For federal government workers, Monday is the last day to receive a vaccine dose to be considered “fully vaccinated” by the upcoming Nov. 22 deadline for President Biden’s federal workforce vaccine mandate. However, thousands upon thousands of federal workers are still awaiting a response to their religious or medical exemption request, and the backlog on these applications appears to be headed nowhere fast. The question then is what will become of these workers, with pending accommodation requests, once the deadline hits in two weeks?
What’s clear is that the Biden administration, either through ignorance or just plain incompetence, failed to comprehend the vast number of employees who are refusing to be vaccinated as a condition of keeping their federal employment.
Make no mistake, the President could speed this process up or minimally assure accommodation applicants that their rights will be respected and taken seriously. He has not done so leaving thousand of federal workers staring at an uncertain future.
As it stands, employees all over the federal government, including the U.S. Border Patrol and the Bureau of Prisons, have pending accommodation requests waiting to be processed:
But tens of thousands of holdouts have requested exemptions on religious grounds, complicating President Biden’s sweeping mandate to get the country’s largest employer back to normal operations.
Federal agencies have yet to act on the requests piling into managers’ inboxes from vaccine resisters seeking accommodations that would allow them to continue their jobs unvaccinated rather than face the possibility of being fired as the administration has threatened. A far smaller number of employees have asked for exemptions on medical grounds, officials said, prompting what are likely to be more clear-cut decisions on whether to grant them.
The number of religious objectors ranges from a little more than 60 people at the Education Department to many thousands among the 38,000-strong workforce at the Bureau of Prisons, according to federal employee union officials.
It seems unconscionable that these federal workers are being left in limbo while the Biden administration does everything it can to make life uncomfortable for any worker refusing the Covid-19 vaccination. If there is an option for a religious or medical accommodation, the government should process these requests in a timely fashion without delay considering that jobs and livelihoods are on the line.
From what it sounds like, each and every request for accommodation will be investigated and deliberated over to sort through the pile of exemption applications and make sure they’re “valid” requests:
The process could take months for officials designated at each agency, leaving anxious employees in limbo and delaying implementation of a mandate Biden announced in September as a model for employers nationwide. The administration saw the vaccine program as essential to getting workers back in their offices and improving services to taxpayers.
How to fairly and legally weigh the surging requests and determine who receives an exemption has consumed federal attorneys, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), unions and outside lawyers helping employees with the process. The deliberations are particularly acute as the government tries to balance the right to religious freedom against the goal of creating safe workplaces for 2.1 million civilian employees.
The result seems to be the false notion that an option exists for employees to claim a religious or medical accommodation, and have that request be respected by the federal government. Each worker will be forced to “prove” the validity of their request, which makes the requests meaningless in most cases. If the federal government can steamroll the rights of thousands of federal workers, what kind of religious liberties do Americans really have? Individual rights don’t become invalidated once you become a federal employee.
This scenario should not exist, where workers must choose between honoring their deeply held beliefs of keeping their paychecks coming, or accepting a medical procedure they don’t want and in many cases don’t need. All this from a President that repeatedly vowed that there should be no mandated Covid-19 vaccine program.
So much for that campaign pledge. Then again, it’s become plainly clear that Biden’s campaign pledges were not worth the air into which they were uttered.
Until the government, which moves at the speed of backward, can decide how it will process these requests, workers will continue to be cajoled and harassed by whatever agency they happen to work for:
Officials estimate that most unvaccinated employees who have not quit or retired by this point are seeking an exemption. The IRS informed its employees in an email Wednesday that unvaccinated people should expect counseling letters, followed after Nov. 23 by proposed suspensions and removals beginning in December for those still not in compliance.
Under federal workplace rules, those awaiting word on an exemption cannot be summarily fired, and it is unclear how agencies plan to safeguard vaccinated colleagues in the meantime in what typically are close quarters.
From that account, workers can’t be outright fired while their request is pending, but they could end up being placed on unpaid leave which isn’t any better. The problem here is the scale of the problem created by President Biden, which encompasses all federal employees and federal private contractors. There are so many different agencies involved, and so many tens of thousands of accommodation requests, that the government is way over its head in paperwork and processing.
President Biden has created a hostile work environment for workers choosing to reject the Covid vaccination, this conflict shouldn’t exist over an illness with a 99% survival rate among healthy individuals:
One [Federal] prison worker in West Virginia texted a colleague that the worker wasn’t willing to be a guinea pig, writing: “It would be different if it wasn’t new. But it is. And I don’t wanna be your experiment.”
The worker, describing how agonizing the decision had been, said: “I’ve cried and puked so much my eyes and stomach hurts.” The worker wondered if it was wrong to stand firm against the vaccine.
Within the prevailing socialist ideology of the modern Democratic Party, individual rights don’t matter, only the interest of the collective is important, and the federal government will enforce with authoritarian measures. Hence the reason why the constitution guarantees individual rights so that the government cannot steamroll individuals in the name of accomplishing a goal or agenda. In this case, vaccine absolutism is the prevailing idealogy flowing from the Biden administration, and the rights and concerns of individual workers are on the backburner.
The lawsuits will continue, and at least part of Biden’s mandate, the portion covering private employees, already hit a roadblock on Saturday with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Will the federal worker mandate see a similar fate? We’ll know in the coming weeks.
