President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Friday, pulling federal funding from U.S. schools who still enforce COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
The order bans “federal funds from being used to support or subsidize an educational service agency, state education agency, local education agency, elementary school, secondary school, or institution of higher education that [still] requires students to have received a COVID-19 vaccination to attend in-person education programs.”
The order requires the department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to take the lead and “provide a plan to end coercive COVID-19 vaccine mandates.”
Although the vast majority of schools have already dropped COVID-19 vaccine mandates, the order fulfills Trump’s campaign promise to “not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate” — while also discouraging a similar scenario from happening in the future.
According to the National Academy for State Public Health, twenty-one states currently still have bans on COVID-19 mandates in schools.
The order follows after President Trump’s executive order last month, which pulled federal funding from K-12 schools teaching critical race theory (CRT), as it “Indoctrinate[s] [children] in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight.”
“Such an environment operates as an echo chamber, in which students are forced to accept these ideologies without question or critical examination. In many cases, innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics,” the order continued.
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