Bush Paves Path for Postal Reform

"There will be several big-ticket items that will consume a lot of time, and it just gets difficult to get the leadership to commit to bringing a new bill to the floor," Cooper says.

The biggest stumbling block to appeasing Congress and the Bush Administration was the impact of the bill on the federal budget. Cooper notes that any liability the deficit would encounter is strictly "on a ledger sheet basis, not in dollars and cents," from an accounting standpoint. Still, getting the ledger cost closer to zero, he believes, will help mollify the budget conscious members.