CDC ends telework for employees with disabilities, union says

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preventing employees with disabilities from utilizing telework as a reasonable accommodation, according to the unions representing those workers, who called it “the most sweeping civil rights violation against federal employees in decades.” 

American Federation of Government Employees locals 2883 and 3840 in a statement on Wednesday said that CDC employees were informed that they can no longer apply for telework as an RA and that existing telework agreements will not be eligible for renewal once they expire. 

Examples of RAs include interpreters, flexible work schedules and accessible technology. Agencies are required to provide RAs to employees with disabilities, unless doing so would result in an “undue hardship.” 

“This means no CDC employee with a disability will have the option of telework as a reasonable accommodation,” according to the union statement. “Additionally, employees with disabilities are at risk of retaliatory discrimination, disciplinary actions and loss of essential workplace accommodations. [The Health and Human Services Department] and CDC have engineered a no-win situation for its employees.”

The unions argued that this policy change violates protections in federal disability law as well as guidance implementing President Donald Trump’s directive largely ending telework for government employees, which exempts individuals “due to a disability, qualifying medical condition or other compelling reason.”  

Eric Pines of Pines Federal Employment Attorneys, who specializes in representing employees with disabilities, said that, if the union’s characterization of the RA policy change is correct, then that would be a “straight violation of the law, like as clear as day.” 

“Making a blanket assessment of new requests to work at home would be against the law, and not renewing one is also against the law because, obviously, if they had it before then that's because everyone believed it complied with the law,” he said. 

Additionally, the union officials alleged that CDC hasn’t processed RA requests for five months due to layoffs at the agency’s Equal Employment Opportunity Office. 

HHS did not respond to a request for comment. 

CDC headquarters employees were permitted to work from home following the Aug. 8 shooting of the Atlanta campus by a gunman who opposed the COVID-19 vaccine. The shooter killed a responding police officer before commiting suicide. Those staffers, however, were ordered to return to work in-person by Monday. 

While the entire federal workforce has been subject to upheaval since the start of Trump’s second term, CDC employees have been particularly impacted in recent weeks. 

HHS in August terminated its union contracts at CDC following Trump’s executive order to remove collective bargaining rights for two-thirds of federal employees under the auspices of national security. 

Trump also recently fired CDC Director Susan Monarez after she held the job for a little under a month. She testified on Wednesday that she was removed for refusing to pre-accept decisions from the agency’s vaccine advisory panel, whose members HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., recently replaced, or to fire career employees who work on vaccine policy without cause. For years, Kennedy has been known for spreading misinformation about vaccines. 

The White House said that Monarez "was not aligned with the president's mission to make American health again." 

The Veterans Affairs Department has implemented a policy to provide stricter scrutiny of RAs for employees with disabilities as part of an effort to “maximize” in-person work.