The military may have been too hasty in rejecting the vast majority of vaccine-exemption requests submitted by service members, the Pentagon’s oversight agency concluded.
Sean O’Donnell, the Pentagon’s inspector general, wrote in a June 2 memo to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin obtained by Military.com calling attention to a “concerning” trend in which military brass rushed to reject vaccine-exemption petitions rather than giving each request due consideration.
“We found a trend of generalized assessments rather than the individualized assessment that is required by Federal law and DoD and Military Service policies,” he said. “Some of the appellate decisions included documentation that demonstrated a greater consideration of facts and circumstances involved in a request.”
O’Donnell calculated that officials likely gave each appeal a cursory glance rather than a thorough examination, possibly opening the door to litigation from service members who had to resign after they failed to obtain exemptions. Across all the branches, there were about 50 denials per day in a 90-day period, he determined. Over a thousand Coast Guardsmen have already tried to launch a class-action lawsuit in response to their being refused religious exemptions, the publication noted.
“The volume and rate at which decisions were made to deny requests is concerning,” the memo read. “Assuming a 10-hour work day with no breaks or attention to other matters, the average review period was about 12 minutes for each package. Such a review period seems insufficient to process each request in an individualized manner and still perform the duties required of their position.”
Austin imposed a vaccine mandate for troops in August 2021 as the pandemic escalated, forcing service members to either get the shot or, in many documented cases, be discharged.
The military’s largest branch, the Army, has approved just 24 religious exemption requests out of a total 8,514 requests submitted by active duty soldiers. Meanwhile, 1,602 requests have been rejected and the rest remain pending.
Legal challenges were initiated months ago while the vaccine exemption applications were still an active issue, in some cases yielding favorable court outcomes for the service members who claim they were discriminated against.
In late March, a Texas judge blocked the Navy from dismissing sailors with pending exemption requests, Military.com noted. In August, a Florida federal judge ordered class action relief and granted an injunction barring the federal government from enforcing the vaccine mandate for the Marine Corps.
For the last year, military has been struggling with a recruitment problem. As of July, with only three months left in the fiscal year, the Army had met only 40 percent of its recruitment goal and reduced its active-duty force by 12,000 troops.
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