President Donald Trump is dragging the US Postal Service deeper into his war on mail-in voting.
After years of baselessly casting vote by mail as a fraud magnet, Trump in March issued an executive order that would push USPS far beyond delivering ballots — and into the business of deciding who gets one.
That order has raised alarms inside the Postal Service over whether it can or should take on such a complicated and controversial role, sources told CNN, especially when it may need help from Trump and Republicans to steady its finances.
Under the order, the Postal Service would work with states to determine who can vote by mail and enforce that eligibility, flagging or rejecting ballots tied to people not on those lists. Voting-rights groups and some Democratic-led states say that’s an unconstitutional power grab: The Constitution gives states — not the president or USPS — control over election administration.
“USPS is no longer merely a carrier of ballots; it is instead transformed into a gatekeeper of voter eligibility,” lawyers challenging the order wrote.
Even as the lawsuits move through federal court, the order directs the Postal Service to begin the first stage of implementation — its rulemaking process — by the end of May. The Postal Service says it’s begun that process, but current and former postal officials question whether a cash-strapped USPS could take on a sweeping new election role — or whether its independent board could refuse.
Still, USPS is trying to comply, balancing its legal authority with a desire to avoid a confrontation with the White House or Congress, two sources familiar with the discussions told CNN.
The timing is fraught. On Friday, the Postal Service announced a nearly $2 billion quarterly loss, and USPS leaders have warned that the agency, already facing operational cutbacks and an unsustainable business model, could run out of money within a year without help from Congress and the administration.
“If the Postal Service decides to do this, it will be a disaster,” former USPS Board of Governors Chair S. David Fineman told CNN. “They don’t have the resources to build this or the administrative infrastructure to do it.”
It’s the latest escalation in a fight that first flared in 2020, when Trump threatened to withhold USPS funding as mail-in voting surged during the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, with the Supreme Court weighing limits on counting ballots that arrive after Election Day, Trump is again trying to reshape how — and whether — Americans vote by mail, and he wants the Postal Service to help.
Trump’s March order directs the federal government to build “state citizenship lists” of eligible voters using federal data, including Social Security and immigration records — tools that have shown limits and errors when used to verify citizenship. It pressures states to cross-check their voter rolls against those lists and to remove people the federal government deems ineligible.
It then calls for the Postal Services to work with states on a narrowed list of voters approved to receive mail-in ballots — and to stop delivering absentee ballots to or from anyone not on that list. The goal is to ensure mail ballots are sent only to eligible voters, a White House official told CNN.
“Absentee ballots do not currently abide by the same secure processes that exist for in-person voting, and the USPS rule will fix that,” the official said.
But voting-rights lawyers warn that would effectively turn USPS into an election enforcement arm, even though there’s no evidence of widespread fraud from ballots cast by mail.
The order also raises the threat of criminal penalties for delivering ballots to ineligible voters, alarming the nation’s largest postal unions, which fear their members could be put at legal risk if they’re pushed into policing voter eligibility.
“We are frankly very skeptical about our ability to even do this effectively,” National Association of Letter Carriers President Brian Renfroe told CNN, saying his union is pressing Postal Service leaders on how to implement a plan without politicizing the agency. “I’m very concerned about where this road leads.”
In one of the lawsuits brought by Democratic-led states, lawmakers and voting rights groups, the district court judge has set a hearing for Thursday, meaning there could be a ruling ahead of the Postal Service rulemaking deadline at the end of the month.
Election law experts say the order is likely to be struck down by the courts because it clashes with procedures set by states for absentee voting, and the Constitution grants states the power to run elections. Trump’s executive order last year on voting, which mandated a proof-of-citizenship requirement to register to vote, was blocked by the courts.
Current and former election officials say the latest order would cause chaos at the state level because it clashes with many state laws. In particular, it includes a provision that requires the list of eligible mail-in voters to be sent 60 days before an election, a deadline that is well before when many states allow voters to register or request a mail ballot.
“They would be completely at odds,” said Kathy Boockvar, a former Pennsylvania secretary of state who runs an election security firm. “It puts extra burdens on election officials with, of course, no funding, no infrastructure and no support.”
Conservative groups and a dozen Republican-led states have lined up behind the administration, arguing that mail voting is vulnerable to abuse and that the Postal Service has the power to restrict mailed ballots.
“The goal is simple: make sure the Postal Service knows that every federal ballot it delivers was sent by a lawful election authority to a verified voter, and make sure it can trace every one of those ballots from start to finish,” the conservative group America First Legal wrote in a petition to USPS.
Even now, key details of Trump’s plan remain murky. In one recent Justice Department filing, government lawyers described the USPS program as “voluntary and on a state-by-state basis.”
“Then we’re opting out. No, thank you,” joked Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read, whose state is among those suing the Trump administration to block the executive order. “It’s not realistic and it’s not legal.”
The Department of Homeland Security is also weighing how to carry out Trump’s order. In a court filing this month, a DHS official said it has “not yet begun preparation of any ‘State Citizenship List’” and has not decided which federal databases it would use to create them.
In the Justice Department’s filings to dismiss the lawsuits, agency lawyers outlined potential ways the order could be used, including for “post-election law-enforcement” of voter fraud.
USPS leaders and lawyers are now deliberating how to carry out Trump’s order, a Postal Service official said in a court filing this month. In a brief statement, a USPS spokesperson confirmed they’re “working on a draft of a proposed rule.”
One option under discussion would require states to provide a written list of voters receiving mail ballots when they hand over batches of ballots to be delivered, according to a source familiar with the talks. That approach would largely keep USPS in its traditional role of processing, tracking and delivering mail.
But some inside the agency question whether it has the legal authority — or the practical ability — to keep voter lists or verify ballots against them, the source said.
The administration has not said who would pay for the agency’s potential new workload.
“It is not a postal worker’s responsibility to verify who can vote and who can’t vote,” said Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union. “When you politicize us, then you take away the trust that we have earned from the American people.”
The rhetoric undermining mail-in voting has grown so toxic that the union launched a national TV ad campaign in April promoting the security and reliability of the practice.
“It was a message to the American people that vote by mail works,” Smith said. “It’s safe, it’s efficient and it gives people opportunity.”
Former USPS Board of Governors Vice Chair Anton Hajjar said implementing the order is “infeasible,” especially before the midterms, and seems designed to make mail-in voting harder.
“The Postal Service has done a very, very good job, and there is really no documentation of any fraud being committed in mail balloting,” Hajjar told CNN. “Even if it were lawful, I think this would be an enormous undertaking.”
Voting-rights lawyers and some former senior postal officials, including Hajjar, say USPS — an independent entity governed by its board — likely has the power to resist or outright reject the president’s directives. So far, though, it has not done so publicly.
“If the Postal Service is correctly an apolitical body, it doesn’t need to pick a fight, it doesn’t need to start a fight — it can just not do it,” said Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who worked on voting issues in Democratic administrations. “The thing (Trump) has asked to regulate is a thing he can’t ask. And I think the postmaster general knows that. The board of governors know that.”
But the Postal Service finds itself in a precarious position — navigating Trump’s demands as it desperately seeks to stabilize its future.
Postmaster General David Steiner warned Congress in March that USPS could be out of money within a year without legislative action. The Postal Service has spent years pushing lawmakers for a financial overhaul that would let it borrow more money and loosen long-standing limits on postage rates — changes that hinge on lawmakers and the president.
In March 2025, at the behest of the Trump administration, then-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy granted the Department of Government Efficiency limited access at USPS to help with cost-cutting and efficiency, drawing swift criticism over the agency’s statutory independence. But behind the scenes, DeJoy’s restrictions on DOGE frustrated some inside the administration — and the tug-of-war only fueled Trump’s push to oust him, according to two former senior USPS officials.
Trump has since nominated four candidates to the USPS board, which currently has only four seated members — potentially reshaping it into a board more willing to back his agenda.