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Q&A – Could Biden Mandate Vaccinations For Those On Government Programs? Part 2
Bottom Line: Could it be possible for federally administered programs like Medicare, Social Security and the Earned Income Tax Credit come with a vaccine mandate attached to them? Yes, but not through executive action. The legal authority President Biden is attempting to use for workplace vaccine mandates is through OSHA. OSHA was signed into law in December 1970. While providing a host of sweeping employer requirements for workplaces it also included in an open-ended ability for regulators to change regulations over time as they deemed necessary for the safety of workplaces and to uphold the rights of employees for a safe work environment. President Biden’s order will be drafted and enacted through OSHA by those regulators. His order is a directive to the agency to do this. Not the actual policy itself. We’ve seen different but similar example of this with Governor DeSantis’s recent EO to the Florida Board of Education over parental opt-outs for School Mask Mandates. His order wasn’t the policy. It was to the FDOH and FDOE to get together to enact a related rule which they did.
Should any federal programs be attached to vaccine mandates, it’d require an act of Congress. All federal assistance programs have been authorized by Congress. Unlike OSHA, which only applies to workplaces, none were enacted with regulators able to apply specific health standards to the receipt of them. For that reason, for an effort to even be attempted by President Biden or any federal official to issue vaccine mandates as a condition of receiving them, each program individually would have to be altered by Congress to reflect that ability and be signed into law by the president.
Even the most militant on the left in Congress along with the Dictator-Wannabee-in-Chief aren’t about to open up Medicare, Social Security and other federal benefit programs to changes for the purpose of instituting a COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Though Constitutionally flawed, Biden’s logic is pretty clear. Nationally 89.7% of Americans 65 and older (retirement age) have been vaccinated – that rate is 99.9% in Florida. Hence the focus on the workplace.