Trump signs executive order to block federal money for schools, universities with COVID vaccine mandates
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday barring schools who still have coronavirus vaccine mandates from receiving federal funds.
The order, according to a report from Breitbart confirmed by the White House, prohibits "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 requires students to have received a COVID-19 vaccination to attend in-person education programs."
It also tasks Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and the Secretary of Education to establish guidelines for compliance and to "provide a plan to end coercive COVID-19 vaccine mandates."
That includes coming up with a system to block federal funding to "educational entities" that have coronavirus vaccine mandates.
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"That solves that problem," Trump said in the Oval Office.
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Trump also signed an executive order Friday establishing an "energy council" led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
It's not clear how many schools will be affected by the vaccine order. The nonprofit Immunize.org said as of May 2024, no state required COVID-19 vaccines for any grade level K-12. No College Mandates, a group pushing to end coronavirus vaccine mandates, reported that as of December 2024, 15 of the more than 1,200 institutions it tracked had some form of coronavirus vaccine mandate.
An executive order Trump signed in late January called a vaccine mandate for U.S. service members "unfair, overbroad, and [a] completely unnecessary burden."
That order called to "make reinstatement available to all members of the military (active and reserve) who were discharged solely for refusal to receive the COVID-19 vaccine and who request to be reinstated."
The order said in August 2021, the Secretary of Defense "mandated that all service members receive the COVID-19 vaccine." That mandate was rescinded in January 2023.
Trump also signed an executive order in January that removes federal funding from K-12 schools that teach critical race theory.