The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is exploring workarounds to a new Department of Health and Human Services policy, which sets stricter rules on telework as a reasonable accommodation for employees with disabilities.

The HHS policy states all requests for telework, remote work, or reassignment must be reviewed and approved by an assistant secretary or a higher-level official — a decision that is likely to slow the approval process.

The new policy, as Federal News Network reported last week, generally restricts employees from using telework as an “interim accommodation,” while the agency processes their reasonable accommodation request. But faced with a backlog of more than 3,000 reasonable accommodation cases, the CDC is taking an ad-hoc approach to granting temporary medical telework.

According to four CDC employees, supervisors have instructed staff to email their medical documentation directly to Lynda Chapman, the agency’s chief operating officer, to “bypass” the traditional reasonable accommodation system, and receive up to 30 days of telework as an interim accommodation.

“The instructions are for you to email her a letter from your doctor, and she will be the judge of if you can telework for up to 30 days,” a CDC employee told Federal News Network.

A second CDC employee shared a photo with Federal News Network showing that Chapman was recently added as an authorized official to review the employee’s reasonable accommodation materials.

“I think this is very problematic, because she really should not be evaluating people’s health needs,” the employee said. “It should be an RA specialist.”

Two CDC employees told Federal News Network that Chapman is only approving interim telework in a few circumstances — including recovery from surgery, pregnancy or chemotherapy.

This week, the CDC hosted a series of “office hours” sessions with supervisors. During these question-and-answer sessions, the agency’s Office of Human Resources gave supervisors more information about the new reasonable accommodation process.

“I was requested to share my medical information via personal email to Lynda Chapman,” a CDC employee wrote in a screengrab of one of these Q&A sessions. “When I questioned her role prior to sending my file, she denied my request.”

Linnet Griffiths, a former senior advisor to CDC’s chief operating officer who left the agency in April, told Federal News Network that the agency had a “robust system” for processing reasonable accommodations, but said many employees who carried out this work were targeted by reductions in force.

“They have gotten rid of all the RA staff and EEO offices, which is extremely disturbing, because the department already had a lot of RA cases, a backlog that was unbelievable. They were understaffed,” Griffiths said.

Griffiths said human resources employees who left CDC and HHS received specialized training to ensure the agency was following “due diligence” when processing reasonable accommodations. That included making sure the agency complied with requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act.

“We had in-house doctors that were specifically trained to review that information and approve whether someone should be eligible for full-time telework,” Griffiths said. “The [CDC] chief operating officer or someone that does not have medical expertise reviewing that information was something we would never do.”

Griffiths said that reasonable accommodation requests often took months to get approved during her tenure at CDC, but said the agency granted full-time telework as an interim accommodation, when deemed necessary by an employee’s doctor.

In a readout from one of these “office hours” meetings, obtained by Federal News Network, agency leadership told supervisors that, under the new HHS policy, they cannot approve interim telework requests, even in cases where telework has already been identified “as the only effective accommodation.”

According to the readout, supervisors were told that expiring telework agreements, granted as an interim accommodation, will not be renewed, and that employees will have to either return to the office or use leave. Supervisors were told that these outcomes were “not denials.” Instead, supervisors were instructed to tell employees that telework could not be granted.

“Several supervisors noted this functions like a denial in practice,” the readout states. “Leadership acknowledged legal risks associated with forcing or effectively compelling leave.”

During one of the sessions, multiple supervisors raised concerns that agency guidance conflicts with federal disability law.

“Leadership directed supervisors to stop discussing legal issues during the session, stating it was not the forum for legal discussion, and advised that such concerns should be raised offline through supervisory channels,” the readout states.

According to the readout, when supervisors raised concern about personal legal exposure, leadership advised supervisors to “consider obtaining professional liability insurance.”

“Overall, the call left many supervisors concerned about how to lawfully provide interim accommodations, the lack of written guidance, and how to avoid harm to employees while complying with the direction given,” the readout states.

A CDC spokesperson said in a statement that interim accommodations, including telework, “may be provided while cases move through the reasonable-accommodation process toward a final determination.”

“This has always been the case,” the CDC spokesperson said.

‘Outsized harm’

Several Senate Democrats, in a letter led by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), said the new HHS policy “will inflict outsized harm on workers with disabilities,” including employees with chronic diseases and compromised immune systems.

“The federal government is a major employer of people with disabilities. It is bound by law not to discriminate against those workers and to take steps to increase employment of workers with disabilities,” the senators wrote.

The senators said department employees “have been harmed” by its new reasonable accommodation policy.

The senators wrote that an HHS employee’s telework accommodation because of a high-risk pregnancy was rescinded. On the day she was supposed to report back to the office, she was rushed to the emergency room by ambulance.

Kaine and Warnock said a disabled veteran’s post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was exacerbated by a shooting at the CDC’s headquarters this summer, but their telework accommodation was denied, approved, then denied again, “leaving them without direction or guidance.”

HHS Press Secretary Emily Hilliard said in a statement that the department “will respond directly to the senators.”

“Interim accommodations, like telework, may be provided while cases move through the reasonable-accommodation process toward a final determination. The Department remains committed to processing these requests as quickly as possible,” Hilliard said.

The post As HHS restricts telework, CDC asks employees to ‘bypass’ reasonable accommodation process first appeared on Federal News Network.