Postal Bill Mandates 180-Day Delay on Post Office Closures, Blocks Optimization in Underperforming Districts

The “Protect Postal Performance Act” is essentially a massive set of new rules designed to slow down or outright stop the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from making changes to its facilities and transportation networks. The bill starts by making it much harder to close local post offices, requiring a public hearing within 60 days of the decision and then delaying the final action for a full 180 days after the public feedback summary is posted online (SEC. 2). More importantly, it creates rigid new protections: if your local post office is the only one within a 15-mile radius, or if it serves a population of 15,000 or more, it can’t be closed or consolidated, period. This is a huge win for communities worried about losing their local branch, but it also handcuffs the USPS from making efficiency moves, even if a protected post office is barely used.

The Bureaucratic Brake on Processing Centers

Section 3 throws serious shade on the USPS’s ability to modernize its mail processing centers—the big hubs that sort all your letters and packages. Before the USPS can change, downsize, or consolidate any of these centers, it first has to get an advisory opinion from the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC). The PRC gets 120 business days to weigh in on whether the change will slow down on-time mail delivery. If the PRC says yes, the USPS has to post a report detailing how they’ll keep service on track, and then they can’t implement the change for another 180 days. This means any major facility upgrade or consolidation could easily take six months to a year just to clear the administrative hurdles, drastically slowing down any attempt to streamline operations.

Punishing Poor Performance with Gridlock

Here’s where it gets complicated: the bill blocks the USPS from closing, consolidating, or moving operations from any processing center located in a district that failed specific on-time delivery benchmarks in the previous year (SEC. 3). Specifically, if a district missed both the 93% on-time rate for two-day mail and the 90.3% rate for three-to-five-day mail, that facility is basically untouchable. While this sounds like a way to protect service, it actually means that the worst-performing, least efficient centers—the ones that might need an overhaul or consolidation the most—are now legally protected from change. For the average person, this could mean that areas already struggling with slow mail service will be stuck with the current, underperforming facilities for the foreseeable future, as the USPS is blocked from fixing the problem.

No More Cutting Corners on Mail Runs

Finally, the bill takes aim at the USPS’s efforts to optimize its transportation networks, known as LTO (Local Transportation Optimization) and RTO (Regional Transportation Optimization). The USPS is flat-out prohibited from implementing any LTO or RTO effort that would reduce the number of times mail is picked up or dropped off at any post office nationwide (SEC. 3). If they want to change the schedule at all, they need the PRC’s opinion first. If the PRC advises against reducing service frequency anywhere, the USPS is blocked from implementing those optimization efforts across the entire country. This provision is a major limitation on operational flexibility, essentially locking the USPS into current, possibly inefficient, transportation schedules. While it protects against service cuts, it also ensures that the USPS can’t find cost savings by optimizing routes, which could ultimately mean higher costs for the system—and potentially, for taxpayers—down the road.