Election workers sort ballots at the Weld County elections office in Greeley, Colorado, in June 2024. (Photo by Andrew Fraieli/Colorado Newsline)
President Donald Trump’s order on mail-in voting would destroy the U.S. Postal Service’s decades-long independence that was meant to protect it from partisan politics, postal experts and lawyers say.
Postal experts said Trump’s order for the postmaster general to take action – let alone on a matter as sensitive as elections – violated federal law’s guardrails against presidential control of the mail. Several people with extensive knowledge of the Postal Service’s history said they could not recall a similar assignment in the agency’s up-to-date era.
“If the president directs the postmaster general to do anything, including processing these ballots, that is against the statute, against the law,” said James Campbell Jr., a Washington, D.C., area attorney who advises on postal law.
The command, signed March 31stwas quickly condemned as an unconstitutional attempt by Trump to control state elections. If passed, the directive would also represent a seizure of power from the White House over the Postal Service, which remains an vital part of American life and business.
Trump’s order directs the postmaster general, who serves as the Postal Service’s CEO, to set rules requiring states to notify the Postal Service if they plan to send ballots by mail in federal elections. States that want to apply the mail would have to provide lists of absentee voters to the Postal Service, which would be prohibited from delivering ballots to people not on a list.
A board of governors runs the postal service and has the authority to hire and fire the postmaster general. No more than five of the nine governors may belong to the same political party.
While presidents appoint governors and the Senate confirms them, they serve seven-year terms. The length theoretically protects them from political pressure.
S. David Fineman, a Philadelphia lawyer who was appointed to the Board of Governors by President Bill Clinton and served as its chairman from 2003 to 2005, said he had never heard of the White House or a president directing the postmaster general to take specific actions. He described the executive order as highly unusual.
“The postmaster general is available to the board,” Fineman said.
The board currently only has four membersall appointed by President Joe Biden, and five open positions. Trump has sent four nominations this year to the US Senate. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has not scheduled confirmation hearings for the nominees.
The service is tight
Trump has expressed interest in more control over the postal service.
Last year he brought the possibility into play Consolidation of the postal service with the Commerce Department, a move that would require congressional approval. The Washington Post reported In February 2025, it was expected that Trump would attempt to fire the Board of Governors and take control of the Postal Service.
The Trump administration has a impoverished view of independent agencies. Many of the president’s allies subscribe to the unitary executive theory, the idea that the U.S. Constitution gives the president full power over the entire executive branch — meaning that Congress cannot constitutionally create agencies that exist outside the control of the White House.
Since taking office, Trump has sought to assert authority through a range of independent and quasi-independent agencies, most notably the Federal Reserve. The Justice Department is investigating what are widely viewed as cost overruns at a Federal Reserve construction project an excuse to aim Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman whose interest rate policies have angered Trump.
The Postal Service is under enormous financial pressure — potentially making it more vulnerable to proposals to bring it under White House control. Mail volume peaked in 2006 with 213 billion items. The Postal Service now processes 109 billion items annually.
The current Postmaster General, David Steiner, told a U.S. House committee last month that the Postal Service will run out of cash within a year without changing its prices and operations. The Postal Service is generally funded by stamps and other forms of user revenue, not tax dollars.
In his prepared testimony, Steiner emphasized the independent nature of the postal service. He has laid out a number of options to improve the Postal Service’s financial stability, including changes to pension funding and a $15 billion augment in the borrowing limit, a level that has remained unchanged since 1992.
“It is important to remember that we face these challenges as a self-funded, independent institution of the executive branch,” Steiner wrote.
Congress passed comprehensive legislation in 1970 to reorganize the United States Post Office into the United States Postal Service, an independent corporation. Previously, the postmaster general was a Cabinet-level position nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
Trump’s order represents “a dramatic departure from the intent of the 1970 legislation to protect the Postal Service from interference,” said Joseph M. Adelman, a history professor at Framingham State University in Massachusetts who has studied the postal service’s history.
Election security
The White House did not directly answer States Newsroom’s questions about Trump’s views on the independence of the Postal Service or the legal rationale for the executive order.
“Election integrity has always been President Trump’s top priority, and the American people sent him back to the White House because they overwhelmingly supported his common-sense election integrity agenda,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement.
“The President will do everything in his power to lawfully defend the security of America’s elections and ensure that only American citizens participate in them.”
Jackson also called on Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which requires voters to prove their citizenship when registering.
The Postal Service did not respond to questions about how it plans to respond to the order. A USPS spokesman said only that the postal service was looking into the matter.
Complaints
Steiner has indicated that he is waiting for a court decision on how to proceed.
“If a court says that’s not the legal meaning, we will follow that,” Steiner said told the New York Times after the signing of the implementing regulation. “So from our perspective, we don’t get involved in politics or the law, we just follow the law.”
The ordering of mail-in ballots is facing at least five lawsuits. The Democratic National Committee, top Democrats in Congress and Democratic state officials have all sued. The legal challenges underscore the Postal Service’s independence under federal law.
The lawsuit filed by the DNC, top Democratic lawmakers and other Democratic campaign groups claims the Post is structured so that it operates independently of party politics. The complaint calls the Postal Service “essential” to absentee voting and notes that it delivered more than 222 million ballot mail items in 2024, including nearly 100 million general election ballots.
A dozen Republican attorneys general filed motions in court this week to shield the executive order from Democrats’ legal challenges. The filings call the order an example of cooperative federalism, providing states with optional resources to protect their elections.
The GOP officials argue that Democrats have no standing to challenge the order’s postal provisions and that their objections are premature because the Postal Service has not adopted fresh rules for mail-in ballots.
The order simply “directs” the Postal Service to “initiate rulemaking—it does not directly regulate the States, and it does not directly restrict anyone’s voting rights.” a court file says the Attorney General.
States involved in the Republican-led defense of the order include Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas.
Vote by email
Absentee voting surged in the 2020 general election amid the COVID-19 pandemic, when 43% of voters cast their ballots by mail. The percentage of voters sending their ballots by mail has fallen from that peak but is still above pre-pandemic levels. According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, about 30% of voters cast mail-in ballots in 2024.
During the 2024 election, 584,463 mail-in ballots returned by voters were rejected by election officials – 1.2% of mail-in ballots returned. About 18% of those ballots were rejected because they didn’t arrive on time.
Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said in a statement that the Postal Service does not prevent mailers from sending letters or deny delivery of letters based on the sender’s identity. Postal workers are taking extraordinary measures to ensure ballots reach their destination quickly and safely, he said.
“Postal workers take the sanctity of the mail seriously, and every Postal Service process and policy ensures that mail is accepted, processed and delivered, regardless of who sent it or where it goes,” Smith said.
On Monday, more than 100 Democrats met in the US House of Representatives sent a letter to Trump He called on him to refrain from future actions that undermine the independence of the Postal Service and called on him to rescind the executive order. The letter said the order sets “a dangerous precedent for political interference” in Postal Service operations.
Democrats in the Senate followed with a letter to Steiner and the USPS Board of Governors on Tuesday, urging the Postal Service not to implement the order. The letter, signed by 37 senators including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, calls the Postal Service’s independence a “hallmark” of its operations.
“The Postal Service doesn’t care what politicians you support,” said Sen. Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan. said in the Senate last week. “Their only priority is to deliver the mail to every community in the country.”
“The president is now trying to corrupt that mission,” said Peters, the top Democrat on the Senate committee that oversees the USPS. “If the president succeeds in forcing the Postal Service to play a role in the conduct of elections, he will completely undermine the trust of this storied institution.”
