Federal Contractors Will Have a Vaccine Mandate Similar to Federal Employees
President Biden will sign an executive order on Thursday to require federal contractors to be vaccinated against COVID-19, alongside their federal employee colleagues.
Biden will give remarks on Thursday evening about further plans to increase vaccinations and decrease the spread of the Delta variant. This comes after the president’s July 29 announcement that onsite federal contractors, as well as federal employees, must attest to their coronavirus vaccination status or be subject to restrictions. Agencies are still in the process of implementing that directive and the contracting community still has questions about it.
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“This is something we’ve predicted for quite a while,” Albert Krachman, a partner for government contracts at the law firm Blank Rome LLP, told Government Executive on Thursday. “Federal contractors are low-hanging fruit.”
He and Brooke Iley, a partner for labor and employment law at the firm, wrote in a March post that the federal government has a history, dating back to the 1960s, of conditioning “contract awards on contractor compliance with emerging social policy mandates.” Therefore, “do not be surprised if, before the end of 2021” there is some type of requirement, they said.
Krachman said Thursday that he would like to know if there will be “any distinctions given between large employers and small businesses?” Small businesses “face increased costs and regulations for their size compared to the large entities,” he said. Also, will the mandate start to “appear in solicitations as evaluation factors or even maybe gateway issues?”
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“Federal Contractors Will Have a Vaccine Mandate Similar to Federal Employees,“ by Courtney Buble was published in Government Executive on September 9, 2021.