USPS says it’s not implementing Trump’s anti-mail voting order, for now

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) confirmed it is following a pair of court orders blocking it from implementing President Donald Trump’s anti-mail voting executive order. 

“The Postal Service is abiding by these injunctions, which are also currently under appeal,” Postmaster General David Steiner and Amber McReynolds, chairwoman of the USPS board of governors, wrote Monday in a letter to Senate Democrats obtained by Democracy Docket.

The USPS leaders were responding to concerns Democratic senators raised in a letter after Trump issued his executive order in March. That order directed the Postal Service to only deliver mail ballots if states handed over a list of preapproved voters. The senators later reiterated their concerns after USPS published a proposed rule to execute the order in June. 

Trump’s directive also mandated USPS to develop secure ballot envelopes with unique barcodes for tracking and utilize them ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

USPS’s letter contends that, even though the agency proposed the rule in response to the executive order, the changes themselves would be “consistent with the Postal Service’s existing — and longstanding — recommended best practices.” 

A federal court in Massachusetts blocked the USPS’s rule implementation last month, and another court in Washington D.C. soon issued its own injunction. 

In the letter, USPS acknowledged both court orders, which stemmed from a lawsuit launched by 23 Democratic-led states challenging the executive order and an existing 2021 consent decree between USPS and the NAACP regarding the delivery of election-related mail. 

“Any issuance of a final rule would be impacted by the outcome of ongoing litigation,” the USPS leaders wrote. “In this regard, an injunction was issued limiting implementation of the Executive Order with respect to a subset of states for the upcoming General Election. A separate injunction has also been issued enjoining implementation of the proposed rule.”

The Department of Justice is appealing both cases on behalf of USPS. 

The March executive order also instructed the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to assemble separate lists of citizens eligible to vote in each state.

Trump’s order is part of his administration’s broad, multi-front effort to make it more difficult for Americans to vote. Since returning to office, the president has pushed legislation that would supposedly combat the nearly nonexistent problem of noncitizen voting. 

His DOJ has also sued 30 states and the District of Columbia in a bid to gain access to their unredacted registration rolls containing voters’ confidential personal data. So far, courts have ruled against the DOJ in 15 cases.

This is a breaking news report that has been updated.