The Treasury and Health and Human Services departments are breaking federal rules by largely ignoring reasonable accommodation requests from employees with disabilities, the National Treasury Employees Union alleged in a lawsuit filed on Monday.
“The defendants are failing to administer even basic threshold steps required by law, regulations and their own internal procedures, such as acknowledging receipt of requests, routing requests to a designated reasonable accommodation coordinator, communicating with employees throughout the request process, resolving requests promptly or considering interim accommodations while requests are under review,” the plaintiff attorneys wrote.
As a result, NTEU said that its members have been forced to use up their time off, risk their health by reporting to work in person and, in some cases, leave federal service.
When the Trump administration ended work-from-home flexibility for the civil service at the start of the president’s second term, officials exempted qualifying employees with disabilities. Nevertheless, workers across government have reported widespread denials and revocations of reasonable accommodations, which agencies are legally required to provide unless doing so would cause an “undue hardship,” that permit telework.
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