Schools, colleges and states that require immunizations against COVID-19 may risk of losing federal money under an executive order President Donald Trump signed Friday.
Watch Trump’s remarks in the player above.
The order should have little national impact as most schools have dropped such mandates, and it isn’t clear what money is at risk.
Trump often said while campaigning that he would “not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate,” but this order applies only to COVID-19 vaccines.
All states require schoolchildren to be vaccinated against certain diseases including measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, whooping cough and chickenpox. And all allow exemptions for certain medical or religious reasons.
Trump on Friday also signed an executive order formally creating a National Energy Dominance Council and directed it to move quickly drive up already record-setting domestic oil and gas production.
READ MORE: Trump has called for U.S. ‘energy dominance’ but is likely to hit real-world limits
Trump’s administration also announced it has granted conditional export authorization for a huge liquefied natural gas project in Louisiana, the first approval of new LNG exports since former President Joe Biden paused consideration of them a year ago.
And Trump said he has directed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to undo Biden’s ban on future offshore oil drilling on the East and West coasts. Biden’s last-minute action last month “viciously took out” more than 625 million acres (253 million hectares) offshore that could contribute to the nation’s “net worth,” Trump said.
Speaking to reporters after signing the orders, Trump reacted positively to Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, where Vance said that he fears free speech is “in retreat” across the continent.
“To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election,” Vance said.
WATCH: Vance lectures European allies on democracy at security summit in Munich
“I thought he made a very good speech, actually, a very brilliant speech,” Trump said from the Oval Office.
The president was asked by a reporter about the prosecutors resigning over the Justice Department’s push to drop the criminal case against New York City’s mayor.
“I know nothing about the individual case. I know that they didn’t feel that it was much of a case,” Trump said.
“It looked to me to be very political,” he added, and questioned why the prosecutors didn’t complain weeks earlier, though the prosecutors began raising objections this week when instructed to drop the case.
Trump also said United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer asked during their phone call Thursday to visit him in the U.S., which he accepted.
“Friendly meeting, very good. We have a lot of good things going on,” he said.
No date was set, Trump said, but it could be next week or the week after.
