Govt Response to Notice of Supplemental Authority — Feds for Medical Freedom v. Biden (5th Cir.)

Record facts

U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Galveston Division · No. 3:21-cv-00356 · Doc. 32 · 2022-01-18 · Docket on CourtListener

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IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT 
FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS 
GALVESTON DIVISION 
 
 
FEDS FOR MEDICAL FREEDOM, et al., 
 
      Plaintiffs, 
 
v. 
 
JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., in his official 
capacity, et al., 
 
      Defendants. 
 
 
 
 
    Civil Action 3:21-cv-00356 
 
  
 
 
RESPONSE TO PLAINTIFFS’ NOTICE OF SUPPLEMENTAL AUTHORITY 
 
 
Defendants respectfully respond to Plaintiffs’ Notice of Supplemental Authority, ECF 
No. 29 (“Notice”), which discusses National Federation of Independent Business v. OSHA, 595 U.S. 
___ (2022) (“NFIB”), and Biden v. Missouri, 595 U.S. ___ (2022).  To the extent that those 
decisions are relevant here, they confirm that Executive Order 14043 constitutes a legitimate 
exercise of the President’s authority to oversee the Executive Branch workforce. 
I. 
NFIB Does Not Limit The President’s Authority To Oversee The Federal 
Workforce. 
 
NFIB addresses a statutory question irrelevant to the one at issue here:  whether the 
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”) has statutory authority to impose 
a masking, testing, and vaccination requirement on private businesses.  It does not address 
whether the federal government may impose a vaccination requirement on its own workforce, 
just as numerous other employers across the country have chosen to do.  
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The Supreme Court uncontroversially observed in NFIB that “[a]dministrative agencies 
are creatures of statute,” and “possess only the authority that Congress has provided.”  NFIB, 
slip. op. at 5.  That is true, but the President of the United States is not a creature of statute; 
the Constitution itself vests him with executive power.  U.S. Const. Art. II, sec. 1.  Thus, as 
other courts have recognized, the President possesses independent constitutional authority to 
act as CEO of the Executive Branch, even absent confirming statutory authority from 
Congress.  See Rydie v. Biden, No. 21-2696, 2021 WL 5416545, at *3 (D. Md. Nov. 19, 2021) 
(“The President derives his authority to regulate the federal workforce from the Constitution, 
not from Congress’s enactments.”), appeal pending, No. 21-2359 (4th Cir.); Oklahoma v. Biden, --- 
F. Supp. 3d ---, 2021 WL 6126230, at *10 (W.D. Okla. Dec. 28, 2021) (“executive order is a 
permissible exercise of executive authority . . . substantially for the reasons stated in Rydie”).  
Indeed, the reason that Congress sometimes limits the President’s ability to hire or remove 
whomever he pleases, see, e.g., 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-16 (Title VII protections for civil servants); 
5 U.S.C. § 7513 (discipline “only for such cause as will promote the efficiency of the service”), 
is that absent such limits the President’s Article II authority in this area would be untethered 
by statute.  The appropriate question is therefore whether Congress has prohibited the Executive 
Branch from requiring its employees to be vaccinated, and even Plaintiffs do not suggest that 
Congress has done so. 
Even if explicit congressional authorization were necessary, it exists here for the 
reasons Defendants have explained.  See Defs.’ Opp’n. to Mot. for Prelim. Inj. at 27 (“Opp’n 
Br.”), ECF No. 21.  Plaintiffs point to NFIB’s invocation of the so-called major questions 
doctrine, but it does not apply here.  NFIB involved a mandate affecting 84 million private 
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sector employees.  In Executive Order 14043, however, the government is not claiming “the 
power to regulate or license, as lawmaker,” but rather “as proprietor, to manage [its] internal 
operation.”  Cafeteria & Restaurant Workers Union v. McElroy, 367 U.S. 886, 896 (1961).  As the 
Supreme Court has repeatedly instructed lower courts, the government’s role—as either 
regulator or proprietor—is a critical distinction.  See, e.g., NASA v. Nelson, 562 U.S. 134, 148 
(2011) (“Time and again our cases have recognized that the Government has a much freer 
hand in dealing ‘with citizen employees than it does when it brings its sovereign power to bear 
on citizens at large.’” (quoting Engquist v. Oregon Dep’t of Agriculture, 553 U.S. 591, 598 (2008))); 
Borough of Duryea, Pa. v. Guarnieri, 564 U.S. 379, 392-93 (2011) (“The government’s interest in 
managing its internal affairs requires proper restraints on the invocation of rights by employees 
when the workplace or the government employer’s responsibilities may be affected.”).  Indeed, 
this Court has already recognized that EO 14043 is supported by “more authority” than the 
“healthcare worker mandate” addressed in Part II below, because the latter applies to 
“nonfederal employees,” Hr’g Tr. at 7:18-22—and that mandate has now been upheld by the 
Supreme Court in Missouri.  Even putting aside that critical distinction, EO 14043 applies to 
far fewer employees than the OSHA rule.  See Cong. Rsch. Serv., Federal Workforce Statistics 
Sources: OPM and OMB, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R43590/17 
(approximately 2.1 million civilian workers).1 
 
1 Finally, Plaintiffs’ halfhearted suggestion that Tenth Amendment principles are relevant here, 
see Notice at 4, may be rejected out of hand.  Whatever police powers the states generally 
possess, the employment relationship between the federal government and its own workforce 
is an exclusively federal concern that states are powerless to regulate under the Supremacy 
Clause.  See Johnson v. Maryland, 245 U.S. 51 (1920); Sperry v. Florida ex rel. Florida Bar, 373 U.S. 
379, 385 (1963). 
 
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II. 
The Lack Of A Perfect Historical Analogue Does Not Invalidate An Otherwise 
 
Lawful Exercise Of Executive Power. 
 
Plaintiffs argue that because the President has never previously required vaccines for 
federal employees, he must lack the power to do so.  See Notice at 4–6.  That is wrong, and 
NFIB does not suggest otherwise.  To the contrary, as explained above, NFIB is principally 
concerned with a specific statutory question not presented here. 
 
The more relevant opinion on this question is Missouri, which shows that the federal 
government may exercise old powers in new ways when faced with new challenges.  Like the 
Secretary of Health and Human Services, the President, in his capacity as an employer, “has 
never had to address an infection problem of this scale and scope before.”  Missouri, slip op. 
at 7.  Thus, the fact that the federal employee vaccine mandate “goes further than what the 
[President] has done in the past to implement [workplace safety]” is not at all surprising—and 
it does not place the executive order outside the President’s authority to regulate employee 
conduct.  Id.  If that were the case, the President could never respond to changing 
circumstances like the COVID-19 pandemic.  See generally The Federalist No. 70, p. 425 (C. 
Rossiter ed. 1961) (A. Hamilton) (explaining that “vigor[ous] and expedit[ous]” 
decisionmaking is the “most necessary ingredient[]” of the Executive’s power).  Consequently, 
NFIB does not decide the case; this Court, if it reaches the merits, is free to resolve 
independently whether EO 14043 falls within the President’s constitutional and statutory 
authority. 
In any event, EO 14043 is not as unprecedented as Plaintiffs would have the Court 
believe.  Before 1986, no President had sought to impose a drug-testing mandate on federal 
employees:  It took “a new epidemic” of drug abuse to spur President Reagan’s exercise of 
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executive power in response to a nationwide health crisis.  See Address to the Nation on the 
Campaign Against Drug Abuse (Sept. 14, 1986), https://perma.cc/5RFU-6XS6.  Recognizing 
that the federal government was concerned with both “the well-being of its employees” and 
“the successful accomplishment of agency missions,” President Reagan invoked constitutional 
and statutory authorities similar to those at issue here and issued Executive Order 12564, 
which banned the use of illegal drugs by federal employees on or off duty and required employing 
agencies to implement robust drug-testing programs.  51 Fed. Reg. 32,889 (Sept. 15, 1986).  
That executive order was not rendered unlawful by its novelty, and neither is this one. 
III. 
Executive Order 14043 Is Not Subject To APA Review And Requires No 
Rulemaking Record.  
 
 
In Missouri, the Supreme Court held that, “given the rule-making record,” the interim 
final rule was not arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).  
Missouri, slip op. at 6.  Plaintiffs contend that because there is no similar record here, the 
agencies’ vaccine requirements must be arbitrary and capricious.  Notice at 6.  But the agencies’ 
vaccine requirements are not final rules subject to the APA, nor is the executive order itself.  
See Opp. Br. 20–21; see also Rodden, 2021 WL 5545234, at *3 (relevant “final agency action” is 
an employing agency’s ultimate decision as to whether an individual employee “receives an 
exemption, whether and what additional remedial measures and procedures should be taken, 
and whether and how [that employee] should be disciplined).  In any event, the vaccination 
requirement is amply supported by CDC’s determination, adopted by the President, that 
vaccination is the best way to fight COVID-19.  See Opp. Br. at 23.  Nothing in Missouri 
suggests otherwise. 
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IV. 
The Court Lacks Jurisdiction Under The CSRA. 
 
Finally, Plaintiffs ignore the most salient difference between this case and NFIB, which 
is that the Civil Service Reform Act divests this Court of jurisdiction by creating “the 
comprehensive and exclusive procedures for settling work-related controversies between 
federal civil-service employees and the federal government.”  Rollins v. Marsh, 937 F.2d 134, 
139 (5th Cir. 1991) (emphasis added).  Plaintiffs’ reliance on 1980s-era cases to contend that 
these principles do not apply to programmatic challenges to generally applicable policies, see 
Pls.’ Reply, ECF No. 23 at 1-4, is unambiguously foreclosed by modern Supreme Court 
precedent.  See Elgin v. Dep’t of Treasury, 567 U.S. 1, 7-8 (2012) (CSRA precluded district court 
action seeking not only “reinstatement to their former positions, backpay, benefits, and 
attorneys’ fees,” but also “a declaratory judgment that the challenged statutes are 
unconstitutional”).  Writing for the Court, Justice Thomas rejected the federal employee’s 
contention that he “could challenge the constitutionality of the statute authorizing an agency’s 
action in district court, but the MSPB would remain the exclusive forum for other types of 
challenges to the agency’s decision.”  Id. at 14.  That is the exact same contention that Plaintiffs 
advance here, and this Court is bound by the Supreme Court’s rejection of it in Elgin. 
Dated:  January 18, 2022 
Respectfully submitted, 
 
BRIT FEATHERSTON 
United States Attorney 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Eastern District of Texas  
 
  /s/ James G. Gillingham 
 
 
JAMES G. GILLINGHAM 
Assistant United States Attorney  
Eastern District of Texas 
Acting Under Authority Conferred by 28 U.S.C. § 
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515 
Attorney in Charge 
Texas Bar #24065295 
110 N. College Street; Suite 700 
Tyler, Texas 75702 
Telephone: (903) 510-9346  
Facsimile: (903) 590-1436 
James.Gillingham@usdoj.gov  
 
Counsel for Defendants 
 
 
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CERTIFICATE OF SERVICE 
 
I certify that on January 18, 2022, a true and accurate copy of the foregoing document 
was filed electronically (via CM/ECF) and served on all counsel of record. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
/s/ 
James G. Gillingham 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
JAMES G. GILLINGHAM 
 
 
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