Federal Court Orders Nationwide Pause on Biden's Federal Employee Vaccine Mandate
The Biden administration has already filed an appeal of the injunction.
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A federal court in Texas has issued an injunction against President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for the federal workforce, pausing implementation of a requirement for more than 2 million civilian servants.
The Biden administration has already had sweeping success with the mandate, as most agencies have seen virtually their entire workforces come into compliance. Still, federal offices across the country were just beginning to move forward with suspensions—which could eventually result in firings—for those who did not meet the requirements. Biden issued the mandate by executive order in September.
Judge Jeffrey Brown, appointed by President Trump to the U.S. Court for the Southern District of Texas, said the case was not about whether individuals should be vaccinated or even about federal power generally.
“It is instead about whether the president can, with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress, require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment,” Brown wrote. “That, under the current state of the law as just recently expressed by the Supreme Court, is a bridge too far.”
The Supreme Court last week struck down a Biden order that would have required private sector employers with more than 100 workers, and the U.S. Postal Service, to test or vaccinate their employees. The federal employee case was brought by Feds for Medical Freedom, which filed three different lawsuits against the mandate, as well as an American Federation of Government Employees council that represents workers in the Homeland Security Department's Federal Protective Service.
The Biden administration immediately filed an appeal to the Fifth Circuit court. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the mandate had already led to 98% of federal employees getting vaccinated, which she called a “remarkable number.”
“Obviously we are confident in our legal authority here,” Psaki said.
Following the Supreme Court’s ruling in the private employers case last week, Brown had tasked both Feds for Medical Freedom and the Biden administration with issuing new briefs to reflect the decision.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services mandate for health care workers at facilities that receive federal funding that the court upheld was much more narrow in focus, Feds for Medical Freedom argued, whereas the Occupational Safety and Health Administration lacked clear statutory authority for its broad rule focused on the private sector. Like the OSHA rule that the Supreme Court struck down, the federal employee mandate applied to every worker indiscriminately. Because the requirement applies regardless of an individual’s job, Feds for Medical Freedom argued the court’s finding that the risk of COVID-19 is untethered from the workplace applied to its case as well. The pandemic is part of the hazards of daily life, they said, again quoting the court’s majority ruling, and both OSHA and the president have never issued such mandates before.
The Biden administration had pushed back in a new filing this week, saying the federal government, like any employer, can choose to impose a mandate on its employees.
“The president possesses independent constitutional authority to act as CEO of the executive branch, even absent confirming statutory authority from Congress,” Justice Department officials in Texas wrote. They added the OSHA rule affected 84 million private sector employees, whereas the president’s mandate is aimed at a much smaller group.
It is “not at all surprising” the president has never issued such a mandate previously, the officials said, and restricting the executive branch’s ability to respond to novel circumstances would prevent it from dealing with the pandemic at all. They further suggested that President Reagan’s drug-testing mandate for feds was an example of the executive branch responding to a new epidemic of drug use. The officials also said the Merit Systems Protection Board, rather than the federal circuit, would be the appropriate forum to resolve the case.
In his ruling, Brown noted that Friday was the first day that some employee suspensions were scheduled to take effect. Agencies are currently sorting through the hundreds of thousands of requests for medical and religious exemptions to the mandate and have just started issuing some of those decisions.
Brown argued the mandate amounted to a “Hobson’s choice” between their “jobs and their jabs.”
