KENTUCKY — U.S. Congressman James Comer (R) of Tompkinsville, Kentucky has served as the representative for Kentucky’s 1st congressional district since 2016.

Comer currently serves as the Ranking Member on the House Oversight Committee and during this In Focus Kentucky segment, the Western Kentucky Congressman shares details about the U.S. House of Representatives recent 342-92 passage of the bipartisan Postal Service Reform Act, which Comer believes could be a boost to rural post offices in Kentucky and help cut costs at the independent agency.

"This is something that every American utilizes every day. And in rural America, it has an overweighted influence, because we we depend on the post office a lot more. And if you if you look at the post office over the past 10 years, that two things jump out at you, first of all, they've lost 10s of billions of dollars, probably hundreds of million dollars. And secondly, the performance has deteriorated in how long it takes to get your mail. So a lot of people complain about the post office and say, well, we should privatize the post office. Well, the truth of the matter is, nobody wants the post office. If you had a company like FedEx or UPS, they might want the package delivery business in the cities, but they don't want to deliver mail six days a week in the rural areas and they don't want to do general delivery mail. So you can talk about privatizing it, and it's not possible. It's not going to happen. Nobody wants it, or you can try to fix it. And that's what I've tried to do," Congressman Comer explained.

Two key provisions in the bill aim to save the agency almost $50 billion over the next decade: having USPS retirees enroll in Medicare and scrapping the mandate for the USPS to pre-fund future retirement benefits for current and retired employees.

Comer also said the bill will invest in package-sorting infrastructure for post offices to adapt to future demands with the increase in package deliveries.

You can watch the full In Focus segment above.