One employee is a survivor of a gastrointestinal cancer who sometimes loses control of her bowels. Another is undergoing breast cancer treatment that leaves her vulnerable to infections. A third has severely limited mobility and excruciating pain.
They all work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has told them they must commute to the office each day regardless of their medical conditions.
Before President Trump returned to the White House, many disabled C.D.C. employees, including veterans and uniformed members of the Public Health Service, had permission to work from home, an accommodation granted long before the Covid pandemic made remote work routine. But in response to a January 2025 executive order, the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the C.D.C., canceled all existing accommodations for disabilities and required employees to report to physical offices.
The executive order explicitly allowed for exemptions as needed, but the H.H.S. and C.D.C. have interpreted it more strictly than many other federal agencies have. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. aggressively carried out other executive personnel orders too, overseeing widespread layoffs last year that reduced the C.D.C. work force by about 2,400 employees — more than at many other agencies. Among the cuts were officials with the expertise to vet requests for accommodations. Most of the agency’s leaders were also placed on administrative leave or fired.
Hundreds of C.D.C. employees with medical conditions have filed complaints about the in-office requirement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which their union estimates will cost the agency about $200 million to address.
“It is appalling that this is occurring within our federal government, let alone at an agency that’s supposed to be on the forefront of public health and safety,” said Yolanda Jacobs, president of AFGE Local 2883.
In a bid to bring workers back to the office after the pandemic, many employers have tried perks like free lunches. Legal experts say others may have pushed the boundaries of the law in punishing employees who do not comply with return to office requirements.
“But I’ve never seen anything like this in the federal government,” said Jennifer Mathis, deputy director of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law.
Last month, H.H.S. said supervisors could allow employees to work remotely until their cases were decided but said remote or telework as a “final accommodation” could be decided only by an assistant secretary at the department. H.H.S. has amassed a backlog of about 9,000 cases.
“Telework remains an available option to accommodate qualified employees with disabilities, and each request is evaluated on a case-by-case basis,” Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for H.H.S., said in a statement. “Temporary telework arrangements have been granted as H.H.S. works to finalize reasonable accommodation decisions.”
She did not address the backlog or the delays.
The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires the government to provide disabled federal employees with reasonable accommodations — unless doing so will result in “undue hardship” for the agency. The federal government has historically been welcoming to disabled workers.
A blanket revoking of existing accommodations potentially violates legal protections for disabled workers, experts in workplace law said.
“They’re on shaky grounds,” said Katherine Macfarlane, director of the Disability Law and Policy Program at Syracuse University.
Many C.D.C. employees interact mainly with officials in other states, countries and time zones, making their presence in the office largely formal. For some disabled employees, including veterans, the requirement to work from the office has exacerbated medical problems, led to hospitalizations or forced them to quit.
“It’s chaotic, absurd, unwelcoming to people with disabilities,” Ms. Macfarlane said of the H.H.S. policy. “It’s thoughtless from top to bottom.”
The review of the accommodation requests is complicated by the fact that extensive layoffs at the agency in April 2025 included officials who oversaw looking into reasonable accommodations. Now, supervisors with no expertise in the issue have been charged with determining whether an employee qualifies for short-term telework.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some supervisors are too nervous to approve even short-term requests.
“The reality is, final accommodations for telework as a reasonable accommodation are still consistently denied, and this new guidance does not suggest that improving,” said Ms. Jacobs, the union official. “Workers’ needs continue to be ignored and unmet.”
In interviews with The New York Times, about a dozen employees described having medical conditions ranging from immune and neurological conditions to chronic pain and severe anxiety. Some have post-traumatic stress disorder, which they said makes it difficult to work in buildings that are still riddled with bullets after a gunman attacked the agency last August.
Gastrointestinal cancer so wrecked Jennifer’s body that she might be painfully constipated one day and have diarrhea that next. “I never know when I wake up which day it’s going to be,” she said. (She asked to go by only her first name out of concern of retaliation.)
She wears a sanitary pad but even so, having to clean up with her colleagues nearby can be mortifying, she said. After nearly a year of silence in response to her application, her remote work request was denied, she said.
Some other employees have been offered standing desks or advised to use their 240 hours of remote or telework per year — raised from 80 in March — which is available to all employees. In other cases, H.H.S. has offered extreme and sometimes expensive measures to help employees, such as providing private offices and hiring aides to help individuals with mobility issues, rather than allowing them to work from home.
But even the simplest of adjustments such as certain kinds of lights or chairs have taken months to obtain, according to the union.
In February, the Office of Personnel Management and the E.E.O.C. issued joint guidance saying “agencies should not take a blanket approach to rescind and deny” telework accommodations.
But it also indicated that an agency may request updated medical documentation to assess an employee’s need for accommodation.
Having to provide medical documents poses further barriers to getting requests approved in a timely manner, Ms. Macfarlane said, adding that no federal law requires such documentation to obtain a reasonable accommodation.
In any case, the new guidance doesn’t help employees who have already been denied accommodations, or those who have left the agency as a result of the order.
Katie Schenk, an infectious disease epidemiologist based in Washington D.C., was hired as a remote employee in 2024, and traveled to attend meetings at the C.D.C.’s headquarters in Atlanta as needed. But after last year’s executive order, she was assigned to an office in Hyattsville, Maryland, up to an hour’s commute in each direction.
Dr. Schenk has PTSD from her work during the Covid pandemic, which can manifest suddenly as panic attacks and nerve pain. The sudden change to her circumstances made life for her and her family of five “a miserable nightmare,” and the stress triggered a bout of shingles.
She tried applying to get back her remote work accommodation, but the “instructions that were coming back were unclear and contradictory,” she said, and no one could guide her on which ones to follow. Frustrated, she quit the agency in February.
The situation “was really making me feel like I had nothing left to contribute,” she said. “I’m now looking for a way to channel my expertise and to to find a way to improve the public’s health.”
Apoorva Mandavilli reports on science and global health for The Times, with a focus on infectious diseases and pandemics and the public health agencies that try to manage them.
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