Reform doesn't mean the check is in the mail.

AT least since 1914, when the words were incised on the post office building in midtown Manhattan, Americans have known that neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night will stay a mail-delivery specialist of the U.S. Postal Service from the swift completion of his or her appointed rounds.

All true. But what about technology? The explosion in electronic communication, which threatens to make the old-fashioned first-class letter obsolete, may at last accomplish what the natural elements have failed to do: Stop the mailman in his tracks.

Or so you could conclude from all the talk about postal reform, which has reached a crescendo as the U.S. Congress inches closer to approving a postal reform bill.

No one doubts that some kind of reform is overdue. Since 1970, when Congress reorganized the traditional government-run post office department into the quasi-governmental USPS, the postal service has accumulated $6 billion in losses and taken on many billions more in debt, even as it has steadily raised prices and trimmed services.

Meanwhile, the business environment in which the postal monopoly operates has changed utterly.

A presidential commission concluded last year that maintaining the current fiscal course would place the survival of the USPS in "significant jeopardy," given the increasing competition it faces from electronic alternatives (e-mail and Internet bill-paying services, most prominently).

Many of the postal service's problems are built into its design. Congress chartered it to be neither a government agency, protected against losses by steady subsidies from the federal purse, nor a private business, able to adapt itself to a changing market.

The linchpin is the postal service's government-granted monopoly on delivering first-class mail. Along with the monopoly comes a "universal service" obligation to deliver mail everywhere at uniform rates. Those rates, moreover, are set not by the market or by the postal service, but by a governing board that imposes its will on USPS management.

Once its greatest asset, universal-service has become a burden. First-class mail generates most USPS revenue, but the number of those first-class letters continues to decline, shrinking to less than half the postal service's volume for the first time this year.

The one area of USPS business that's growing--the "standard mail" service that consists mostly of advertising--yields much less income. Meanwhile, the number of addresses to which the postal service is obligated to deliver mail has increased by 3 million in the last two years.

USPS also faces huge costs in personnel. The presidential commission estimated that more than 75 percent of operating costs go to the service's unionized workforce. Those numbers worsen under the weight of at least $27 billion in unfunded pension obligations.

Congress deserves credit (did I just write those words?) for trying at last to address a sorry history of incompetence and bad luck. But the rerfom bill doesn't include, for example, important provisions that would encourage USPS to control its personnel costs. In fact, it transfers the unfunded $27 billion pension obligation--a great disincentive to further extravagance- to the U.S. Treasury for taxpayers to pay.

It also leaves out one of the more important reforms the presidential commission emphasized: a mechanism that would allow the postal service to close inefficient post offices and mail distribution centers. At present, these are kept open through political and union pressure, and if closed could save tens of millions in future costs.

These failures of nerve mean that Congress will have to revisit postal reform again, probably within the next decade. Until then, Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, is proud that she and her colleagues are addressing the issue, doing their jobs, she says, "just as postal workers (refuse to) let anything stand in their way of delivering the mail every day."

Neither snow nor rain nor heat will keep a U.S. senator from self-congratulation.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist with Bloomberg News.