President Joe Biden in September issued a directive to compel private companies with more than 100 employees to have their workers be vaccinated or tested weekly. Once in force, companies face $13,600 in fines per violation. At the time, Abbott called Biden’s move “an assault on private businesses” and said that “Texas is already working to halt this power grab,” joining more than a dozen states in resisting the mandate. The text of Abbott’s latest executive order, GA-40, reads, “In yet another instance of federal overreach, the Biden Administration is now bullying many private entities into imposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, causing workforce disruptions that threaten Texas’s continued recovery from the COVID-19 disaster.
