The following excerpt was originally published on Newsmax. Click here to read it there. President Joe Biden and his legion of deep-state bureaucrats have threatened for months to impose a nationwide vaccine mandate. Just last week, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) director Rochelle Walensky told Bret Baier that the administration will be “looking into” a mandate as soon as the vaccines receive full approval from the FDA. Walensky tried to walk back her comments later that day, but the cat has been out of the bag for months. Everyone knows the little tyrants in Washington’s public health bureaucracy want to force all Americans to get the jab, and our president has neither the willingness nor the fortitude to stop them. But even if this administration decides that a mandate is too politically risky, there are lots of ways that the federal government can impose a shadow mandate without issuing an official executive order — and some of those options have been used before. First, Biden could threaten to withhold federal funds from public schools. The federal government gives public schools $1,131 per student for K-12 education and $2,032 per student for postsecondary education, according to EducationData.org. That’s an appreciably nice chunk of change for your local school district, and many schools wouldn’t be able to function without it. What would happen if the Biden administration issued an order that pulled funding from all schools that didn’t require the vaccine for their teachers and students? Those schools would issue a mandate within 24 hours. SEE ALSO: Democrats Vote for Down Syndrome Abortion, School Closures, and Criminal Immigrants in Latest Vote-A-Rama It doesn’t matter that such a move would probably be struck down in court, as some argued when Trump threatened similar action over school reopenings. Biden would simply have to make the threat, and the schools would fall in line. We saw this in 2016 when Obama threatened to withhold federal funds for schools that refused to acquiesce to the left’s transgender ideology. The Obama administration simply issued a “directive,” not an order, and we saw schools adopt the policy simply to avoid blame. “I think thousands of superintendents are breathing a sigh of relief today,” one institute president told Politico at the time. “Many of them probably don’t want to take a position. … Thousands of school superintendents can now say they don’t want to put their federal funding at risk.” If Biden issues a similar “directive” to schools about their vaccine mandates, we can expect the same result. Click here to read the two additional ways Biden could impose a nationwide mask mandate.
