Yes, it's true: Federal government plans to track religious holdouts

A little-noticed announcement by an obscure federal agency divulged the Biden administration’s controversial plan to document every federal employee who has requested a religious exemption to the COVID-19 vaccine.

The federal government’s plan to track its most trouble-making and defiant federal employees is troublesome enough, all by itself, but what caught the attention of Heritage Foundation legal fellow Sarah Parshall Perry is the tiny agency that appeared to be the first one to admit it. That agency, she says, is the Pretrial Services Agency, a legal office headquartered in D.C. whose role is assisting court officers who work with court defendants.

The announcement by the Pretrial Services Agency (pictured above), which can be read here on the Federal Register, describes a “notice of a new system of records” that will collect “religious accommodation requests for religious exception from the federally mandated vaccination requirement.”

The agency states it plans to create a records system in the “context of a public health emergency” to maintain a “safe and healthy environment” for PSA employees.

It is allowed to do so, the agency further states, because President Joe Biden signed executive order No. 14043 that requires all federal employees to get The Jab.

On the same day the PSA announcement was posted, Perry and a second Heritage legal fellow, GianCarlo Canaparo, dropped that bombshell in a legal story published by Heritage news outlet The Daily Signal. The same-day timing suggested Heritage had been tipped off about the controversial plan, though that is unknown and Perry has not said how she learned about the posting.

Regardless, four days later, Perry and Canaparo reported in a second Daily Signal story that 19 more federal agencies were planning to create --- or had done so already --- similar tracking lists of religious-exemption requests from their own employees. Those bigger and more-powerful agencies include the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of the Treasury, among others.

An 'Orwellian' government

Perry tells American Family News the personal information to be collected includes personal details about  religious practices, and background information such as past addresses and your maiden name, and she likens that government intrusion to the villainous Soviet KGB and the feared East German Stasi.

“It is truly one of the most aggressive, Orwellian attempts,” Perry says, “to segregate and blacklist conservative Americans, religious Americans, faithful Americans, that we've ever seen.”

The federal government’s civilian workforce is estimated at 2.1 million of which an estimated 90% had received The Jab when the deadline to comply with Biden’s executive order hit on Nov. 22. If that number has now hit 95% compliance, that would mean approximately 105,000 federal employees did not comply and at least some of those federal workers can now expect to be added to a list noting their religious exemption request.

Meanwhile, a federal judge on January 22 blocked Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal employees but it appears the federal government's planned database is still moving forward.

Reading from the Federal Register announcement on his AFR radio show, Abraham Hamilton III pointed out the federal agencies are not keeping track of federal employees who submitted a medical request.

“You don’t have to be brilliant, or any type of genius, to recognize what’s happening,” he warned ominously. “All that you need to be able to do is know a little bit about history.”

Any time a powerful government has kept of a list of people it views as troublesome, Hamilton went on to say, the population did not witness religious freedom and personal liberties grow.

Editor's Note: American Family Radio is a division of the American Family Association, the parent organization of the American Family News Network, which operates AFN.net.