Trump to sign order yanking federal funds for schools with COVID-19 vaccine mandates

WASHINGTON — President Trump signed orders Friday creating a new council on US “energy dominance” and barring federal funding for schools and universities that require students to take COVID-19 vaccines.

“We have more energy than any other country, and now we’re unleashing it,” Trump said with five of his Cabinet secretaries arrayed behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office as he signed the pair of executive orders.

The president said one of his priorities would be approving a pending pipeline to New York and New England — a likey reference to plans to expand the Algonquin Gas Transmission Pipeline to supply more fuel from fracking in Pennsylvania.

“We are also working on a project that has been under wraps for 20 years, everybody wanted it,” Trump said. “We’ll bring down the energy prices in New York and in all of New England”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said Trump would boost domestic energy production — one of his campaign pledges — and that “we’ve got to unleash it from the Gulf of America all the way up to Alaska.”

The vaccine executive order, meanwhile, comes roughly five years after the novel coronavirus arrived in the US, killing more than 1 million Americans and unleashing massive economic, social and educational upheaval.

Highly effective vaccines were developed in late 2020 through Trump’s first-term Operation Warp Speed, but Republicans generally have opposed vaccine mandates imposed on federal employees and by state and local entities.

Vaccines have become less effective at blocking COVID-19 transmission while newer variants of the virus have become less lethal over time.

Twenty-one states currently ban coronavirus vaccine mandates in schools, according to the National Academy for State Public Health, including Republican bastions such as Texas and Florida and Democrat-led jurisdictions including Arizona and Michigan.

It’s unclear precisely how much money could be clawed back if state and local officials refuse to comply — or how many schools and educational districts currently have such policies, which in some cases are made on a county-by-county basis.

Federal funding for schools has long been a mechanism for Washington to intervene in education, which is mostly regulated locally.

It’s unclear precisely how much money could be clawed back if state and local officials refuse to comply.

Federal funding for schools has long been a mechanism for Washington to intervene in educations, which is mostly regulated locally.

For example, the Senate passed a proposed rule in 1994 to bar schools with federal funding from advocating “the promotion of homosexuality as a positive lifestyle alternative” — a measure supported by then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), who went on to become president. That dictate wasn’t approved by the House and so did not become law.

Trump, who took office Jan. 20, has authorized Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative to chop up to $1 trillion from annual federal spending through massive staff and grant reductions, with early targets including USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Education Department, each of which Trump hopes to ultimately eliminate.