Tom Carper

In November, he and since-retired Ohio Senator George Voinovich proposed a one-cent-per-month for a 25-month period.

Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for your preparation.

Initially, we were going to have it at noon. It has been moved to, I am told, 12:17.

I think we can grow our product. I think we have the people to do it.

How important is it that the Postal financial relief bill that we consider here in Congress go beyond simply pensions and retiree health issues.

We need your full participation, so thanks.

I have always said, and we have talked about this before, some day, somebody will look back at the Postal Service and say we had a Post Office in every community in America and we went to every door 6 days a week.

We must be--we have also lowered the cost of processing inside plants.

Senator Carper's bill proposes allowing the Postal Service to provide non-Postal services utilizing Postal physical and digital infrastructure in a manner consistent with public interest.

Both Senator Carper's bill and Senator Collins's bill would fix this problem, and we strongly support those efforts.

There will be some followup questions, I am sure, and we would appreciate your prompt response to those.

I want to come back, and before I yield to Senator Begich for his closing questions, just for clarification...

I have encouraged the previous Postmaster General, the Board of Governors, the labor unions that represent many of the Postal employees, is to just be as creative as possible and think outside the box.

Thanks for being here today and for being a very active participant on this issue.

It is critical that we address the FERS issue, the overpayment, and that we can get that money back.

Most of it is from foreign sources. A lot of it is from places that are undemocratic, frankly, unreliable, and we need to reduce that.

We need to develop a bipartisan, bicameral approach to address these challenges.

Absent prompt and dramatic action on the part of Congress, our next Postal hearing may well be about how we pick up the pieces from a shutdown in operations.

This is not the first hearing that we have held with regard to the Postal Service's financial challenge, but it is an important one.

It is critical that we address the FERS issue, the overpayment, and that we can get that money back.

We hope within a couple of years to have deployed maybe the first offshore windmill farm off of Rehoboth Beach.

The crisis the Postal Service faces is more urgent now than it has been in the past.

That is a very good point. Thank you for mentioning that.

I think there were three things working against it, and that is not to say it wasn't a good idea.

OK. Good. Thank you.