President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Saturday aimed at eradicating the last vestiges of the COVID-19-era mandates by removing federal funding from all schools and universities that continue to require COVID vaccinations.

“Given the incredibly low risk of serious COVID-19 illness for children and young adults, threatening to shut them out of an education is an intolerable infringement on personal freedom.  Such mandates usurp parental authority and burden students of many faiths,” said President Trump in his order.

The order directs the Secretary of Education, along with Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to create a plan to be presented to the President within 90 days that will include a full list of all grants and federal funding given to local or state educational authorities, individual schools, and any institutes of higher learning that continue to require COVID vaccinations for students.

The plan will include a list of discretionary federal grants and contracts issued to schools with COVID vaccine mandates, along with each relevant department’s rules for cutting off those funds.

Currently, no states require COVID vaccines as a prerequisite for public school attendance, though some colleges maintain their requirements. However, Maine was ground zero for pandemic-inspired mandates emanating from taxpayer-funded universities and and community colleges.

As of Friday, one day before Trump’s order, 15 colleges nationwide still required their on-campus and residential students to be vaccinated to some extent against COVID-19, with some schools even requiring booster shots.

Only one college in New England, the Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire, still mandates the COVID shot.

Meanwhile, former Maine Center for Disease Control (CDC) Director Nirav Shah has stepped down from his position with the federal CDC and is headed back to Maine, he told Maine Public on Tuesday. Throughout the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shah was the face of the state’s response, which included some of the strictest lockdown policies in the nation.

Shah says his decision to step down was made voluntarily, but it is unlikely his views and policies align with those of recently-confirmed Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., who was sharply critical of the government’s response to COVID-19.