White House Announces Temporary Hold on Vaccine Mandate Disciplinary Actions
In response to noncompliance with its mandate that federal workers be vaccinated against COVID-19, the Biden administration announced Monday that suspensions and other serious penalties will be delayed until 2022.
As previously reported by FEDmanager, the Biden Administration required all federal workers to be fully vaccinated by November 22 or request a medical or religious exemption. To resolve noncompliance, the White House advised agencies to offer a week of counseling to encourage employees to get vaccinated, followed by suspensions and, eventually, more severe adverse personnel actions, such as terminations.
Yet in a Monday email, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Kiran Ahuja and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Deputy Director for Management Jason Miller suggested agencies wait until January to begin instituting discipline actions.
According to Ahuja and Miller, for this year, agencies should only issue letters of reprimand to non-compliant federal employees if it is warranted. Although, they acknowledged that in rare circumstances, agencies should move forward with adverse personnel actions more quickly.
“We have been clear that the goal of the federal employee vaccination requirement is to protect federal workers, not to punish them. Last week’s deadline was not an endpoint or a cliff. We are continuing to see more and more federal employees getting their shots,” they stated, “Given that tremendous progress, we encourage your agencies to continue with robust education and counseling efforts through this holiday season as the first step in an enforcement process, with no subsequent enforcement actions.”
To reflect the change, the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force updated its website with guidance encouraging agencies to issue reprimands to noncompliant employees before imposing more serious sanctions, as well as allowing repeated suspensions before firing an employee.
A second suspension (15 days or more) should be considered following an initial brief suspension (14 days or less) rather than moving from a first suspension to a proposal of removal, according to the task force report, though government-wide consistency is a commendable goal.
