Supreme Court wipes rulings on federal employee, military vaccine mandates

The Supreme Court wiped a series of rulings implicating the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates for federal employees and military service members, preventing the decisions from holding the weight of precedent in the future.

With the mandates rescinded, the justices sided with the Biden administration Monday in agreeing to set aside the lower rulings after deeming the disputes moot, thus providing a clean legal slate for any future vaccine mandates.

Courts had come to conflicting conclusions in the cases, but before the Supreme Court could weigh in on any of the appeals, the vaccine requirements were canceled. At issue before the justices was what legal remedy was appropriate given the developments.

On the federal employee mandate, two appeals courts had arrived at opposite conclusions about whether federal employees had the ability to challenge the constitutionality of the mandate in court, or whether they were required to instead first go through the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB).

In one case brought by a Navy civilian employee, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in March that federal law required the MSPB. A few days later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit issued a conflicting decision in favor of an organization called Feds for Medical Freedom and various other plaintiffs.

Biden rescinded his executive order that established the federal employee vaccine mandate in early May, before the Supreme Court could weigh in on either case. 

President Joe Biden meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

In the military vaccine mandate case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit issued an injunction preventing the Air Force from enforcing the requirement against religious objectors. 

Weeks later, Congress passed legislation directing Biden’s defense secretary to rescind the mandate before the Supreme Court could consider any appeal.

In all three disputes, the administration urged the justices to issue what is known as a Munsingwear vacatur, which sets aside a lower ruling in certain instances of mootness.

The Navy employee who lost in the lower court agreed, while the victorious plaintiffs in the other federal employee case and the military vaccine case urged the Supreme Court to let their rulings stand.

Those plaintiffs argued that Munsingwear wasn’t applicable because the Biden administration had voluntarily mooted its own case. One group noted that other pandemic-era measures were dismantled months earlier, while the vaccine mandate remained in effect.

“Petitioners ask this Court to endorse a ‘heads we win, tails you get vacated’ version of Munsingwear, where they can litigate to the hilt in both district and circuit court and—only if they lose—then decline to seek substantive review from this Court and instead moot the case and ask this Court to erase the circuit court loss from the books,” those plaintiffs’ attorney wrote to the justices.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has repeatedly pushed back on the legal maneuver, dissented from the court’s decision in two of the three cases. In the third, Jackson said she would personally disagree but agreed to the administration’s request based on the Supreme Court’s established practice.

“In my view, the party seeking vacatur has not established equitable entitlement to that remedy,” Jackson wrote.

The Biden administration pushed back by arguing the changing public health circumstances is what caused the president to end the federal employee mandate.

“The President revoked EO 14,043 because of the waning of the pandemic, not any effort to evade judicial review or gain litigation advantage,” the Justice Department wrote in court filings.