I try discrimination cases for a living. The hardest element to prove is almost never the harm. It is intent. Agencies rarely write down that they acted because of someone’s disability, so the law lets us prove intent the way juries and fact-finders have always inferred it: from what decision-makers said, from what they did when nobody was watching, from whether they followed their own rules, from whether their explanations held still, and from who ended up hurt.
For the past twenty months I have watched a set of facts accumulate around federal employees with disabilities that I would be eager to put in front of an Administrative Judge. This post lays that record out, cites it, and then reads it the way I would read a case file. I will tell you where I think the evidence is strong, where it is an inference, and what the best defense of the administration’s conduct sounds like. Then I will tell you what to do if you are living inside these facts.
I want to be careful about one word. “Targeting” is a conclusion, not a fact. What follows is the evidence I believe supports that conclusion. You can weigh it yourself.
Part I. The Record
The Words
Start with what was said, because in a discrimination case the decision-maker’s own words are the closest thing to direct evidence.
On January 20, 2025, Executive Order 14151 opened by declaring that the prior administration had “forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military.” The order directed the termination of “all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government,” and gave agencies sixty days to eliminate all “DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions.” The A in DEIA stands for accessibility. It was named in the order as something to be terminated.
The next day, the White House issued a presidential memorandum on aviation hiring. The accompanying fact sheet, as reported by Government Executive on January 23, 2025, stated: “The Biden FAA specifically recruited and hired individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities, psychiatric issues and complete paralysis over other individuals who sought to work for the FAA.” Fact-checkers found the FAA’s targeted-disability recruitment language had been on the agency’s website since at least 2013, through the entirety of the first Trump term.
Eight days after that, an Army helicopter and a regional jet collided over the Potomac. On January 30, 2025, the President signed a second memorandum, “Immediate Assessment of Aviation Safety,” which again described the prior administration as “specifically recruiting individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities in the FAA,” and directed the Secretary of Transportation to “review all hiring decisions and changes to safety protocols made during the prior 4 years, and to take such corrective action as necessary to achieve uncompromised aviation safety, including the replacement of any individuals who do not meet qualification standards.” No investigative body had linked the crash to any employee’s disability. The document nonetheless placed disabled hires and “uncompromised aviation safety” in the same sentence.
On April 16, 2025, the Secretary of Health and Human Services said this about autistic children at a press conference on autism prevalence, as recorded by NPR: “These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date.” The Secretary runs the department that, four months later, issued the telework instruction discussed below.
And there is the statement that predates all of it. In a 2023 speech obtained and published by ProPublica and Documented in October 2024, and reprinted by Government Executive, the man who now directs the Office of Management and Budget said of career civil servants: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” And: “We want to put them in trauma.” That statement was about the workforce generally. Keep it in mind when you read what happened to the employees who need an accommodation to get to work at all.
The Infrastructure
The DEIA order did not merely change a policy. It removed people and services.
OPM’s own implementing guidance acknowledged the legal problem. On February 5, 2025, the Acting Director’s memorandum “Further Guidance Regarding Ending DEIA Offices, Programs and Initiatives” told agencies: “Agencies should not terminate or prohibit accessibility or disability-related accommodations, assistance, or other programs that are required by those or related laws.” It then told them to “retain the minimum number of employees necessary to ensure agency compliance with applicable disability and accessibility laws,” and that the functions of any office that processes accommodation requests be “strictly limited to the duties within its statutory authority and that staffing levels are consistent with those responsibilities.” Read that as an instruction: keep the floor the statute requires and nothing above it.
What happened on the ground was documented by Congress within weeks. On March 24, 2025, eleven Members of Congress wrote to OPM that “American Sign Language interpretation and captioning services have been disrupted or discontinued across multiple agencies, with interpreters, captioners, coordinators, and other support staff being placed on leave or terminated,” and that “Requests for interpreters from Deaf and Hard of Hearing federal employees have been denied because the provision of interpreters is no longer a priority.” The letter also recorded that “White House press briefings have ceased to include ASL interpreters” and that accessibility resources had been removed from White House, DHS, and FEMA web pages.
The White House’s decision to end ASL interpretation at its own briefings became a lawsuit. In National Association of the Deaf v. Trump, No. 25-cv-01683 (D.D.C.), Judge Amir Ali granted a preliminary injunction on November 5, 2025. The government argued that closed captioning was a sufficient accommodation. The court, as reported by OPB, answered: “[I]t is not reasonable — indeed it can hardly be called an accommodation at all — to transcribe press briefings into a language that Ford and many NAD members do not know.” The exclusion of deaf Americans, the court wrote, “in addition to likely violating the Rehabilitation Act, is clear and present harm that the court cannot meaningfully remedy after the fact.” On November 17, 2025, the court had to order the defendants again to “take all reasonable steps to comply,” noting the defendants “have not made any submissions, in writing or orally, that would justify failing to take all reasonable efforts to provide ASL interpretation when they have knowledge of such a plan to brief the press.”
That is the government’s own house. The accommodation it fought hardest to avoid was the one it owed to deaf citizens at its own podium.
The Accommodation
The return-to-office memorandum of January 20, 2025 directed agencies to end remote work “provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary,” and to implement it “consistent with applicable law.” OPM’s January 22 guidance, as quoted by NPR, excused employees “due to a disability, qualifying medical condition, or other compelling reason certified by the agency head.” On paper, employees with disabilities were carved out in the first week.
What agencies then did is the heart of this case.
On August 13, 2025, HHS issued Instruction 990-3, HHS Telework. The instruction does not mention disability. It does not say how reasonable accommodation requests are to be handled. Its only reference to accommodation is a clause allowing an employee with a telework agreement to be ordered to the worksite “at any time for any reason, unless the employee has a reasonable accommodation precluding such a direction.” A policy that is silent on the one category of telework the Rehabilitation Act protects is not neutral. It leaves every component to guess, and components guessed in one direction.
On September 16, 2025, a CDC memo obtained by NPR announced that approvals for pending remote-work accommodation requests would be “paused until further notice.” The AFGE local reported roughly 250 emails from disabled employees at Atlanta headquarters. On December 15, 2025, five senators wrote to the Secretary that Instruction 990-3 “rescinds telework as a reasonable accommodation for qualified employees with disabilities” and produced “a pause on all new and renewing telework requests in at least one HHS operational division.” They observed, dryly, that “This document does not mention the word ‘disability.'” Their letter describes an employee with a high-risk pregnancy accommodation sent to the emergency room the day she was ordered back; a disabled veteran with PTSD whose accommodation was “fitfully denied, approved, and denied again” after the August 8, 2025 attack on CDC headquarters; an employee threatened with loss of supervisory duties for requesting a PTSD accommodation after that same attack; and a fully remote veteran who could not learn the status of his request because the human resources and EEO staff who would have answered had been terminated. The senators asked, among nine questions, how many telework accommodations were canceled after January 27, 2025, and whether HHS considers it permissible to demote, discipline, or demoralize employees who request telework as a reasonable accommodation. They asked for answers by January 16, 2026.
HHS was not alone. Government Executive reported on January 8, 2026 that the Department of Veterans Affairs began in June 2025 requiring Senior Executive Service sign-off on certain telework accommodations and annual review of those already approved; that HHS moved telework accommodation decisions to the assistant secretary level or above; and that the IRS imposed new restrictions on hardship telework, citing the return-to-office directive. The same story describes a GS-13 physical security specialist at the Justice Department whose telework request was denied within three business days on the ground that it “would remove an essential function,” who was then handed a termination notice citing “security concerns with professional conduct” despite no prior discipline, and whose termination was rescinded after his hospitalization. He left with a settlement. Federal News Network reported in January 2026 that HHS had also begun restricting telework as an interim accommodation while requests are processed, and had centralized processing into a backlog of six to eight months. An accommodation that arrives eight months late is a denial with better paperwork.
Then the Justice Department itself was sued. On June 3, 2026, two attorney-advisors at the Executive Office for Immigration Review filed Panian v. Blanche in the Eastern District of Virginia. One plaintiff has Type 1 diabetes among other conditions and had teleworked as an accommodation since 2020. The other is immunocompromised while in treatment for Stage IV lung cancer. As their counsel describes the complaint, “EOIR abandoned the legally required process of individually evaluating accommodation requests and instead began automatically rejecting all telework accommodations for employees with disabilities.” The suit seeks relief for a class of EOIR employees denied telework accommodations since January 20, 2025. On July 10, 2026, Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles granted a preliminary injunction ordering the Department to restore both plaintiffs’ telework while the case proceeds, as reported by Democracy Forward, the ABA Journal, and Federal News Network.
A second suit against the Department, reported by Government Executive the same day, alleges a “systematic, agency-wide practice” of denying telework accommodations and punishing those who ask. One plaintiff, a veteran rated 100 percent disabled, alleges he was demoted from GS-14 to GS-13 and stripped of supervisory duties in November 2025 after requesting accommodation and filing an EEO complaint. The other alleges that after documenting progressive spinal deterioration he was put on an informal performance plan, then proposed for involuntary reassignment, and that a supervisor told him, “It’s your body, you can choose not to take the pills.” These are allegations. They are also precisely the sequence I see in the accommodation-retaliation cases that come through my firm’s door: request, denial, sudden performance concern, adverse action.
The Rulebook
On February 11, 2026, the EEOC and OPM jointly issued “Frequently Asked Questions from the Federal Sector about Telework Accommodations for Disabilities.” The press release quotes the EEOC Chair: “President Trump has given a clear directive to the federal workforce to return to in-person work to the maximum extent possible consistent with applicable law.” It quotes the OPM Director: “Returning to in-person work and upholding disability rights are not mutually exclusive.”
The document is more candid than the press release. Question 4 states: “We strongly caution agencies against revoking previously granted telework without first making an individualized determination in each case.” That sentence is the government’s best evidence of good faith, and I credit it. Then read the rest. Question 3: “the employer providing the accommodation has the ultimate discretion to choose between effective accommodations.” Question 5: if reassessment shows telework “is not necessary under the Act, the agency may replace a previously granted recurring or full-time telework accommodation with a reasonable and effective in-office option,” and agencies “may find it helpful to reevaluate a significant accommodation such as recurring or full-time telework once a year.” Question 7: an agency “may ask a health care professional about such measures and whether they would permit the employee to work in the office.” Question 10: “agencies may find that regularly attending work on-site is essential to most jobs, especially the interactive ones.”
None of those sentences is wrong as a statement of law in isolation. Together they are a manual for converting an existing telework accommodation into an in-office one, issued a year into a campaign in which agencies were already doing exactly that. The caution in Question 4 is real. So is the architecture around it.
The Forums
The last piece of the record concerns where federal employees with disabilities go to enforce their rights.
On August 28, 2026, the Commission published a notice of proposed rulemaking that would rewrite the federal-sector complaint process in 29 C.F.R. Part 1614. Comments are due September 28, 2026. The proposal eliminates the current right to a hearing before an EEOC Administrative Judge prior to a final agency decision. Under the proposed rule, the agency investigates and issues its own decision, and “A complainant can appeal the final agency decision to the Commission,” with an Administrative Judge involved only on appeal and only if the Commission decides one is needed. The proposal also amends 29 C.F.R. § 1614.203(d)(3)(iii)(D), the provision governing what an agency must tell you when it denies an accommodation, to conform to the new filing model.
Consider what that means against everything above. The telework-accommodation cases are being won at hearings, before neutral Administrative Judges, where agency witnesses are cross-examined about “essential functions” they cannot define. Our firm wrote in April about one such Commission decision. The proposed rule removes that stage and leaves the accommodation-denying agency to grade its own homework first.
On June 4, 2026, the Commission also approved “clarifying instructions” for agencies’ 2026 MD-715 reports, the annual filings that include each agency’s Section 501 affirmative action plan for people with disabilities, to ensure “compliance with applicable executive orders,” citing Executive Orders 14151, 14168, 14173, and 14281. The Chair described this as a step “toward a modernized directive.” What the modernization will do to the disability affirmative-action components remains to be seen. I would not bet on expansion.
Outside the federal workforce, the same pattern appears in the enforcement agencies that protect disabled Americans generally. In March 2025 the Department of Education placed most Office for Civil Rights staff on administrative leave and closed seven of twelve regional offices; the GAO found that between March and September 2025, OCR received 9,072 complaints, resolved 7,072, and dismissed 90 percent of those it resolved, while paying up to $38 million in salaries to staff it was not letting work. OCR is where a parent goes when a school denies a child a Section 504 plan. In March 2025, the Justice Department withdrew eleven ADA guidance documents, calling them “unnecessary and outdated.”
The Wider Circle
Federal employees are my clients. But intent is judged by the whole course of conduct, and the administration’s conduct toward disabled Americans outside the workforce corroborates what happened inside it.
On March 27, 2025, HHS announced it would dismantle the Administration for Community Living, the agency that administers independent-living and developmental-disability programs, distributing its functions across three other components as part of a reduction from roughly 82,000 to 62,000 employees. The Secretary’s description, reported by Disability Scoop: “We’re going to eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments and agencies while preserving their core functions.”
In July 2025, Congress enacted roughly $1 trillion in Medicaid reductions over ten years, with work requirements and more frequent eligibility redeterminations. Home- and community-based services are optional under Medicaid, which is why advocates warned they would be cut first. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network’s Zoe Gross: “Because states are not required to provide these services to everyone who needs them, states faced with a huge loss of federal funding for Medicaid will cut HCBS first.”
Then, in June 2026, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum taking the position that federal disability law does not impose an “integration mandate” requiring states to serve people with disabilities in their communities rather than institutions, the principle the Supreme Court recognized in Olmstead v. L.C., 527 U.S. 581 (1999). The memorandum’s own author acknowledged, as NPR reported: “We recognize that this view of Olmstead‘s import is out of step with the common understanding of that decision within the federal courts.” The American Association of People with Disabilities responded that the interpretation “will open the doors for states to revert to warehousing people with disabilities out of sight and out of mind in institutions.”
A government that tells deaf citizens captions are enough, tells disabled employees the office is essential to most jobs, and tells the courts that community integration was never required is telling a consistent story about where it believes people with disabilities belong.
Part II. Reading the Record as a Case
Here is how I would organize this evidence if I were proving intent.
Direct evidence. The FAA documents are the closest thing in this record to a decision-maker announcing a disability-based motive. Two presidential documents, eight days apart, singled out “severe intellectual disabilities” as a hiring problem and ordered a review of “all hiring decisions” with authority to replace “any individuals who do not meet qualification standards,” before any investigation had identified a cause. In an individual case, a manager who declares that employees with a particular disability are a safety risk, and orders their files reviewed without an individualized assessment, has handed the complainant a “regarded as” claim and a pretext argument in the same memo. The Secretary of HHS’s statement that autistic people will “never hold a job” is the same category of evidence: a decision-maker’s stated belief about the capacity of a protected class.
Blanket policy versus individualized assessment. Rehabilitation Act law turns on the individualized, interactive process. 29 C.F.R. § 1614.203(d)(3) requires every agency to maintain written accommodation procedures, including processing timeframes, and the Commission’s longstanding guidance calls for interim accommodations when a decision is delayed. The senators’ letter, the CDC pause memo, the Justice Department complaints, and the preliminary injunction in Panian all describe the opposite: categorical treatment of telework requests, applied to a category of employees defined by disability. A blanket rule against an accommodation is the signature failure the statute was written to prevent.
Departure from its own rules. In pretext analysis, an employer’s failure to follow its own policies is classic circumstantial evidence. OPM carved out disability on January 22, 2025. OPM told agencies on February 5, 2025 not to terminate accommodations required by law. The EEOC and OPM “strongly caution[ed]” against revocation without individualized determination. The agencies did it anyway, at HHS, at VA, at DOJ, and, per the House letter, wherever interpreters were “no longer a priority.” When a defendant’s stated rules point one way and its conduct points the other, fact-finders are permitted to infer that the conduct reflects the actual policy.
Shifting and contradictory explanations. The OPM Director says in-person work and disability rights “are not mutually exclusive.” The FAQ he co-signed says on-site attendance may be “essential to most jobs.” Instruction 990-3 is described by its own department as a routine telework policy; five senators read it as a rescission of accommodations, and the department’s largest component implemented it as a pause. Justifications that move under scrutiny are evidence.
Motive. The OMB Director’s stated goal of making federal employees “not want to go to work” and of putting them “in trauma” is motive evidence for the workforce generally. The reasonable inference, and I label it as an inference, is that a strategy of deliberate demoralization falls hardest on the employees who cannot absorb it, and that the people who designed the strategy understood that. An employee with Stage IV cancer does not experience an accommodation revocation as a policy disagreement.
Foreseeable, exclusive impact. Telework-accommodation revocations, by definition, fall only on employees with disabilities. In the most recent EEOC federal workforce data I could locate, covering fiscal year 2020, persons with disabilities were 9.45 percent of the federal workforce and persons with targeted disabilities 1.84 percent, below the 12 and 2 percent goals the Commission’s regulations set for every agency at 29 C.F.R. § 1614.203(d)(7). When a policy’s burden lands exclusively on a protected class and the decision-makers knew it would, the law does not require them to have said the quiet part aloud.
The best case for the defense. Fairness requires it, and it is not trivial. Return-to-office applied to everyone. OPM carved out disability from the start and repeated the carve-out in February 2025. The 2026 FAQs expressly warn against blanket revocation. Agencies articulate facially legitimate reasons, including operational needs and in-person essential functions, and the law does give employers the choice among effective accommodations. The system is also working in the sense that matters most to a lawyer: a federal court enjoined DOJ, a federal court enjoined the White House, and arbitrators at SSA, HHS, HUD, the IRS, and the Forest Service have ordered telework restored under collective bargaining agreements, with the IRS arbitrator calling OPM’s guidance an “unqualified overstatement” of the governing labor law. The EPA’s response to its adverse award, terminating the bargaining agreement entirely, is not a point in the government’s favor. Finally, some of what I have described, Medicaid above all, is fiscal policy with disparate effects rather than a disability policy as such.
My assessment. If this were a single-plaintiff case, the defense would say the harms were collateral to lawful, neutral policies on DEIA and office attendance, and that any mistakes were made in good faith at the component level. That defense has a serious problem: the disability-specific evidence does not run through DEIA. The FAA documents are about disabled hires, not diversity officers. Instruction 990-3 and the FAQs are about accommodations, which exist only for people with disabilities. The Olmstead memorandum is about disabled people and no one else. The record shows a government that, given every opportunity to honor a carve-out it wrote itself, chose the reading that removed the accommodation. On this record, intentional targeting is not the only possible conclusion. It is the most reasonable one.
Part III. What Federal Employees Should Do
None of this is legal advice for your situation, and every case turns on its own facts. But the pattern above tells you where the fights are, and the law tells you how to be ready for them.
Get your accommodation in writing and keep it off the agency’s servers. If you have an approved telework accommodation, save the approval, the medical documentation you provided, and every message about it in a place you control. Agencies that revoke accommodations also lose the records of having granted them.
Know your agency’s procedures. Under 29 C.F.R. § 1614.203(d)(3), every agency must have written reasonable accommodation procedures with processing timeframes, and the Commission’s guidance calls for interim accommodations while a request is pending. Ask for the procedures by name and ask for an interim accommodation in writing. If your agency has moved decisions to an assistant secretary or a Senior Executive, the timeframes still apply. An eight-month backlog is not a timeframe.
Engage the reassessment; do not boycott it. The 2026 FAQs permit agencies to reassess existing accommodations, and Question 3 gives the agency the choice among effective alternatives. Your leverage is the word “effective.” When an agency proposes an in-office alternative, respond in writing explaining, with your provider’s support, why the alternative does not address the limitation telework addresses. Ask the agency to identify in writing the essential function that requires your physical presence and the evidence it relied on. Employees who refuse to participate in the process lose cases. Employees who document the agency’s refusal to engage win them.
Watch the calendar. A denial or revocation of accommodation is a discrete act. Under current 29 C.F.R. § 1614.105(a)(1), you must contact an EEO counselor within 45 calendar days. The proposed rule would change the filing model, which is one more reason to read the proposal and file a comment before September 28, 2026, particularly if you believe the hearing stage is where accommodation cases get their fair shake. I do.
Document what happens after you ask. Requesting an accommodation is protected activity. The Justice Department complaints describe the sequence to watch for: a request, then a new performance concern, then a reassignment or demotion. Keep a dated log of every change in your duties, ratings, or supervision after your request. Retaliation cases are won on chronology.
Use your contract if you still have one. The telework arbitration decisions were contract cases, not accommodation cases, but they matter to you in two ways. If your bargaining agreement protects telework, a grievance may restore it faster than an EEO complaint. And if your agency has terminated its agreement, as EPA did, that fact belongs in the record of your accommodation dispute, because it shows what the agency was willing to do to avoid providing telework at all.
If you are removed or demoted, you have two forums. An adverse action appealable to the Merit Systems Protection Board can be paired with a disability discrimination affirmative defense in a mixed-case appeal under 5 U.S.C. § 7702. The Board’s Administrative Judges hear these cases, and a removal for “failure to report” to a worksite you could not reach because your accommodation was revoked is not a routine AWOL case.
Deaf and hard-of-hearing employees: an interpreter denial is an accommodation denial. The same procedures, the same 45-day clock, and the same rights apply. The House letter and the National Association of the Deaf decision give you language to quote back.
Applicants: Schedule A is still the law. The excepted-service hiring authority for people with disabilities at 5 C.F.R. § 213.3102(u) was not revoked by any executive order. Agencies that have stopped using it are making a choice, not following a directive.
Stewards and HR professionals: hold agencies to OPM’s own words. The February 5, 2025 memorandum’s instruction that agencies “should not terminate or prohibit accessibility or disability-related accommodations, assistance, or other programs that are required by” law is the administration’s document. Quote it in every meeting where someone claims the executive orders required the cut.
Why this Matters to Every Eederal Employee
Section 501 of the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. § 791, has required the federal government to be a model employer of people with disabilities since 1973. No executive order in 2025 or 2026 repealed it, because no executive order can. The statute is still there. What changed is the government’s willingness to honor it without being ordered to, and that is a test of the entire merit system, not only of the employees with disabilities inside it. The bargain federal employees accept is lower pay in exchange for a workplace governed by rules rather than by whim. When an administration honors a legal obligation only after a court or an arbitrator compels it, the bargain is being renegotiated one employee at a time. Disabled employees are simply first.
If you are living inside these facts, you are not imagining the pattern, and you are not without options. Our firm represents federal employees nationwide in accommodation, discrimination, and retaliation matters before the EEOC, the MSPB, and in federal court. We offer free consultations at attorneysforfederalemployees.com. This post is general information, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.
Sources and Citations
Statutes and regulations. Rehabilitation Act of 1973 § 501, 29 U.S.C. § 791; 29 C.F.R. § 1614.203 (affirmative action and reasonable accommodation in federal employment); 29 C.F.R. § 1614.105(a)(1) (45-day counselor contact); 5 U.S.C. § 7702 (mixed cases); 5 C.F.R. § 213.3102(u) (Schedule A appointing authority for persons with disabilities); Olmstead v. L.C., 527 U.S. 581 (1999).
Executive actions. Exec. Order No. 14151, Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing (Jan. 20, 2025), text; Presidential Memorandum, Return to In-Person Work (Jan. 20, 2025); Presidential Memorandum, Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation (Jan. 21, 2025) and accompanying fact sheet, as quoted in Gov’t Exec. (Jan. 23, 2025); Presidential Memorandum, Immediate Assessment of Aviation Safety (Jan. 30, 2025); Cong. Research Serv., IN12497, Recent Executive Actions on DEI.
OPM and EEOC documents. OPM, Further Guidance Regarding Ending DEIA Offices, Programs and Initiatives (Feb. 5, 2025); EEOC & OPM, Frequently Asked Questions from the Federal Sector about Telework Accommodations for Disabilities (… and press release; OPM transmittal memorandum (Feb. 11, 2026); EEOC, Additional Instructions for MD-715 Reporting for 2026 (June 4, 2026); Federal Sector Equal Employment Opportunity, Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, 91 Fed. Reg. 55690 (Aug. 28, 2026); EEOC, Two Reports on the Federal Workforce and Disabilities (Mar. 20, 2024).
Agency actions. HHS, Instruction 990-3, HHS Telework (Aug. 13, 2025); NPR, CDC pauses remote work arrangements for employees with disabilities, union says (Sept. 18, 2025); Gov’t Exec., Trump’s return-to-office mandate exempted feds with disabilities. Many are being ordered to work in…; Fed. News Network, arbitrator’s decision in NTEU v. HHS (Jan. 2026).
Congressional oversight. Letter from eleven Members of Congress to Acting OPM Director Ezell (Mar. 24, 2025); Letter from Sens. Kaine, Warnock, Alsobrooks, Van Hollen, and Warner to Secretary Kennedy (Dec. 15, 2025) and press release (Dec. 16, 2025); U.S. Gov’t Accountability Office, GAO-26-108320, Department of Education: Full Costs and Savings Estimate Needed for Reduction-in-For…, as reported by K-12 Dive.
Litigation. Nat’l Ass’n of the Deaf v. Trump, No. 25-cv-01683 (D.D.C.) (preliminary injunction Nov. 5, 2025; order of Nov. 17, 2025), as reported by OPB; Panian v. Blanche (E.D. Va. filed June 3, 2026; preliminary injunction July 10, 2026), case page, ABA Journal (July 13, 2026), Fed. News Network (July 2026); Gov’t Exec., Lawsuit claims DOJ is retaliating against employees with disabilities who request telework (June 3,…; Gov’t Exec., Arbitrator restores telework for IRS workers (July 20, 2026); Gov’t Exec., Arbitrator restores telework and remote work at the Forest Service (July 2026); The Mindful Federal Employee, Telework Arbitration Wins for Federal Unions (Mar. 13, 2026).
Statements and broader policy. ProPublica/Documented reporting on Russell Vought’s 2023 remarks, as reprinted in Gov’t Exec. (Oct. 2024); NPR, RFK Jr.’s comments on autism spark outrage among researchers (Apr. 20, 2025); Disability Scoop, Trump Administration Withdraws ADA Guidance (Mar. 20, 2025); Disability Scoop, Trump Administration To Close Agency Promoting Community Living (Mar. 31, 2025); Disability Scoop, Congress Approves Nearly $1 Trillion In Cuts To Medicaid (July 3, 2025); NPR, Disability advocates say DOJ memo threatens community-based care (June 20, 2026); Center for Economic and Policy Research, Hayley Brown, The Trump Administration Is Attacking Federal Workers with Disabilities (July 28, 2026).