Fear has grown so suffocating inside federal agencies that whistleblowers now feel they have a "gun to their heads," former Trump Homeland Security official Miles Taylor warned this week, saluting a U.S. Postal Service employee who braved that climate to expose the administration's rushed effort to police the nation's mail ballots in defiance of a court order.
The complaint, released Tuesday by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), warns that the Postal Service built an "untested" barcode system to carry out President Donald Trump's order restricting voting by mail. As designed, the whistleblower said, if a single barcode in a batch of 10,000 ballots fails to scan, the entire batch is bounced back to state officials, potentially stopping millions of ballots from reaching voters. Work began in June and continued despite a court injunction, according to the disclosure, which was prepared with Whistleblower Aid.
The revelations set off alarm among election lawyers and Democrats days ahead of mail voting for the November midterms. A federal judge has temporarily blocked Trump's order, which 23 states and Washington, D.C. are challenging in court. The White House disputed the whistleblower's account, with spokesperson Lauren Bis calling the software "neither complex nor unique," and USPS said it is "carefully reviewing" the concerns.
For Taylor, the missed story was the person who stepped forward.
"The fear is palpable inside federal agencies," he wrote in a Tuesday essay for his anti-Trump group Defiance, which has partnered with the nonprofit representing the whistleblower. He pointed to a Partnership for Public Service survey in which the share of federal employees confident they could report wrongdoing without retaliation fell from about 75% to roughly 22% since Trump returned to office. Taylor also noted the administration has fired at least 17 inspectors general and floated a governmentwide gag rule that critics have said would silence potential whistleblowers.
Taylor himself blew the whistle on Trump years ago, and said the disclosure is already bolstering the legal fight against the mail voting order.
"Somewhere out there in America, a public servant looked at a plan to sabotage your vote. Over their own self-doubt and the daunting consequences of self-sacrifice, he or she decided their oath to the Constitution mattered more than their own safety. That’s what saving a democracy actually looks like, friends. It’s rarely the famous people swinging their fists at the dictator. It’s almost always someone like this," he concluded.