(The Center Square) – Sixteen attorneys general are urging members of Congress to modify, clarify, and rescind an emergency-use authorization authority still being used by federal agencies to mandate coronavirus-related policies.
The letter sent at the end of January to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Committee on Energy & Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rogers, both Republicans, relates to curtailing the authority of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Food and Drug Administration.
The AGs have requested that Congress override existing emergency-use authorization policies still in effect and to conduct rigorous oversight to establish what mistakes were made related to current and past implementation of the federal authority. They also asked Congress to “consider revising the liability protections provided by a prior Congress, and confirm what President [Joe] Biden has admitted and what the American people in their sound judgment know: any valid grounds for claiming a state of medical emergency due to COVID have ended; normalcy and the rule of law must be restored.”
He made the remarks after his administration had sought for months to add another roughly $22 billion to the Omnibus spending bill to fund COVID-related programs, NPR reported at the time.
Despite these claims, the president and his administration are using emergency use authorization to justify “an unprecedented expansion of executive power.”
“From student loan forgiveness to a moratorium on evictions, the President and his Administration continue to attempt to push through an authoritarian agenda based on an emergency that, according to the President, does not exist,” the AGs wrote. “The idea that we are still in the midst of a medical emergency flies in the face of the facts on the ground. Yet, HHS and FDA continue to perpetrate the myth that an emergency exists to aggrandize their power at the expense of people’s freedom.”
They also called on Congress to clarify and amend the various statutory emergency authority provisions the agencies “have abused in their unrealistic and impractical quest to operate under emergency authority indefinitely” and to “narrow unilateral authority that agencies and the president have during times of emergency.”
They urged Congress “to move quickly” to “override any remaining emergency use authorizations for COVID vaccines, consider reforms to the sweeping liability shield created in 2005, and ensure that our liberties and system of government are robustly protected against any such future attempts at medical tyranny.”
