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The U.S. Postal Service is dysfunctional, timeworn, and hemorrhages billions of dollars a year. It’s also an essential operation that still knits communities together and helps major private carriers get their packages to doorsteps.

So it’s wonderful that a bipartisan coalition in the House of Representatives finally mustered the will Tuesday evening to pass a bill that gives the Postal Service a fighting chance. Politicians have warned that the post office was in danger of running out of money in two years without an overhaul.

The Postal Service Reform Act aims to do just that, by ending a budget oddity that had hamstrung the service for more than a decade. It also rationalizes how the post office handles its employees’ health benefits, mandates greater transparency and oversight around its bookkeeping, and opens the door to modernization and innovation. A companion bill is expected to get bipartisan backing in the Senate and the White House has signaled its support.

The Postal Service offered Congress a reminder of its dire condition Tuesday morning when it released results for its fiscal first quarter. It reported a net loss of about $1.5 billion, compared to net income of $318 million in the same quarter a year ago.

Revenue fell $202 million to $21.3 billion, which the post office attributed to waning e-commerce deliveries that had surged during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Lower mail volumes and higher costs also weighed on results.

No enterprise can survive that kind of routine financial bleeding, but it’s also worth remembering that the Postal Service isn’t a business. It’s a public service, and the Constitution identifies it as such. Like the military, public schools, police, firefighters, and the national intelligence and diplomatic corps, it hasn’t used traditional private-sector accounting.

Mail delivery, the service’s true lifeblood, has been unspooled by email and other technological changes and has been slumping for years.

A big chunk of the Postal Service’s losses, about $46.7 billion for the fiscal years 2014 through 2021, were also due to a congressional mandate requiring it to prefund future retiree health benefits for its employees. The prefunding requirement also accounts for $152.8 billion of the service’s $206.4 billion in liabilities.

The House’s legislation does away with that requirement, and also forgives about $57 billion of the liabilities associated with it. The bill’s sponsors also said the accounting change, and a requirement that the service’s retirees enroll in Medicare, will save the post office another $50 billion over the next decade.

The House bill requires the post office to provide easily searchable delivery data that consumers can use to track mail and packages, and mandates the service to continue delivering mail at least six days a week.

Still, the House bill goes a long way toward refashioning the Postal Service and gives it the financial relief it needs to be creative — and, hopefully, profitable. The Senate should follow suit as quickly as possible.

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Timothy L. O'Brien writes for Bloomberg Opioion.