Deb Haaland Didn't Wait for Biden

One week before President Biden ordered federal employees to get vaccinated, Deb Haaland had already done it to teachers in Native schools.

On September 2, 2021, the Secretary of the Interior signed Secretarial Order 3402, giving educators at Bureau of Indian Education schools until October 15 to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Those who refused, absent an approved accommodation, faced "non-renewal of an educator's contract or discharge". Biden's federal employee mandate wasn't signed until September 9, and it rested on entirely different legal authority. Haaland didn't need it. She used a statute of her own.

This May, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that her department broke the law enforcing it.

Haaland is now running for governor of New Mexico . New Mexicans weighing whether to hand her the state's executive branch are entitled to look at how she handled the last emergency.

She Asked First. Then She Stopped Asking.

On June 25, 2021, the Interior Department published a video titled "U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland on the Importance of Getting a COVID-19 Vaccine" . Ten weeks later, persuasion became a condition of employment.

Secretarial Order 3402 rested on 25 U.S.C. § 2012(o)(2) — a statute governing BIE educators — not on any presidential directive. It reached a population no executive order had yet touched, and it did so before the White House acted.

Haaland was a sitting member of the Biden cabinet, a seat that carried the standing to raise objections to the administration's pandemic approach. The public record contains no evidence she did. It contains evidence she moved ahead of it.

What the Commission Found

The EEOC's federal-sector appellate decision, issued May 18, 2026, concluded that the Bureau of Indian Education unlawfully denied religious accommodation requests from three employees at Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, California.

Interior's own defense is worth reading twice. The department's internal review had determined the three were not entitled to relief "because they never faced any consequences".

That is the position of the agency Haaland led: denying someone's sincerely held religious objection is not a harm, so long as you don't ultimately punish them for it. A federal commission disagreed.

They Sued for the Right to Refuse

On October 24, 2021, twenty plaintiffs sued nineteen cabinet-level and agency-head officials in federal court in Washington. Haaland was named in her official capacity, tied to a Bureau of Land Management training administrator among the plaintiffs.

This was not a technical personnel dispute. The complaint raised four counts: First Amendment free exercise, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Fifth Amendment equal protection, and a claim that federal law guarantees the right to refuse a product authorized for emergency use. Eighteen plaintiffs were federal employees; two were active-duty Marines.

The court denied their emergency restraining order on November 8, 2021, and on May 11, 2022 dismissed the employees' remaining claims without prejudice as unripe — a ruling about jurisdiction and timing, not about whether their rights were violated.

Nothing was proven and nothing was refuted. What the record establishes is that Americans went to federal court because they believed a mandate had stripped them of the right to say no, and the Secretary of the Interior was one of the officials they named. Two FOIA requests seeking Interior's underlying implementation records were still listed as "Processing" years after filing.

The Money

Interior's stewardship of pandemic relief for Native schools is where the record turns from contested to documented.

• BIE and its schools spent $1.5 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funds, including nearly $60 million on IT and broadband, under what GAO described as "insufficient controls" limiting accountability.
• GAO found nearly half of COVID-19 purchase-card spending at BIE schools involved transactions at elevated risk for fraud or misuse, with no evidence BIE investigated them.
• The Interior Inspector General found BIA and BIE, which together received nearly $2.3 billion in pandemic funds, developed no additional internal controls to prevent duplicate use of that money.

GAO's April 2021 recommendations to fix BIE's distance-learning guidance and IT-needs data — issued weeks after Haaland took office — were not fully implemented until March 2024.

What She Inherited, and What She Owned

Fairness requires saying plainly that BIE was already failing when Haaland arrived in March 2021. By fall 2020, 53 of 54 BIE-operated schools were fully remote. Roughly 10,000 laptops were ordered days before the school year began, and more than 80 percent remained undistributed by year's end. As of March 2021, 25 BIE schools were still teaching about 1,400 students with paper packets. None of that was her doing.

Tribal sovereignty is also a real factor and deserves to be said out loud. Navajo Nation executive orders closed all schools on the Nation, explicitly including BIE-operated ones, and Arizona's statewide reopening mandate carved tribal nations out by name. Reservation schools stayed closed because sovereign tribal governments decided they should.

But money controls were never a tribal decision. Neither was how BIE handled religious accommodation requests. Those were Interior's, and Interior was hers.

The Question in Front of Voters

Native communities were hit harder by COVID than almost anyone in America — roughly 3.5 times the case incidence of white Americans, nearly three times as likely to be hospitalized, more than twice as likely to die . Those disparities are structural and long predate any single official.

What was within one official's control was what the federal government did next: with $2.3 billion, with a vaccine mandate applied to teachers in Native schools, and with employees who raised religious objections.

Deb Haaland now asks New Mexicans to trust her with a state facing its own compounding emergencies. The record of the last one is public.