Internal Veterans Affairs memo shows plan to scrutinize disability work from home accommodations

The Veterans Affairs Department is implementing a policy to provide stricter scrutiny of reasonable accommodations for employees with disabilities as part of an effort to “maximize” in-person work. 

Agencies are required to fulfill requests for RAs from eligible federal workers with disabilities. Examples of RAs include interpreters, accessible technology and telework.

Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump largely ended remote and hybrid work for the government labor force, arguing the flexibility was being abused after the pandemic. His administration, however, allowed for exemptions in case of disability or other qualifying medical condition. 

Deputy VA Secretary Paul R. Lawrence in a June 5 memo to department undersecretaries and assistant secretaries obtained by Government Executive said that a member of the senior executive service (highest-ranking career employees) or SES-equivalent must now sign off on an RA request for more than eight weeks of regular or recurring telework or remote work. 

Lawrence also said that supervisors must, at least annually, review RAs approved without an end date to assess their “appropriateness and effectiveness.”

The memo also orders a 90-day review of RA approvals since Jan. 1, 2025, for remote or telework that last longer than eight weeks. 

Eric Pines of Pines Federal Employment Attorneys, who specializes in representing employees with disabilities, predicted the new policy would result in more of a “hassle” for workers requesting RAs. He also said the memo, as written, might violate federal law that prohibits employers from requiring medical documentation for “obvious” disabilities. 

“For example, should a blind person have to go to their doctor to acquire a letter stating that they're blind and they need books written in braille? Speaking in extremes here, but certain things that clearly are open and obvious, the law does not require them to prove anything,” Pines said. “So this would force those people to —  because it does seem to be a blanket request for everyone to provide proof of disability — it would force those people who normally would not have to get anything from a doctor to go back and to reprove that they're entitled to work at home.”

But he also posited that the lack of specific language in the memo about employees with “obvious” disabilities might have been an oversight. 

“I'm impressed with this memo in that it really tries to comply with the law and not just wholesale order people back to work [in an office],” Pines said. 

VA Press Secretary Peter Kasperowicz said in a statement to Government Executive that “the purpose of VA’s new reasonable accommodation guidance is to ensure these accommodations remain necessary, reasonable and effective for both the employee and VA.”

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents the VA workforce, argued that the new requirements would unduly harm employees with disabilities. 

“It’s outrageous that a department that employs so many disabled veterans would potentially ask every person with a reasonable accommodation to recertify their need for an accommodation,” a union spokesperson said in a statement. “It’s a waste of time and resources and a clear attempt to force disabled veterans out the door at the VA even as the veteran unemployment rate is ticking up across the country.”

The veteran unemployment rate was 3.7% in June, which is down from 3.8% the previous month but up from 2.9% in 2024. 

According to Office of Personnel Management data that was last updated in September 2024, there are nearly 115,000 employees with disabilities at the VA out of an approximately 483,000-person workforce.  

Eric Katz contributed to this report