Sen. Tom Carper has introduced legislation on Capitol Hill to help the struggling U.S. Postal Service sustain itself in the digital age.
The USPS employs 7 million people, but it's buried under billions of dollars in debt. Carper is proposing what he calls a long-awaited package of reforms that will help the 200-year-old service stay afloat.
"The postal service's business has changed," Carper says. "They still go to every mailbox in the country six days a week. They deliver a lot fewer first-class letters than they used to, but they deliver a lot more packages and parcels than they used to."
Carper's bill, known as iPost, would let the postal service do more to earn money for itself.
"It enables them to be innovative and creative and figure out how to use a 200-year old distribution network to generate revenue," Carper says. "For example, to deliver wine, beer, spirits -- they do that in a lot of other countries, we ought to be able to do that here."
Carper's bill also looks to make the service financially stable -- restructuring its massive debt and making sure employee health care and other liabilities are covered by better investments.
And the bill would enforce the two-to-three day delivery standard, by making the postal service's delivery performance public and searchable by zip code.