Federal contractors spent the autumn grappling with implementing Executive Order 14042, one of the White House’s actions taken to help end the Covid-19 pandemic. The EO requires many contractors to follow several safety protocols that most notably include ensuring employees working on or in connection with performance of EO-covered federal contracts are fully vaccinated.
Agencies rolled out the requirements quickly, at times incompletely, and in some circumstances more broadly than the EO’s own text required. State-level efforts to restrict or prohibit vaccination mandates only added to the complexity for federal contractors.
Many segments of the economy were affected by the EO and related state-level provisions, ranging from the traditional defense industrial base to more commercially oriented companies that happened to have a small number of federal contracts or subcontracts.
Legal challenges to the EO followed. Currently three federal courts have issued orders barring the government from enforcing the vaccination requirements. One order from a court in Kentucky covered...
Health care entities may be able to pay less than half the steep fines ordinarily associated with False Claims Act (FCA) violations by voluntarily reporting issues under a new pilot program launche...