Congress Should Step Up on Pandemic Policy

In November, when the Biden administration imposed a federal coronavirus-vaccine mandate on all employers with 100 or more workers, it did so through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a federal agency that Congress created in the early 1970s to ensure safe working conditions. Now the Supreme Court has blocked OSHA’s action, ruling that the agency lacked the authority to order large employers to require all workers to be vaccinated or frequently tested.

Critics of the decision have decried it as a deadly blow to an effective pandemic safeguard. Be that as it may, in our constitutional system, Congress is the body that should determine whether to impose a federal vaccine mandate. And generally, the United States would be better served if Congress voted on more federal pandemic policies, rather than ceding basic judgments about how society operates to the president or the federal agencies that he oversees.

COVID-19 began as an emergency, and virus variants of acting. By and large, though, it has chosen to be characteristically passive during this crisis and left major pandemic-policy matters—such as who should be allowed to enter the country and whether employers should require workers to get shots—to President Donald Trump and then President Joe Biden.