WASHINGTON — President Biden retracted several COVID-19 executive orders Friday — including one imposed on his first day in office to require people to wear masks in federal facilities.
Biden’s Executive Order 13991 — titled “Protecting the Federal Workforce and Requiring Mask-Wearing” — was issued after the wearing of face masks became heavily polarized, with outgoing President Donald Trump and his aides rarely wearing them and focusing on “reopening” from lockdowns.
The order is “hereby revoked,” the White House said in a Friday afternoon announcement more than four years after the virus brought mobile morgues to New York and shut down schools and businesses across the country.
Under the prior order, federal agencies were told to “immediately take action” to “require compliance with CDC guidelines with respect to wearing masks, maintaining physical distance, and other public health measures by: on-duty or on-site Federal employees; on-site Federal contractors; and all persons in Federal buildings or on Federal lands.”
The enforcement of mask requirements long ago subsided, with the White House lifting its own internal mask requirements more than two years ago in March 2022 after the CDC adjusted its mask recommendations to account for local risk reflected by hospitalization rates.
Biden on Friday also retracted Executive Order 13998, adopted on Jan. 21, 2021, that sought to impose mask mandates on flights, trains and buses, and Executive Order 13910, adopted by Trump on March 23, 2020, to forbid the hoarding of medical supplies.
The announcement additionally terminated federal positions created to manage the pandemic.
“The positions of COVID-19 Response Coordinator [vacant since June 2023] and Deputy Coordinator of the COVID-19 Response… are hereby terminated,” Biden decreed.
The developments mark a near complete return to pre-pandemic rules after a gradual easing of enforcement.
Biden in June 2022 ended requirements that travelers entering the US — including American citizens — present negative COVID-19 tests. That rule was announced in January 2021 in the final days of the Trump administration.
Biden in May 2023 ended his mandate, imposed in September 2021, that all federal workers submit to COVID-19 vaccination or lose their jobs unless they had a qualifying religious or medical exemption.
Other pivots back to the pre-pandemic status quo have worried Biden’s critics, including his administration’s April 2023 decision to resume funding for the EcoHealth Alliance, a group that did risky US-financed “gain of function” research on coronaviruses at a lab in Wuhan, China, before the pandemic’s origin in the same city in late 2019.
The FBI and Energy Department have assessed that the pandemic likely began with a lab leak.
Recent scientific studies in China on the same virus family have sparked concern that reckless research could lead to future pandemics.
Nearly 1.2 million US residents died from COVID-19, according to CDC data. Roughly 400,000 of the deaths occurred during Trump’s tenure and the remainder under Biden.
