Postmaster General breaks silence on Trump’s failed mail voting crackdown

Work on a controversial computer database central to President Donald Trump’s effort to restrict voting by mail has been suspended by the U.S. Postal Service, following the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down his executive order this week.

"There’s an injunction so we’re not doing anything," postmaster general David Steiner told The Associated Press in an interview.

Steiner, a former chief executive of Waste Management, has spent much of the past year guiding the postal service through political turbulence and financial hardship. He continues to press Congress for legislative changes to help resolve what he has described as a "liquidity crisis."

Trump’s efforts to largely eliminate voting by mail transformed the postal service into an unlikely arbiter of voter eligibility just months before this year's critical midterm elections.

Steiner seemed reluctant to play that role. While Trump launched sharp criticism at the Supreme Court decision and mocked several justices, Steiner offered no assessment of the ruling.

Steiner also declined to take a position on Trump’s policy, characterizing himself as the leader of an "independent agency of the executive branch" whose involvement with the president’s order was strictly limited to operational concerns.

"I don’t get to decide what rules that are put on us that I decide to accept or not accept," he said. "I looked at it more from the execution side."

The agency has previously asserted its independence, including during a 2019 standoff when the first Trump administration sought to pressure the service during a dispute with Amazon. Steiner said he would not get into the "nuance" of that previous standoff.

Intense political pressure has occasionally fueled speculation regarding whether Steiner might resign, a possibility he explicitly denied.

"There’s no truth to that," he said. "I think I know the motivation behind it. I think it’s somebody that would like to see me out of a job."

Under the executive order Trump signed in March, several federal agencies were tasked with developing state citizenship lists. Those records were to be sent to an online portal at the Postal Service, which would then be allowed to send mail ballots exclusively to voters cleared through the process.

Steiner noted he learned of the order about a month before its unveiling, emphasizing that his focus remained strictly on implementation rather than policy merits.

A whistleblower report released earlier this month by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., argued that the system had been hastily built and was riddled with errors.

Steiner acknowledged reading "portions" of the report and recognized the obstacles associated with rapidly building such a massive platform. Nevertheless, he expressed confidence in colleagues working on the project and said the agency had planned to unveil it around Sept. 15.