Pentagon’s ‘Blanket Denial’ of Religious Exemption Requests to Vaccine Prompts GOP Lawmakers to Demand Answers

More than a dozen Republican lawmakers have called on Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to answer questions following the circulation earlier this month of a leaked memo by the Pentagon’s watchdog that found “potential noncompliance” with the law in the review and denial process of religious accommodation requests to the vaccine mandate.

The June 2 memo by Acting Inspector General (IG) Sean W. O’Donnell states that after reviewing dozens of denials of religious accommodation requests, the IG’s office “found a trend of generalized assessments rather than the individualized assessment that is required by Federal law and DoD and Military Service policies.”

In a Sept. 19 letter to Austin, 15 lawmakers pointed to the extremely low approval rates of religious exemption requests to the Department of Defence’s (DoD) vaccine mandate.

According to the most recent publicly-available data, only 196 religious accommodation requests have been approved out of more than 26,000 requests across the armed services.

Lawmakers wrote that it was “especially concerning” that most of the approved religious accommodation requests were granted to service members slated for retirement, and that “all branches have approved non-religious vaccine exemption requests at a far higher rate than religious exemptions.”

“This suggests the DoD is applying different policies towards servicemembers’ applications based on their religious beliefs and expected employment status,” the letter stated.

Referring to the memo, the lawmakers wrote that the “blanket denial” of religious accommodation requests violates DoD Instruction 1300.17 (pdf), which requires each religious accommodation request to be reviewed individually.

“In summary, according to the DoD IG’s memo, the Department has engaged in unlawful religious discrimination,” the lawmakers wrote.

The findings of the IG memo did not astonish Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), who signed the letter.

“The fact that the Department of Defense didn’t seriously consider religious exemptions is no surprise,” Higgins told

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