re: #196 Decatur Deb

States that run their own plans do that under certification from Fed Dept of Labor. If they don’t do the job, they can be decertified.

This is what I suspected, but hadn’t confirmed. Most federal programs run like this; it allows states that want their own autonomy to do so, while still enforcing the federal standards enacted by Congress. In general, states are not supposed to be allowed to remove restrictions that the federal government has set, nor local jurisdictions with state restrictions; however, we’ve seen an alarming trend of Republican-run states where they are deciding either to prevent local governments from enacting additional restrictions (mask/vaccine mandates), or prevent federal restrictions from being applied to them (TX Governor Abbott’s idiotic executive order last night). All in the name of, “We have a political message about COVID and we don’t care if it kills everybody in our state, we’re going to see it through to the bitter end.”