Federal appeals ruling sets worrying Postal Service precedent ahead of midterm elections

A federal appellate court has tossed a 2020 injunction against budget cuts that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) proposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the decision may not have much impact on mail service, it could mean doom for a separate court order preventing USPS from implementing President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at curtailing mail ballots. 

The ruling could also make it more difficult for legal challenges to stop Trump from ordering the Postal Service to reduce or cut election-related deliveries shortly before the upcoming midterm elections. 

In its decision Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that the plaintiffs in New York v. Trump should have first challenged the budget cuts before the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) before suing in the district court. A three-judge panel of two Barack Obama appointees and one Trump appointee ruled unanimously, setting aside the lower court’s order that prevented USPS from eliminating late and extra mail delivery trips.

In summer 2020, the Postal Service announced it would make a series of service changes aimed at cutting costs. New York, New Jersey, Hawaii and San Francisco sued to block those changes, arguing that then-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy failed to first get an advisory opinion from the PRC, as required by law. They won a temporary pause in September 2020 before receiving a permanent injunction in 2022. 

The appellate court lifted that injunction Tuesday, ruling that the complaints should have been made before the PRC before seeking judicial review, in accordance with the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. 

The order itself might not have much effect on postal service standards. The Postal Service adopted new pick-up and postmark rules last year — this time after first getting the necessary PRC review — that will slow down delivery times. 

But Tuesday’s decision could sway the outcome of another, ongoing lawsuit. Earlier this month, the D.C. federal district court granted the NAACP’s request to stop USPS’s implementation of Trump’s March 2026 executive order.

That ruling stems from a lawsuit the NAACP brought to block USPS service cuts in 2020, around the same time New York and the other states sued. Like the plaintiffs in that case, the NAACP sued directly in federal court, skipping the PRC. But unlike that case, USPS settled with the NAACP. The 2021 agreement required the Postal Service to safeguard mail voting in future federal elections and prioritize the timely delivery of election-related mail through 2028.

The NAACP asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to enforce that stipulation last month, after USPS posted a draft rule executing Trump’s order, which directed the Postal Service to only deliver mail ballots if states first handed over their voter lists to the administration. 

Represented by the Department of Justice (DOJ), USPS is now appealing that decision before the D.C. Court of Appeals. Now, DOJ lawyers may be able to argue that the NAACP agreement should also be tossed for lack of jurisdiction. It’s unclear whether the court would agree, or if they would say that the government is precluded by other procedural rules from raising that argument after abandoning it on appeal in 2021. 

The NAACP’s lawyers at Public Citizen, however, say they’re not too concerned. “I don’t think that the decision today, which addressed only a procedural claim, impacts the ongoing vitality of Settlement Agreement and the court order that incorporated it as an order,” said Allison Zieve, director of Public Citizen Litigation Group.*

Perhaps more troublingly, Tuesday’s ruling seems to suggest that almost all lawsuits challenging a change in USPS mail delivery procedures must be challenged first before the PRC, a step that would significantly delay any attempt to block Trump from meddling with mail ballot delivery.

The Court of Appeals opinion appears to contemplate this concern, however, noting that challenges that are “collateral” to a regulatory agency review scheme set up by Congress can still be brought directly in federal court. “[S]tructural constitutional claims… are wholly collateral,” the judges wrote. “This is in part because agencies do not normally resolve such constitutional objections.” 

And in a footnote, the court hinted further that filing emergency lawsuits directly in federal court just before an election would be allowed. “[W]e need not address whether the statutory review scheme would have foreclosed all meaningful judicial review at the preliminary injunction stage, when the [plaintiffs] sought to halt the Postal Policy Changes only months before the November 2020 general election,” the judges wrote. 

Any lawsuit seeking to challenge a hypothetical new decree from Trump related to mail ballots would raise constitutional arguments, as other lawsuits that blocked Trump’s earlier orders did.

*This report was updated with comment from Public Citizen.