When the Postal Service closes a post office for an emergency, like unsafe building conditions after a weather event or a last-minute breakdown in lease negotiations, it's supposed to correct the problem as soon as possible — by making repairs, settling the lease issue or finding a new location. The Postal Service, however, may choose instead to initiate a study about whether or not to close the post office permanently.

The law does not specify a time frame for re-opening the office or completing the discontinuance process, so some post offices can end up in limbo for many years. A large backlog of unresolved suspensions sometimes develops. At the end of fiscal year 2021, there were about 450 post offices under suspension, nearly a hundred of them going back to 2012 or before.

In February, the Postal Regulatory Commission opened a Public Inquiry docket (its second on suspensions) to examine how the the resolution of these suspensions might be expedited, presumably through a modification of the rules governing discontinuances.

To provide a clearer picture of the suspensions and to lend some transparency to the process of resolving them as it unfolds, we’ve created a Suspension Dashboard. It includes a page for each of the 450 suspended offices, with information about its suspension status, community demographics and facility data.

You can view the new suspension dashboard here.