The Joe Biden administration overstepped its authority by utilizing the Procurement Act to impose a COVID-19 vaccination mandate for most employees of government contractors, a federal appeals court said Friday.
However, a federal district judge in Georgia went too far in issuing a nationwide injunction against the contractor vaccine mandate, the panel of judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit said in the two-to-one majority opinion.
“The district court appropriately determined that the plaintiffs are entitled to a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of the contractor vaccine mandate,” the Atlanta-based appeals court wrote. “But the scope of that injunction—extending nationwide and without distinction to plaintiffs and nonparties alike—was overbroad.”
The case was originally brought by seven states in U.S. District Court in Georgia against the Biden administration, the Office of Management and Budget and multiple agencies in October 2021.
Georgia, Alabama, Idaho, Kansas, South Carolina, Utah, and West Virginia all sued. The states are home to three Department of Energy nuclear cleanup sites: the Idaho National Laboratory, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Moab tailings reclamation site in Utah.
The injunctive relief will be issued to the seven plaintiff states as well as Associated Builders and Contractors, which was a plaintiff in the case, the appeals court said.
“Nothing in the [Procurement] Act contemplates that every executive agency can base every procurement decision on the health of the contracting workforce,” the 11th Circuit said.
As the Supreme Court emphasized, in ruling against an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule mandating employees COVID vaccinations for major companies, “requiring widespread Covid-19 vaccination is “’no everyday exercise of federal power,’” the 11th Circuit said.
Federal agencies can refuse to contract with firms that fail to meet certain cybersecurity qualifications because Congress passed a law to that effect, the appeals court panel said. But that is not the case with the COVID-19 vaccination mandate.
A dissent by Judge Lanier Anderson, said the grounds for the COVID-19 policy did not come out of left field. “Requiring a vaccination in the midst of an ongoing pandemic would not have been surprising to the 1949 Congress,” which passed the procurement rule, Anderson wrote. At that time, “the country was suffering from a polio epidemic.”
Oral arguments were held before the appeals court in April on the nationwide injunction against enforcement of the COVID vaccination mandate by U.S. District Court Judge Stan Baker in Southern Georgia.
Another big legal case concerning the government policy on COVID-19 vaccination is scheduled to be argued in New Orleans Sept. 13. The full Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will consider the government’s authority to order most federal employees to be vaccinated. The DOE said last month it will no longer seek COVID vaccination status information as a matter of routine for its employees, contractors and visitors.
