A federal agency debuted a new system on Tuesday designed to record and store the information of federal employees who requested religious exemptions from the Biden administration’s federal jab mandate.
According to a report by the Daily Signal, the Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia, an independent federal agency designed to aid Washington D.C. courts, created the “Employee Religious Exception Request Information System” to track unvaccinated employees who ask for religious exemptions from President Joe Biden’s federal COVID-19 shot mandate.
The Federal Register describes the new system as the best way to keep track of “personal religious information” that is collected “in the context of a public health emergency or similar health and safety incident, such as a pandemic, epidemic, natural disaster or national or regional emergency and/or any other lawful collection of employee information or data that is necessary to ensure a safe and healthy environment for individuals.” Those with concerns about the system only have until Feb. 10 to offer any public comments.
The agency claims that the database will legally allow for the “collection, storing, dissemination, and disposal of employee religious exemption request information” for an indefinite period of time.
“The primary purpose of the secured electronic file repository is to collect, maintain, use, and—to the extent appropriate and necessary—disseminate employee religious exception request information collected by the Agency in the context of the federally mandated COVID-19 vaccination requirement,” the register states.
The Daily Signal report notes that the group did not explain specifically why it needed to create a longstanding list “and neither does the announcement explain why the Biden administration chose to test this policy in an agency with a majority-black staff, who are both more religious and less vaccinated than other groups.”
The legal fellows who authored the Daily Signal piece also expressed concern that “the Biden administration is using [the database] to stealth test a policy it intends to roll out across the whole government.”
