The Biden administration has suddenly put a halt to the implementation of vax mandates for federal employees after the courts shot his efforts down.
Biden had already pushed his mandate and the first round of firings for those who refuse to vax was supposed to have started at the end of January. But that is all on hold, now.
According to the site Government Executive:
Just as the Biden administration was preparing to suspend thousands of employees across the government for failure to comply with its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, it has issued a notice that it will pause all enforcement.
The updated guidance brings the administration in compliance with an injunction issued by a federal court in Texas on Friday, which found that President Biden had overstepped his authority in issuing the executive order last September. The Biden administration had told the court that Friday was the first day that suspensions for some unvaccinated federal employees who had not requested a medical or religious exemption to the mandate would have begun, after it delayed those penalties late last year.
“To ensure compliance with an applicable preliminary nationwide injunction, which may be supplemented, modified, or vacated, depending on the course of ongoing litigation, the federal government will take no action to implement or enforce the COVID-19 vaccination requirement,” the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force, a Biden-created group led by officials in the White House, Office of Personnel Management and General Services Administration, said on Monday.
The punishment phase would have seen upwards to 40,000 federal workers fired. And another 100,000 have asked for exemptions that the administration won’t bother to honor — and they would be fired, too. This would have thrown the government into disarray (Maybe not the worst thing, after all).
All this came to an end — for now — after the Supreme Court said Biden didn’t have the power to enact a vax mandate.
It isn’t likely that Biden is quite done fighting for his unconstitutional and science-free vax mandate. But for now, federal workers who don’t want to vax are safe for now.
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Tags: Joe Biden Vaccine
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