Demonstrating yet again that the White House is basically making things up as they go along when it comes to vaccine mandates and related pandemic policies, the new vaccine mandate rules published by OSHA on Thursday will apply to the employees of the United States Postal Service. Maybe. Or at least some of them. It doesn’t sound as if even the people in charge of this mess in the Biden administration are entirely sure. Before we dig into the details of this latest announcement, let’s take a stroll back through history to the second week of September. We were assured at that time by an unnamed “White House official,” speaking to Washington Post postal reporter Jacob Bogage, that the USPS was “exempt” from the mandate, but the service’s employees were “strongly encouraged to comply with these standards.”

So what has changed since then? As far as I can tell, nothing. But Government Executive is now reporting that the OSHA rules do indeed apply to most, but not all, postal workers. Interestingly enough, the Postal Service is not saying that they plan to comply and they are still “studying” the details.

On Thursday morning, the administration released details on its new vaccine rules. One is from the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration that applies to private businesses with 100 or more employees, and there is a testing option if employees decline to get vaccinated. The other, from the Health and Human Services Department’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, is a vaccine mandate that applies to healthcare workers at facilities participating in Medicare or Medicaid programs.

“Under the [Occupational Safety and Health Act], the U.S. Postal Service is treated as a private employer,” said OSHA’s emergency temporary standard, set to officially publish in the Federal Register on Friday. “It is therefore required to comply with this [emergency temporary standard] in the same manner as any other employer covered by the act.”

So the wording of the “emergency temporary standard” states that the U.S. Postal Service is “treated as a private employer” by OSHA, eh? That’s interesting, because Reg Jones, the former head of retirement and insurance policy at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has stated repeatedly and unambiguously that postal workers are federal employees. They are somewhat confusingly described in some federal regulations as “civilian federal employees,” but that is only to distinguish them from military federal employees. Court cases have been cited that deal with the retirement and health benefits for Post Office employees, with the courts finding that they are indeed federal employees. But now OSHA is saying that they’re not?

And yet, on September 10th, shortly after the mandate was first announced, a USPS spokesman named Dave Partenheimer told Government Executive that the new rules “do not apply to the Postal Service.” And their union said they did not plan to comply at that time and were taking a “wait and see” approach.

Meanwhile, the USPS itself muddied the waters further with an announcement on September 19th. The statement describes the USPS as “an independent federal agency that operates under a private-sector collective bargaining model.” (Gee, thanks for clearing that up, guys.) It went on to say that any changes to working conditions are subject to collective bargaining. In other words, OSHA can’t simply tell them the mandate applies to them until they come to some sort of agreement with the union.

Right from the beginning of this food fight, the American Postal Workers Union was always at the center of the debate. The union was responsible for negotiating an exemption to the mandate for its members and they donate a lot of money to Democratic political campaigns, including Joe Biden’s. But if the exemption has been nixed, that means that Biden will have to go to war with the APWU. If that’s the case, break out the popcorn because it’s not going to be pretty.