“We demand that you rescind Executive Order 14399 immediately.” That is the line more than 100 members of Congress put to President Trump in a letter led by Democratic Reps. Nikki Budzinski of Illinois (IL-13) and Chris Pappas of New Hampshire (NH-01).
The order, signed March 31, 2026, is titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” It tells the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Social Security Administration and state governments, to compile lists of US citizens eligible to vote in each state. The Postal Service would then deliver ballots only to voters whose names are on those lists. Section 3(iii) says the Postal Service is to “not transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual unless those individuals have been enrolled on a State-specific list.”
The lawmakers, who numbered 101 according to Budzinski’s and Pappas’s announcement, made two arguments. They said the order is illegal. They also said it can’t work.
The legal argument
On the law, the letter points to two things. The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 took the Postal Service out of the president’s Cabinet and placed it under an independent Board of Governors. The letter says the order cuts against that law. And Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution leaves the “manner” of holding congressional elections to the states or Congress. “The President does not have the authority to issue an executive order that attempts to undermine the ability of states to run their own elections,” the members wrote.
Oversight of the Postal Service, they said, belongs to the Board of Governors, the Postal Regulatory Commission and Congress.
The practical argument
The letter leans on numbers from 2024. The Postal Service delivered more than 48 million ballots that year, according to the lawmakers, close to 31 percent of all voters in the general election, and over 99 percent arrived on time. They credited the agency’s more than 600,000 employees.
Under the new order, those employees would have to cross-check and possibly pull election mail already moving through the system, working from lists supplied by Homeland Security and the states. The members called that “untenable,” a job of checking tens of millions of ballots in a narrow window before an election. In their words it would delay “all types of mail, including election ballots, medicine, bills, and paychecks.”
The letter also asks Trump for a written commitment to stop any future actions that would undermine the Postal Service’s independence.
Outside backing
Americans Against Government Censorship, a group that has been campaigning against the order, endorsed the letter. Its executive director, Cole Leiter, called the order “an unconstitutional power grab” and said the White House “wants control over who gets a ballot.” He added: “This is not about election security.”
