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.
According to the lawsuit, Treasury in March 2025 updated its policy to require a bureau head or designee as well as the deputy secretary to review and approve each request for telework that lasts for more than two weeks. By May 2025, officials reported a reasonable accommodation backlog that exceeded 6,500.
In response, the department in June 2025 lowered the approval threshold to a bureau head, among other changes, but specified that the official couldn’t delegate the authority. The NTEU attorneys noted that this meant only a handful of individuals were responsible for reviewing potentially thousands of reasonable accommodation requests.
The IRS told employees last month, according to the filing, that it was eliminating the form that had been used to apply for a reasonable accommodation, and it’s unclear to employees with pending requests whether they need to resubmit them.
While the NTEU attorneys acknowledged that HHS overhauled its reasonable accommodation approval procedures in September 2025, they described the process as “effectively unavailable or defunct.”
Unions representing workers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an HHS component, alleged in 2025 that the agency hadn’t processed reasonable accommodation requests for several months due to layoffs at its Equal Employment Opportunity Office.
In the lawsuit, NTEU spotlighted some of their members’ experiences, such as Shakira Williams, an HHS employee who has been waiting for more than a year for a response to her telework reasonable accommodation request in relation to PTSD.
Likewise, Benita Brown, an IRS worker, had her interim telework reasonable accommodation for a knee injury that caused mobility issues revoked in July 2025. She then provided the agency with additional medical information but hasn’t received a response. Due to not being able to telework, she used medical and annual leave, but when that ended, she was deemed AWOL.
The union also said that members submitted telework accommodation requests related to pregnancy and lactation that “were not processed before the need for accommodation had passed.”
“This lawsuit is about these agencies’ indifference and apathy towards employees with medical needs,” NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald said in a statement. “It’s about treating employees with common human decency.”
Specifically, the union requests in the lawsuit that the court compel Treasury and HHS to process reasonable accommodation requests within certain timelines.
Neither department responded to a request for comment.
