 clerks. There are about 28,000 small post offices, stations and branch post offices that are NOT NEEDED.
3,000 small facilities devoted solely to rural route service can handle all the delivery service presently provided by those 28,000 useless buildings with their 80,000 (app) unneeded employees.
With the modern mail sorting/reading equipment we have available today none of the people served by those 28,000 useless facilities will even need to change their addresses!
They can can be converted over to rural route delivery effortlessly and without disruption to their rural lives.
Next, get rid of door delivery. Why should an elite core of impudent snobs get delivery to the door when they should get it at the curb like the vast majority of Americans.
Good points on the useless postoffices, and alas Senate bill just digs the hole deeper by forbidding the USPS from doing what they need to do there.
Whatever operational changes are needed, and I am sure there are many in this internet age, this is the way to go:
“Of course, what the Postal Service needs isn’t just a little more freedom to cut costs, but wholesale privatization.”
Privatization and free the USPS from the pension burdens via some kind of buyout would work.