White House Budget Bans COVID Air Travel Mask Mandates — Four Years After They Already Ended

The White House proposed budget for the Department of Transportation seeks to ban COVID-19 transportation mask mandates. Those ended April 18, 2022 after a federal judge struck them down, taking the Biden administration off the political hook from deciding when they were no longer needed.

Here’s the language that the Trump administration is using:

SEC. 416. None of the funds appropriated or made available by this division for the Department of Transportation for fiscal year 2027 may be used to enforce a mask mandate in response to the COVID-19 virus.

Sec. 416 Explanation
Section 416 prohibits FY 2027 funds from being used to enforce mask mandates

The broader government-wide general provision in the White House’s proposed budget also says,

SEC. 743. None of the funds made available by this Act or any other Act may be used to implement, administer, or enforce any COVID–19 mask or vaccine mandates

My first reaction was, we’re still doing this? It’s been four years since a federal transportation mask mandate has been in place. My second thought was, this only applies to COVID-19 mandates. It wouldn’t forbid spending money on a COVID-26 mandate.

But we very much are still doing this. Just last month an appeals court ruled that United Airlines must face a class action lawsuit for religious discrimination over its vaccine mandate. The airline placed 2,200 employees unpaid leave in fall 2021.

The thing about the 2021 federal transportation mask mandate is that it never made sense in the way 2020 airline mask mandates did.

• The federal mandate was actually looser, requiring more accommodations (exemptions) than the airlines themselves had offered.

• The airline mandates were adopted in spring 2020 to make people more comfortable flying. The federal mandate came when airlines already required masks.

• Cloth masks which satisfied the mandate did litle-to-nothing.

• You were allowed to remove your mask for eating and drinking. Call it the Ted Cruz exception, milking a Starbucks for the whole flight or eating a can of Pringles very slowly.

• Inflight was one of the places were masks were needed least, due to HEPA air filtration and downward air flow. The airport, of course, was a different matter. Air travel required masking, but clubs and bars did not.

• The federal mandate came about after vaccines were approved. Most people could begin getting vaccinated if they wished to protect themselves. And when the mandate was imposed, those vaccines were sterilizing against the dominant form of the virus spreading at that time. They were nearly completely protective and prevented spread. (This changed later as the virus mutated, and the vaccines themselves did not keep up.)

Masks on board became one of the most polarizing elements in the history of air travel. Unruly passenger events spiked to previously-unheard of levels. Reported incidents never really fell completely back to pre-pandemic levels, and the norm of reporting remained elevated.

Tonight this lady refused to wear her mask abord the @AmericanAir flight from Charlotte NC towards #WashingtonDC DCA. She was yelling and gave a speech about “tyranny”. The passengers in neighboring rows moved.
She calmed down when officers in civilian outfit intervened#COVID19 pic.twitter.com/h95v9ddpXH

— Emir Sfaxi (@EmirSX) January 11, 2021

Video shows the moment a woman punched a Southwest Airlines flight attendant and knocking out two of her teeth. The incident reportedly started over a mask violation. pic.twitter.com/NAPZknOs1e

— Sam Sweeney (@SweeneyABC) May 27, 2021

Even before it became a federal requirement, JetBlue kicked a two year old off a flight for not wearing a mask, Delta banned the Navy SEAL who shot bin Laden, and a conservative activist found himself without a reservation all over not wearing a mask.

I am not the bad guy. I Killed the bad guy.

— Robert J. O'Neill (@mchooyah) August 19, 2020

This wasn’t uniform across airlines. United Airlines had fewer flashpoints and flight diversions, for instance, than American Airlines. American cabin crew were given a rule, and left to enforce it. United, with the David Dao passenger dragging incident still fresh, had given flight attendants de-escalation training. They tended to just write up non-compliant passengers and deal with issues on the ground.

2020 was such a strange time. Fast-tracking vaccines was one of the top successes of the first Trump administration, but the ‘right’ rebelled against them (and not just vaccine mandates). Meanwhile, in places like Texas early mask mandates were the conservative alternative to lockdowns. However, as the pandemic progressed we learned a lot more about the COVID-19 virus, that virus mutated, and the mandate that was put in place in early 2021 did not match well to public health needs at the time.

Still, it’s strange to be re-litigating all of this now, except that it’s always remembering that politics is not primarily about policy, it is about relative status of members of your coalition. And a statement against mask mandates is something that the President’s coalition wants as part of ‘owning the libs’.

A great reminder though how strange 2020 was. Not every inflight incident was about masks.