Pentagon stops implementing vaccine mandate for defense contractors

WASHINGTON: The race to vaccinate defense workers is now at a standstill, after a US district court judge blocked the implementation of the vaccine mandate for federal contractors last week.

The Defense Department issued a Dec. 9 memo instructing its contracting officers to stop enforcing President Joe Biden’s Sept. 9 executive order, which required workers for federal contractors to be vaccinated for COVID-19 by Jan. 18. The memo was first reported by Politico.

The memo was released after a judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of Georgia issued a nationwide injunction on Dec. 7, which prevents the vaccine mandate from being carried out.

Pentagon spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell acknowledged that the department has “provided guidance to contracting officers to ensure compliance with the court order and instructed contracting officers not to enforce the vaccination mandate at this time,” she said in a statement.

She added that the department “fully supports” Biden’s executive order and “has consistently stated that having a fully vaccinated workforce is one of the surest ways to bolster our readiness and safely meet national security readiness requirements.”

Exactly which programs and workers would be covered under the mandate has been a source of confusion across industry and government.

The Pentagon’s original order required contractors to be vaccinated for all new Defense Department contracts worth $250,000 or more for services — including construction — performed in the United States. Contracting officers also have the latitude to mandate vaccination for workers involved in new and existing contracts for products, as well as contracts valued at less than $250,000.

Whether a contract is classified as a “service” or a “product” is typically determined by its Product Service Code, Maxwell said. Products are tangible goods owned by the Defense Department military, like a laptop or aircraft carrier, while services are harder to define and could include products that the department does not own, such as hardware leased by a military service.

In October, several companies — including Northrop Grumman and Raytheon — indicated they had begun hiring workers under the expectation that companies would be forced to lay off employees who did not conform with the mandate.

In November, Huntington Ingalls Industries announced that it would no longer enforce the vaccination mandate for its Ingalls Shipbuilding and Newport News Shipbuilding workers. “Our customer has confirmed that our contracts do not include a requirement to implement the mandate,” HII President and CEO Mike Petters said in a memo to employees.

In a recent interview with Breaking Defense, BAE Systems Inc. CEO Tom Arseneault said his company is “feeling” the impacts of the COVID mandate.

“I think we’re right on the verge of [mid-90% vaccination rate], adding more every day, but we will get to a point where there’ll be some percentage, hopefully small, of the population who will not comply. And so we’re working with the administration, with DoD, to find ways to try to create some flexibility and maybe buy a little bit more time so that we can either find ways to backfill those resources or get them over the hump.