President Donald Trump signed an executive order late Monday to reinstate military members who were discharged for refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19 after the Biden administration made it a requirement for service members.
Trump’s executive action is aimed at following through with his Inauguration Day pledge to reinstate discharged service members “with full back pay.” It could apply to more than 8,000 military members who were discharged from the military due to the mandate after it went into effect in 2021, and it’s a welcome move by Republicans on Capitol Hill, who had been hungry to revisit the divisive mandate that they messaged heavily around.
“The vaccine mandate was an unfair, overbroad, and completely unnecessary burden on our service members,” states the order.
Vaccine requirements for service members are common, but there was pushback to the COVID-19 vaccine as the Republican Party more broadly resisted it during the pandemic.
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On Capitol Hill, Republican lawmakers had been eager for such an executive action. They had weaponized the Biden administration mandate as pandemic-era politics shifted, arguing that it was unfair to force the vaccine on military members and that it hurt military recruitment.
“They should have never treated our military members that way. I think it’s going to be a dark spot in our history,” Rep. John Rutherford, a Republican who sponsored a 2023 bill to reinstate military members who requested an exemption from the mandate and were terminated, told NOTUS last week.
Rutherford added that he’s happy that Trump’s executive order will go a step further than his own bill by giving members back pay.
Joe Biden initially made the decision to enforce a vaccine mandate in August 2021 after consulting Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other senior officials in the military. It stayed in effect for 15 months until it was rescinded in the National Defense Authorization Act passed in January 2023.
“There was a tremendous amount of concern, and they were firing everybody from it,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin said on Monday. “I said, [military members are] going to end up being promoted and being back paid and possibly set up for lawsuits.”
Few of the thousands who left the service because of the mandate ever returned. CNN reported that as of Monday only 113 members who left the military because of the mandate tried to rejoin.
Despite Republicans’ insistence that “wokeness” is leading to the decline in military recruitment, the Pentagon in December announced that the Defense Department’s armed services branches saw a 12.5% increase in the number of people recruited in fiscal year 2024 compared to the prior year.
“We can’t really afford to throw people out based on their conscience,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, who serves on the Committee on Armed Services, told NOTUS ahead of the executive order being signed. “As it turns out, it was a dumb idea anyway. It was an unnecessary thing for young healthy military personnel to even get the vaccine.”
The Trump administration had telegraphed that the executive order was coming immediately after he took office, including Trump’s promise during his inaugural address that he would sign the order in an effort to “stop our warriors from being subjected to radical political theories and social experiments while on duty.”
It was one of several military-focused executive orders Trump signed Monday.
“There never should have been a vaccine mandate in the first place,” Rep. Harriet Hageman, who co-sponsored Rutherford’s bill, told NOTUS.
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Torrence Banks is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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