One has to wonder whether President Biden’s vaccine mandate on companies with over 100 employees was ever designed to be implemented, or just serve as an empty of intimidation from the federal government on Covid-19 vaccine holdouts? It’s been weeks since the mandate was announced, and OSHA, the agency tasked with actually creating rules for employers to follow, is in total disarray over what these rules are supposed to look like. As a result, businesses are even more confused than the government is about when this rule takes effect and how it will be implemented and the vaccination status of employees will be validated.
That didn’t stop President Biden on Thursday from touting his new rules that his own White House doesn’t know how to implement. Short on details, Biden is continuing to praise himself for getting workers fired over not receiving a Covid-19 vaccination.
With no details, only promises of releasing these rules “soon,” business and government officials remain clueless as to how Biden thinks this plan is even workable:
President Joe Biden stumped for his national vaccine mandate at a speaking engagement in Chicago on Thursday but offered no further information on when the plan, that’s set to impact 100 million U.S. workers, will go into effect.
Biden said the U.S. Department of Labor continues to work on the new rules which will be released “soon” but said the announcement itself has already spurred some large U.S. companies to launch their own in-house mandates ahead of the new federal rules.
“When I announced the first requirement, that encouraged businesses to feel they can come in and demand the same thing of their own employees,” Biden said. “More people are getting vaccinated, more lives are being saved.”
That last paragraph may be the real goal of this mess, to drive up vaccination numbers with threats of mandated vaccinations. The President’s order ultimately might not survive legal challenges, the White House may expect that, but it can push forward anyway trying to create the outcome it desires even it eventually loses in court.
If you take a peek over at OSHA, the agency in charge of writing the vaccine mandate rules, the situation isn’t any better with infighting and anger toward the White House:
It marked the first time in nearly five years that the small agency had the opportunity to fulfill its mission to protect workers across industries from “recognized serious hazards.” But it also highlighted tensions between OSHA and the White House, exposing simmering resentments over how the White House has approached working with the Department of Labor during the pandemic, according to three former top OSHA officials.
“It’s been a very frustrating nine months for OSHA,” says Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA Jordan Barab, referencing a series of instructions from the Biden Administration, including the most recent plan for a vaccine and testing mandate. “This whole thing was basically thought up in the White House.”
If the plan was thought up by the White House, without consent of the agency actually in charge of implementing the rules, then how does the Biden administration expect it to be implemented smoothly, or implemented at all? If businesses go ahead and implement their own mandate, driving up their vaccination numbers, then isn’t Biden’s goal accomplished without the need to actually fulfill his own order?
The other possibility, and it’s probably the more likely answer, is that this administration is an administration of chaos and confusion. OSHA doesn’t know how to write the rules and hasn’t produced them yet because the White House came up with the idea out of thin air and hoisted it on the country without so much of an afterthought to the implementation.
Beyond the confusion between the Biden administration and OSHA, there are federal contractors and private employers still waiting for some kind of guidance to get a picture of what these rules will look like:
“The details of what the ETS [Emergency Temporary Standard] will include are scarce at this point, leaving many questions unanswered,” noted law firm Fisher Phillips. How will the 100-employee threshold be counted? Will employers be required to collect proof of vaccination? What type of testing will be required? Will remote employees be covered?
Much of this feels like the White House is just relying on private employers to do the dirty work and implement their own mandates, which is already happening in some cases. If Biden’s continued pushing of his unworkable and perhaps illegal vaccine mandate gets the desired results, they can eventually scrap it decide not to bother with rules.
Until then, Biden will continue patting himself on the back for praising his own executive orders that may end up getting overturned in court.
