Employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention waiting for the agency to process their accommodation requests for disabilities and medical conditions are facing an imminent deadline to submit supporting medical documentation – even if they have already done so.
CDC, in an email sent on Aug. 20, told employees with pending reasonable accommodation requests that they must resubmit their supporting medical documentation within 20 calendar days. That deadline is Sept. 9.
In the email obtained by Government Executive from two sources, CDC states that if employees don’t receive the requested documents within that timeframe, “your case will be administratively closed.” The email also tells employees that any interim accommodations “will also cease upon administrative closure of the case.”
“As part of the ongoing reconciliation of Reasonable Accommodation Program records, we need to ensure that the medical documentation supporting your request is available for review,” the email states.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ updated reasonable accommodation policy states employees have 20 calendar days to submit their medical documentation once requested by their agency, “though reasonable extensions may be granted.” If a reasonable accommodation coordinator finds an individual’s medical documentation is insufficient, they may get the opportunity to provide additional documentation.
CDC’s instructions go beyond what’s stated in the department’s policy. The agency is directing employees who have already provided supporting medical documentation to update or resubmit their medical documentation. According to the memo, the agency is seeking this paperwork from employees in the following circumstances:
- “If you previously submitted medical documentation, please forward or resend a copy so that it can be associated with your current case.”
- “If your previously submitted documentation is no longer current (i.e. older than 6 months) or your circumstances have changed, please provide updated medical documentation.”
- “If you have not previously submitted medical documentation in support of this request, please provide the initial supporting medical documentation.”
CDC employees and their union, as well as a reasonable accommodation expert, say these instructions are unusual, and raise new hurdles for workers who have already waited months or longer for the agency to process their paperwork.
CDC faces a backlog of about 3,000 reasonable accommodation requests that it expects will take six-to-eight months to process. HHS overall is dealing with a backlog of about 9,000 reasonable accommodation requests.
When asked why CDC employees are being asked to resubmit or update their supporting medical documentation, an HHS spokesperson said in a statement that “this reflects a misunderstanding of the documentation process.”
“When an employee submits a reasonable accommodation request, they explain the accommodation they are requesting. Someone then follows up with the employee to determine whether medical documentation is needed to support the request. If documentation is required, the employee has 20 days to provide it. If they do not provide it within that timeframe, the request may be closed,” the HHS spokesperson said. “The employee may also let us know that they no longer need an accommodation.”
Jodi Hershey, a former reasonable accommodation specialist at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the founder of the workplace accommodation firm EASE, LLC, said CDC is “ignoring a basic principle” that “an agency shouldn’t demand more medical documentation than it actually needs.”
HHS’s policy states that once an employee submits medical documentation establishing a disability and describing functional limitations, the case moves to a decision. The policy states that component agencies may not request more medical information from employees once they have provided “sufficient information to document the existence of a disability and their functional limitations related to the request.”
“For employees who already submitted sufficient documentation, a blanket demand to resend or refresh it isn’t just unnecessary. It runs against what the policy instructs,” Hershey said.
One CDC employee, who preferred to be unnamed due to fears of retaliation, said they have now submitted three different reasonable accommodation requests for telework and have never gotten a decision back on any of them.
The employee sent the first one in summer 2025 and didn’t receive a response until an official sent an acknowledgement of receipt in December 2025. Despite following up with the official, the employee said they never heard from them again.
The employee submitted another telework reasonable accommodation request in the spring through a new HHS form. Shortly thereafter, however, the individual was diagnosed with a new condition that necessitated them to send in another request in July, which they have not received a response to besides an automated confirmation of receipt.
“Nobody knows what’s happening. There’s no guidance. There’s no clear communication,” the employee said.
The employee’s supervisor has permitted them to telework some days throughout this process, but the individual said they’ve still had to use sick leave and that their health has “declined rapidly.”
“I went from having my chronic illness completely managed to it having gone totally out of control,” they said. “There’s no proof that the stress of all this caused the new diagnosis, but that is very likely a contributor to how it got so bad.”
A second CDC employee told Government Executive that staff seeking reasonable accommodations are frustrated “because it’s taken over a year, in many cases, or longer, and suddenly we have a strict deadline or lose our accommodations.”
After months of delays and related issues that have contributed to declining morale, the CDC employee said they’re planning to leave the agency for work outside the federal government.
“I feel guilty because I have very specialized expertise in my subject and this will leave a critical gap in my team’s ability to function, but I ultimately need to care for myself and my family,” the CDC employee said.
Hershey said “it’s possible the department is sincerely trying to clean up files that got disorganized,” but said a “cleanup shouldn’t punish the people already stuck in this quagmire.”
“If the agency lost track of documentation it was given, the burden of fixing that belongs with the agency, not with the employee, and certainly not under threat of case closure and the loss of an accommodation they’re relying on right now,” she said.
A former CDC employee said the agency is spending months, if not a year or longer, to process reasonable accommodation requests because HHS-wide layoffs and separation incentives targeted the department’s human resources and equal employment opportunity offices.
The former CDC employee said the agency’s restrictions on reasonable accommodations are “decimating the most vulnerable employees not only at CDC, or HHS, but in the federal government.”
AFGE Local 2883 President Yolanda Jacobs said in a statement “HHS’s new blanket changes to its Reasonable Accommodations Program once again leaves workers in the dark.”
“This is yet another tactic by HHS leadership to deny reasonable accommodations to its workers, all while trying to give the appearance that they’re properly working through and responding to the backlog of thousands of unresolved accommodation requests,” Jacobs said, adding that some CDC employees may not be able to get updated documentation from a medical provider within the 20-day timeline.
Jacobs wrote in a letter to CDC leadership in March that employees are waiting months for the agency to approve their reasonable accommodation requests, and that the estimated cost of resolving hundreds of disability discrimination complaints exceeds $200 million.
Hershey said the 20-day deadline in the HHS reasonable accommodation policy allows component agencies to close out requests for employees who never submitted documentation, or who stopped responding altogether.
“Aiming that closure clock at employees who already provided what was asked repurposes a mechanism meant for abandoned or unsupported cases. The practical effect is that cases can be closed, and quietly dropped from the backlog count, over a records problem the agency created,” she said.
The upcoming closeout of interim accommodations, Hershey added, “carries the most immediate human cost.”
“An interim accommodation exists for one purpose: to protect an employee while the request is pending. Taking it away because the agency is reconciling its own records strips that protection from someone who did nothing wrong,” she said.
Sean Michael Newhouse contributed to this report.
