Republican members of Congress are accusing President Joe Biden of targeting Americans seeking religious exemptions from the COVID-19 vaccine.

“Your administration’s attempt to use the power of the federal government to single out Americans who object to the COVID-19 vaccine on religious grounds is inexcusable and must be withdrawn,” reads the letter, first obtained by The Daily Signal.

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The letter to Biden builds on a Jan. 11 report from The Daily Signal that the Biden administration is testing out a policy in a small federal agency, the Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia, that would likely serve as a model for government-assembled lists of Americans who object to the COVID-19 vaccines on religious grounds.

The Pretrial Services Agency announced Jan. 11 that it will begin storing the names and “personal religious information” of any employee who makes “religious accommodation requests for religious exception from the federally mandated vaccination requirement…

In the Jan. 11 Daily Signal report exposing the Pretrial Services Agency policy, Sarah Parshall Perry and GianCarlo Canaparo, legal fellows with the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, wrote that “Biden may not be winning points for transparency, but he’s doing his best to win first place in subjecting Americans with sincerely held religious beliefs to differential treatment.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“Take the Department of Defense, for example—which has failed to grant a single religious exemption on behalf of any service members requesting one for the federal vaccine mandate,” wrote Perry and Canaparo. “A group of Navy SEALs was recently successful in its federal lawsuit against the Biden administration on claims that its conscience rights under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act were violated…”

“While employers, employment agencies, or unions with 100 employees or more are prohibited under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from engaging in disparate treatment and from maintaining policies or practices that result in unjustified disparate impact based on religion, this administration doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo,” wrote Perry and Canaparo. “That, at bottom, is what this policy is about.”

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(Excerpt from The Daily Signal. Photo Credit: Getty Images)