The Health and Human Services Department is placing new requirements on employees with disabilities who request telework as a reasonable accommodation, according to a policy document that hasn’t been widely shared with the workforce and has prompted union outcry.
All requests for telework, remote work or reassignment must now be approved by an official at the assistant secretary level or above, rather than a supervisor, pursuant to the document obtained by Government Executive dated Sept. 15, 2025, and signed by Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Resources and Chief Human Capital Officer Thomas J. Nagy Jr.
Agencies are required to provide RAs to workers with disabilities, unless doing so would result in “undue hardship.” In addition to telework, other common examples of RAs include interpreters and accessible technology.
The new policy also bars telework from being granted as an interim accommodation without approval from an official at least at the assistant secretary level.
Eric Pines of Pines Federal Employment Attorneys, who specializes in representing employees with disabilities, argued these requirements may deter individuals from applying for an RA.
“If you are going to put the deciding level so high as the assistant secretary…you’re going to make it much, much harder, on a practical level, for reasonable accommodation requests to be handled in a timely manner,” he said.
Additionally, recent internal communications reviewed by Government Executive show that management officials for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an HHS component, have been told to expect that all existing telework RAs will be repealed, so affected workers will need to reapply.
Pines said that action could break the law with respect to feds with “open and obvious” disabilities or who have already submitted medical documentation proving their disability.
“That would not be good for the agency because they’re going to have a lot of discrimination cases against them in the [equal employment opportunity] arena, and it’s not good for the employee because they are basically going to have to jump through many, many more hoops to get the accommodation that they either had in the past and was effective or they believe would be effective in the future,” he said.
According to the internal emails, HHS is already projected to need six to eight months to clear the current backlog of RA requests from CDC alone, which Federal News Network first reported on Monday. Unless and until an employee is provided with an interim accommodation permitting telework, they are expected to report for in-person work or use regular leave, up to 80 hours of allowable ad hoc telework, Family and Medical Leave Act leave or request another RA to enable in-person work like physical modifications to an office.
An HHS spokesperson said in a statement to Government Executive that the Sept. 15 policy “ensure[s] consistency with federal law” and that officials “remain committed to processing these requests as quickly as possible.”
Officials from the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2883, which represents CDC employees, said they are opposed to the new requirements.
“We are looking at an agency that’s supposed to be on the forefront of public health putting the health and safety of its workers with disabilities at risk,” said local President Yolanda Jacobs in a statement to Government Executive. “Under this new policy, it seems like political appointees are practicing medicine without a license instead of allowing workers’ medical doctors to make the best recommendations for their patients.”
CDC in September informed employees that they could no longer apply for telework as an RA and that existing telework agreements would not be renewed upon expiration, but AFGE reported shortly thereafter that the agency was pausing implementation of that policy to review its legality.
Headquarters employees at CDC had been permitted to work remotely for a little more than a month after a gunman on Aug. 8 shot at the building.
Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump ordered the end of telework for most of the federal workforce, arguing the practice had been abused following the COVID-19 pandemic, but provided exemptions for workers with disabilities.
Similarly, the Veterans Affairs Department this summer began more strictly scrutinizing RAs in order to “maximize” in-person work. Its policy requires senior executive service-level approval for certain telework requests and review of existing telework RAs.
