President Trump signed an executive order Friday to defund schools and other education agencies that require COVID-19 vaccines for students and staff.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the head of the Department of Education are directed to create a plan to end these mandates and end federal funding for entities that do not comply.
Plans for the executive action were first reported Friday by Breitbart.
The order helps Trump fulfill his campaign to end the mandates many schools enacted after the COVID-19 vaccines were developed and as cases were ravaging the country under his first presidency.
“I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate,” he said on the campaign trail last year.
Trump also previously signed a order to reinstate military service members who were dismissed for refusing the Pentagon’s own coronavirus vaccine mandate.
Despite Trump’s initial celebration of the vaccines, which were originally made on his watch, he and other Republicans have frequently criticized moves to mandate the shot.
Concerns are likely to rise among health advocates that this move is only the beginning of a lax administration approach to inoculations, given Kennedy’s history of anti-vaccine sentiments.
—Updated at 3:06 p.m. Eastern
