Originally Posted by GrayAnderson

I mean, I feel like there's a strong case that the initial imposition of the rule was within the government's power. It's the continual extensions of it with no formal consultation process where I think they went afoul of the rules. Put differently, I think they stretched the "good cause" exception until it broke.

The bigger issue, one that has blown up in a lot of places over the course of the pandemic, is that "emergency" clauses aren't generally intended to cover multi-year situations. They're intended to cover things for a few weeks, or perhaps a month or two (as was arguably justifiable in early 2020, as it took time to get rules and infrastructure set up for remote meetings), before the legislature can come back into session. Please pardon the turn of phrase, but at some point the "emergency" is no longer "emergent" and regular processes have to be allowed to come back into play at least as far as standing rules go. In this case, that means that the CDC really should have initiated public comment at some point last year (I'd say after the August extension would have been a good point for that), even if only with an eye towards a rule which would produce metrics by which to revise the mask mandate. This at least creates an impression that a given agency or executive "doesn't want to be bothered" with legislative processes, and that's a problem.