USPS board feared retaliation, delayed pushback on voting order
According to ProPublica, the Trump administration initially explored far more disruptive plans than the March executive order the Supreme Court blocked on Sept. 14. According to several people knowledgeable about the discussions, the White House had floated requiring that all ballots be delivered exclusively through certified mail — a system that would have required voters to be home and sign for delivery of their ballots. The proposal was abandoned after Postal Service officials objected that it would have been impossible to execute. In theory, certified mail could have erased some security concerns, but local governments would have had to pay a higher fee per envelope and postal workers would have had to conduct millions of identity checks, actions that would have crippled timely delivery. “It was just, for many reasons, a terrible idea,” one top Postal Service official said.
Even after the certified-mail idea was scrapped, Postal Service officials were cut out of crucial conversations as the administration moved forward with the executive order, two people familiar with the matter said. The order was issued in March, and its contents came as a shock to the Postal Service’s own lawyers. Among other provisions, the order would have effectively required postal workers to serve as gatekeepers, deciding which ballots to deliver and which to reject, and handed coordination authority to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has no formal oversight over the Postal Service.
Inside the Postal Service, which is overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, deliberations over whether to comply stretched on for weeks. Some board members found the order alarming but feared Trump would respond to a direct challenge by trying to fire them, sources familiar with their concerns told ProPublica. Instead, the board remained silent, counting on the courts to block the measure. “The board was being careful how or when it took action, knowing that it might be its last action,” one source said.
The White House team leading the mail-in voting discussions included J. Brian Sikma, a special presidential assistant who has been involved in other administration election initiatives, including efforts to identify noncitizen voters for prosecution and to ban voting machines. Sikma did not respond to a request for comment. A Commerce Department spokesperson confirmed that Lutnick served in “an advisory and coordination capacity” in drafting the order, adding that “President Trump values Secretary Lutnick’s advice on many matters.”
In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis denied that the administration had interfered improperly with the Postal Service, an independent agency whose governance structure is specifically designed to protect it from political influence. She said the executive order “added important safeguards to vote-by-mail. These were commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and to ensure only Americans vote in American elections.” Bis also rejected the idea that the certified-mail proposal was “unworkable,” saying this played no part in the administration’s decision “to go in another direction.”
A Postal Service spokesperson declined to comment on the agency’s internal deliberations about the order, saying it was the Board of Governors’ policy not to discuss them. He referred ProPublica to an earlier statement by Postmaster General David Steiner, who was appointed at Trump’s behest in mid-2025: “Postal employees take great pride in their responsibility to support the democratic process. We will continue to approach that responsibility with the care, professionalism, and dedication that voters and election officials expect from the United States Postal Service.”
Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union, called the administration’s push to revamp mail voting “problematic and baseless” in an interview. “The ultimate goal was to create chaos and doubt in the vote-by-mail process,” Smith said. “You’re creating a rule to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”
The White House first reached out to the Postal Service in the fall of 2025, saying it wanted to explore how to improve mail voting. Postal Service leaders responded with recommendations they had been making to local election officials for years: standardized ballot envelopes with scannable barcodes and other features to separate election mail from other first-class mail. A 2024 bipartisan bill to turn those recommendations into requirements stalled in the Senate. Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that mail voting is riddled with fraud; he has called the process “inherently corrupt” and attributed his 2020 election defeat to it, though he frequently votes by mail himself. Independent audits showed the system worked reliably in 2022 and 2024, when nearly a third of all ballots were cast by mail, though at times ballots got lost or delayed.
After the White House backed away from the certified-mail proposal, postal officials were surprised to see the final order require them to implement the envelope changes and ballot-tracking measures they had recommended, all in time for the midterms. The directive also required states to provide the Postal Service with lists of eligible mail voters that workers would attempt to match against outgoing ballots — a task postal officials said would normally take about a year to design. Postal officials were alarmed by the requirement that workers reject ballots for reasons ranging from outdated voter information to unscannable bar codes, with all mail ballots from a state potentially rejected if the state refused to provide its voter list. “That’s not what we do,” a former official involved with the discussions said. “We deliver mail. We don’t decide what goes and what doesn’t.”
Postal Service officials were also taken aback that the order gave Lutnick authority to coordinate with other agencies and the postmaster general “in effectuating all relevant aspects of the implementation.” Lutnick’s involvement came after Trump had discussed merging the Postal Service into the Commerce Department. At Lutnick’s February 2025 swearing-in, Trump said he thought Lutnick’s “great business instinct” was just what the Postal Service needed. The postal board fought back, and the merger proposal is apparently no longer on the table.
Four separate lawsuits were filed almost immediately after the executive order became public, brought by Democratic-led states and political and civil rights groups. Democratic members of Congress and postal union leaders urged the Postal Service and its Board of Governors, which had long defended the agency’s independence, to resist. A June 2026 Supreme Court decision allowing Trump to remove leaders of many agencies long considered independent gave the governors pause, however.
Steiner directed Postal Service leaders to prepare to implement the order and defended it publicly, saying he would leave the question for the courts to decide. As career officials began drafting rules, concerned about voter privacy and the prospect of disenfranchising legitimate voters, they attempted to do as little as possible to comply, three people knowledgeable about their deliberations said. They looked for ways to protect workers from having to step out of their traditional lanes. One proposal — having states turn over their voter lists but not requiring workers to use them to decide which ballots to send out — was rebuffed by the White House counsel as “not enough,” according to a former official.
The White House team made clear that if even one ballot envelope in a batch mailing did not match the state list, the entire mailing should be rejected and election officials notified. “That means if four addresses don’t align in a mailing of one million, 999,996 other people don’t get their ballot tomorrow,” the former official said. A whistleblower complaint released in August warned that the system designed to carry out the order was rushed, untested and error-prone. The final rule — 95 pages spelling out how the agency would carry out Trump’s order — was issued on Aug. 21, less than a month before the first mail ballots were due to go out.
The rule left many questions unanswered: how voter lists would be kept updated, how the Postal Service would ensure local officials could upload voter information to the agency’s new portal, and how postal officials could approve the new ballot envelope designs required by nearly 10,000 voting jurisdictions in just weeks.
“This was going to be a disaster,” the former postal official said. The Sept. 14 Supreme Court ruling blocked the order, but Smith, the postal union president, criticized agency leadership for not stepping in more forcefully. Counting on the courts to halt the order, Smith said, was “a dangerous calculation, and showed a clear lack of courage and integrity.”