The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear two cases brought by Air Force personnel who were removed from service for refusing the Defense Department's 2021 COVID vaccine mandate, effectively closing the courthouse door on their claims for back pay and vindication of their religious liberty rights.

The petitions in Poffenbarger v. Meink and Doster v. Meink asked the justices a straightforward question: Does the government get to trample First Amendment rights and then walk away by declaring the whole thing moot? The Court, without comment, answered by refusing to engage.

What the Cases Were About

According to Military Times, Air Force Reserve First Lt. Michael Poffenbarger filed suit in 2022, arguing that the mandate violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment. He had sought a religious exemption. The military denied it, issued him a letter of reprimand, and placed him on the inactive list. He wasn't asking for special treatment. He was asking for what the law promises.

Second Lt. Hunter Doster filed a separate suit alongside 17 other Air Force members the same year, also challenging the mandate on religious grounds. After the mandate was rescinded, lower courts dismissed both cases as moot. The appellate courts agreed. The 18 plaintiffs then filed in the Supreme Court, arguing their cases were very much alive because they had never been made whole. They still sought lost pay and retirement points.

The courts said the controversy had evaporated. The service members said their paychecks hadn't reappeared.

The Mootness Dodge

This is a pattern worth watching. The government imposes a coercive mandate. People resist on constitutional grounds. The government rescinds the mandate before courts can rule on the merits. Then it argues there's nothing left to litigate.

It is a neat trick. Impose the punishment, pocket the compliance, withdraw the order, and claim the whole thing never happened. The people who lost careers, pay, and retirement points are left holding nothing but a moot case caption.

More than 8,400 service members were discharged for refusing the vaccine:

• 3,717 Marines
• 2,041 Navy sailors
• 1,841 Army soldiers
• 834 Air Force and Space Force members

Roughly 17,000 refused the shot in total. From early 2023 through June 2025, exactly 126 returned to service. That's not a correction. That's a rounding error.

The Executive Order and Its Limits

President Trump signed an executive order on January 27, 2025, directing the Defense Department to bring back troops removed for refusing the vaccine, including "full back pay, benefits, bonus payments, or compensation."

That order was the right call. But the implementation has been more complicated than the promise. The Defense Department and military services developed policies in response to the executive order that provide back pay but require additional terms of service and deduct wages received while working as civilians, including Veterans Affairs disability compensation or other benefits.

So the executive branch extended one hand while the other did arithmetic. And now the judicial branch has closed its doors entirely.

This is precisely why the Court's refusal to hear these cases matters. An executive order can offer a policy remedy. Only a judicial ruling can establish that what the government did was constitutionally wrong. Without that ruling, there is no precedent. No guardrail. No legal consequence for the next time a bureaucracy decides that religious conviction is an acceptable casualty of emergency policy.

The Broader Reckoning That Isn't Happening

The 2021 vaccine mandate was one of the most sweeping exercises of military authority over personal medical decisions in modern history. More than 2 million troops received two doses of the vaccine through 2022. The Pentagon recorded 740,942 COVID-19 cases among troops, family members, DoD employees, and contractors between March 2020 and December 2022, with 690 deaths, including 96 service members.

Those numbers represented a real threat. Nobody serious disputes that. But a real threat does not suspend the First Amendment, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act exists for exactly the moments when the government believes its interests are urgent enough to override conscience. The law requires the government to demonstrate a compelling interest and use the least restrictive means, and blanket denial of religious exemptions followed by discharge does not meet that standard.

The military burned through thousands of trained, willing service members during a recruiting crisis that persists to this day. It treated people who asked for a religious accommodation the same way it treated people who simply refused an order. That distinction matters legally, morally, and practically. The courts never got around to saying so.

No Accountability, No Precedent

The deepest problem with the mootness doctrine in cases like these is that it rewards the government for changing course. Not because the government was wrong, but because the political winds shifted. No official has been held accountable for the blanket denials. No court has ruled on whether those denials violated RFRA. No precedent exists to prevent the next administration, or the next emergency, from running the same playbook.

Poffenbarger and Doster did everything the system asks citizens to do. They followed the process. They applied for exemptions. They filed lawsuits. They appealed. They petitioned the highest court in the land.

The system answered with silence.