WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Monday, a federal judge in Florida threw down the mask mandate for flights, trains, buses, and other forms of public transportation, less than a week after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended it until May 3.
Individual airlines and municipal transit agencies were left to determine what to do as a result of the verdict, and by late Monday, the country's main airlines had abandoned their mask requirements for domestic flights. Passengers and personnel on the Amtrak rail system will no longer be required to wear masks.
Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, who was chosen by President Donald J. Trump, overturned the mandate nationally on many reasons, including that the agency had exceeded its legislative power under the Public Health Services Act of 1944. The masking order was temporarily suspended as a result of the verdict, and the Transportation Security Administration would not execute it, according to a Biden administration official on Monday evening.
The government was still studying the decision and deciding whether to appeal it, according to the official, and the C.D.C. still advised individuals to wear masks in enclosed public transportation environments.
It was unclear to what extent local transportation authorities would try to maintain their duties. Several state and municipal transit agencies across the country signalled they would preserve their mask requirements for the time being, before an administration official stated the T.S.A. would not enforce the order.
Despite this, governments and businesses across the country have largely relaxed measures, and new coronavirus infections are on the rise once more. The C.D.C. cited a wish to analyse the potential severity of the Omicron subvariant known as BA.2, which has lately become the prevalent variation among new U.S. cases when it extended the mask regulation last week. (As a result, the city of Philadelphia reinstated its mask requirement on Monday, making it the first big city to do so.)
President Biden requested that the C.D.C. impose a mask mandate on passengers soon after his inauguration, and the agency did so on February 2, 2021. That mandate was extended multiple times. A lawsuit was filed in July 2021 by the Health Freedom Defense Fund, a Wyoming-based advocacy group, questioning its validity.
"Unelected officials cannot do whatever they want to our personal freedoms just because they claim noble reasons and a desirable purpose," the group's president, Leslie Manookian, said in a statement.
Judge Mizelle interpreted the authority Congress gave the C.D.C. to create guidelines aimed at avoiding the interstate spread of infectious illnesses narrowly in her ruling.
The statute states that the agency may take whatever actions it considers "essential," with a list of examples including "sanitation." This power, according to the judge, was confined to things like cleaning property and not compelling people to adopt sanitary measures.
"The power granted on the C.D.C. would be astonishing if Congress intended this meaning," she added. "And it certainly wouldn't be restricted to'sanitation' methods like masks."
She said that if the government's broad interpretation of the agency's powers is correct, the C.D.C. might order businesses to install air filtering systems, make people to take immunizations, or even require "coughing into elbows and daily multivitamins."
The decision adds to a labyrinth of legal battles over several mandates aimed at containing the epidemic, the majority of which have focused on requirements that different groups of individuals be vaccinated, issued under various legal bodies.
Legal challenges to those mandates have resulted in a variety of outcomes. A federal district court judge in Texas, for example, barred an administration demand that federal workers get vaccinated, but an appeals court overturned that decision this month.
The Supreme Court halted a Biden administration order requiring major firms to require workers to get vaccinated or submit to regular testing in January. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, has enabled military officials to consider vaccination status when choosing where service members should be assigned or deployed, and it allowed the Pentagon to take disciplinary action against a reservist who refused to get vaccinated on Monday.
The nation's four largest airlines — United, Delta, Southwest, and American — as well as JetBlue, Alaska, Spirit, and Frontier — said they were suspending their mask restrictions after the C.D.C. and T.S.A. issued their recommendations Monday evening.
Amtrak also announced Monday night that masks are no longer required for passengers or personnel on its trains or in terminals.
"Masks are appreciated and will continue to be a crucial preventive step against Covid-19," said agency spokeswoman Kimberly Woods. "Anyone who requires or desires one is urged to do so."
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City stated it would maintain its mask regulation in place just hours after the ruling. Masks will be optional for passengers and personnel, according to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in the District of Columbia and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority in Philadelphia.
After losing re-election in November 2020, President Trump appointed Judge Mizelle to the bench. She was 33 at the time, making her the youngest person Mr. Trump had named to a life-tenured judgeship. She was a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas. Despite the fact that the American Bar Association ruled her ineligible due to her lack of experience, she was confirmed by Republican senators on a party-line vote.
If the Biden administration wants the requirement to remain, Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University professor of global health law, says it will have to challenge the ruling. He also defended the agency's power to impose the mask rule.
"The classic circumstance in which the C.D.C. has authority to act is to prevent the interstate transmission of a severe infectious illness," he explained.
Passengers at La Guardia Airport had varied feelings about the decision on Monday.
Patricia and Brendan Kennedy, who had just arrived from Orlando on a Delta aircraft, claimed the flight staff had reminded everyone on board to wear a mask.
Both agreed that they would prefer not to have to wear masks in airports, but they were split on whether or not they wanted to be required to remain in flights.
It made Ms. Kennedy feel better about flying, she added. Mr. Kennedy stated that he was ready to put the mask rules to rest.
"I wish the whole thing would just go away," he expressed his dissatisfaction.
All United staff checking in passengers at Terminal B wore masks. A counter agent was taken aback when she learned that her job no longer required passengers to wear face masks. She stated that she had not been informed of this.
Judge Mizelle's judgement was met with relief by those in the aviation sector.
David Neeleman, the founder of many airlines including JetBlue Airways and Breeze Airways, which began flying last year, said he was relieved that the mask requirement for passengers was no longer in effect. Crew members at Breeze, where Mr. Neeleman is the CEO, have expressed dissatisfaction with having to police passengers, causing unnecessary tension in the air, he said.
"If the government can elect not to wear masks for the State of the Union address, then we should be able to give citizens that option on an aeroplane," he said.
Judge Mizelle also chastised the government for releasing the order under emergency procedures without allowing time for public comment, dismissing the argument that there was no time because the pandemic had already been a year.
"The mandate was issued in February 2021, almost two weeks after the president requested one, 11 months after the president proclaimed Covid-19 a national emergency, and almost 13 months after the secretary of health and human services declared a public health emergency," she explained. "This history implies that the C.D.C. did not consider the passage of time to be a major issue."
Judge Mizelle did not mention the fact that there had been a change of administration between when the president declared a national emergency and when the agency implemented the mandate, despite the fact that 11 months had passed.
There were more than 37,000 new cases every day on average as of Sunday, up 39 percent from two weeks ago.
Though the number is still significantly lower than the peak of the winter surge caused by an Omicron variation, experts fear that with the advent of at-home testing, new cases are being undercounted. Furthermore, many persons who have been vaccinated and received booster doses have not developed major illness as a result of contracting the Omicron type.
Pulling back on the travel mask requirement now is "very, very concerning," according to Saskia Popescu, a George Mason University infectious disease epidemiologist and assistant professor.
She stated, "We're clearly starting to notice a trend higher in cases." "My concern is that we will see what happened in the United Kingdom, where they substantially reduced restrictions and saw a significant increase, contributing to rising numbers."
