In the wake of the federal government’s push to bring employees back to the office, agencies like FEMA are facing a critical crossroads. While the intent behind return-to-office policies may be rooted in tradition, optics or perceived productivity, the reality is far more complex — and far more costly.

For employees with disabilities, these mandates are not just inconvenient. They are exclusionary, legally questionable and operationally unsound.

The law is clear — even if agency practices aren’t

The Jan. 20, 2025, presidential mandate directing federal employees to return to in-person work includes a crucial caveat: It must be implemented consistent with applicable law. That includes the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which require agencies to provide effective accommodations to qualified employees with disabilities unless doing so would cause undue hardship.

Yet, across the federal landscape, many agency leaders are misinterpreting this mandate as a blanket prohibition against remote work, even in cases where virtual accommodations are medically necessary and legally protected. This misapplication is not only harmful to employees, it exposes agencies to legal liability, reputational damage and operational risk.

FEMA’s case study: A broken system with real consequences

At FEMA, the consequences of this misinterpretation are playing out in real time. In fiscal year 2025 alone, FEMA employees submitted over 4,600 reasonable accommodation requests, up more than three times from the previous year. Despite this surge, the agency’s accommodation infrastructure remains underresourced and reactive.

Supervisors, often untrained in disability law, are making high-stakes decisions without adequate support. The result? Delays, denials and errors that leave employees feeling unseen, unsupported and in some cases, forced out of the workforce entirely.

One FEMA reservist with a service-connected disability shared:

“After months of silence and no support, I gave up. I stopped applying for deployments. I felt like FEMA had no place for me anymore.”

Another permanent employee wrote:

“I wasn’t asking for anything fancy — just to do my job from home so I didn’t collapse from pain after 20 minutes in the building. Instead, I was treated like a problem.”

These stories are not isolated. They reflect a systemic failure that is both preventable and fixable.

The cost of dysfunction

When agencies deny effective accommodations, they don’t just violate the law, they lose talent, morale and money.

Consider the cost of FEMA forcing an employee to deploy in person to a disaster event when they could be performing the same job virtually instead. Tens of thousands of dollars in airfare, lodging and meals — all paid from the Disaster Relief Fund — become unnecessarily incurred expenses. Worse, the employee may underperform due to physical hardship or burn out entirely. In contrast, virtual deployment may be a zero-cost, high-return accommodation that results in better stewardship of taxpayer dollars.

Reasonable accommodations, when applied correctly, do not remove essential job functions or lower performance standards. They enable employees to meet those standards in a way that aligns with their health and abilities. They are not a problem; they are a solution.

Return-to-office mandates are not one-size-fits-all

Federal agencies must recognize that return-to-office policies and reasonable accommodations are not mutually exclusive. Virtual work can, and should, coexist with in-person mandates when it enables qualified individuals with disabilities to perform their essential functions.

This is not just a legal imperative. It’s a strategic one.

A supported, well-equipped workforce is more productive, more mission-focused, and less likely to file complaints and grievances. Accommodations foster a positive workplace culture, which is critical for retaining skilled staff. They also align with the administration’s stated goals of rooting out inefficiency and ensuring high performance among public servants.

A smarter path forward

To modernize federal accommodation practices and align them with both legal obligations and operational goals, agencies should consider the following steps:

1. Strategic messaging campaign
   The highest levels of leadership must publicly affirm that supporting reasonable accommodations is a legal requirement and a mission enabler — not a discretionary gesture.
2. Training and certification for deciding officials
   Supervisors must be equipped with the knowledge and tools to make informed, lawful decisions about accommodation requests.
3. Portability review of roles
   Agencies should classify roles based on their viability for virtual or in-person work to promote consistency, fairness, and transparency in decision-making. This classification should be grounded in the actual essential functions of each role — not tradition or “the way it’s always been done.” For FEMA and similar agencies, defining disaster-related roles by their portability (i.e., whether they can be performed remotely or require physical presence) would provide a clear, functional framework for evaluating reasonable accommodation requests. This approach enables faster, more equitable adjudication and ensures that decisions are aligned with both operational needs and employee rights.
4. Enhanced support infrastructure
   Create interactive tool kits, office hours and just-in-time training to support supervisors and employees navigating the accommodation process.
5. Contractor resource optimization
   Utilize existing contracts and skilled personnel to accelerate processing of virtual work-related requests, reducing backlog, and swiftly complying with strict processing time frames.
6. Streamlined implementation
   Improve procurement and delivery of approved accommodations — such as assistive technology, sign language interpretation and ergonomic equipment.
7. Employee feedback integration
   Use post-decision surveys to monitor effectiveness, identify barriers and improve transparency.

Accommodations are not a burden — they’re a blueprint for better governance

Federal agencies must stop treating reasonable accommodations as a bureaucratic hurdle and start recognizing them as a strategic asset. A fully optimized accommodation program enhances legal compliance, protects against risk, retains mission-critical personnel and improves operational excellence.

Return-to-office mandates may be politically popular, but they must be implemented with nuance, compassion and legal integrity. For employees with disabilities, flexibility is not a perk — it’s a lifeline. And for agencies like FEMA, it’s the key to building a workforce that’s not just present, but prepared.

Jodi Hershey is a former FEMA reasonable accommodation specialist and is now the founder of EASE, LLC.

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Interview transcript:

Terry Gerton: Melwood has been a leader in disability employment for nearly six decades. How would you describe the mission today and how has it changed over that time?

Larysa Kautz: Well, today Terry, Melwood is actually a family of companies with a shared vision of a world in which people with disabilities are fully included. For about six decades, we were one nonprofit entity and recently we restructured in a way so that we can serve more people, have a greater impact and grow the number of individuals that we serve.

Terry Gerton: Tell us about that restructuring and what it looks like today.

Larysa Kautz: So today it looks like Melwood Inc. is our parent holding company, where we have all of our shared services, which we then flow down to our subsidiary companies, one of which is a federal contractor, a social enterprise through which we employ nearly 900 individuals with disabilities on 60-plus federal contracts around the D.C. region. And we have Melwood Community Services, which provides license services to individuals like day programs. We have a camp for children with and without disabilities. We do after-school programs. We’re working on affordable housing now. So we have a number of companies with different missions, but all basically united by this vision that people with disabilities will have every opportunity that they’d like to be included in the community.

Terry Gerton: It sounds like it’s more a life cycle of care.

Larysa Kautz: Absolutely. We started doing a lot of workforce development and employment. That was the goal that began our nonprofit. But the more you work with that one pillar of the stool that makes up anyone’s life, the more you see the need for health care, housing, community and other aspects of what helps any person reach their full potential and live a life in the community that they choose.

Terry Gerton: Let’s go back to the specific vocational support services that you offer. What are some unique capabilities that you provide to help individuals with disabilities really succeed and grow?

Larysa Kautz: Absolutely. So we start from the pre-work world, which is workforce development, and we have done boot camps and trainings in a variety of different industries, including IT and tech, cybersecurity, AI. The construction trades, including as well as custodial, landscaping, mail room, will help train anybody with a disability in any field that they would choose to enter. Then we help them find a job, either with Melwood or with an employer in the community. And then we stay with them as a job coach, as someone that helps them integrate into the workforce, have hard conversations with your supervisor. How do you write an email when you’re angry and frustrated and work with transportation needs, housing needs, other things that arise that really do throw barriers and pitfalls in your road as you try to continue your career.

Terry Gerton: That sounds like training all of us could use a little bit of a refresher on.

Larysa Kautz: I think that’s right. I mean, I think the needs of every person with a disability are not unique. I think a lot of the needs are the things that we see. And we do a lot of training for employers as well and individuals who do not have disabilities on how to help accommodate, be inclusive and really listen to the needs of their employers and colleagues.

Terry Gerton: So as you bring these folks into the federal contractor space at Melwood, what are the toughest adaptations that they go through and how then do you work with government agencies to make sure that they’re effectively using the talents of these individuals?

Larysa Kautz: So one of the hardest barriers to overcome is taking yourself from your home environment, which you have managed to accommodate to your comfort level, to your sensory needs, to accommodate any physical needs, and to then find yourself in a job, 9 to 5, every day of the week that wasn’t necessarily crafted or created for a variety of different disabilities. And so we certainly work in our buildings as well as in government buildings to create opportunities to have a quiet space, to have a space where you can go kind of decompress if that’s something that’s needed during the day or to be able to go run around and get out some of the stimming type of behavior that someone might need to be able to re-regulate and just continue doing their work. I think remote work and hybrid work has helped quite a bit. A lot of our employees and other employees that we see out in the working world to be able to have some days where you can focus without colleagues around, without a lot of noise on the work that you’re doing. And it makes it easier to make it through the days that you do have to go in and have some of that social interaction, especially if you’re not necessarily an extrovert by nature.

Terry Gerton: I’m speaking with Larysa Kautz. She’s the president and CEO of Melwood. Larysa, I want to go back a couple of years because Melwood partnered with MITRE and the University of Washington to launch a neurodiversity at work playbook and pilot with some federal government agencies. Can you tell us what you learned from that pilot and how it’s playing out in the work that Melwood is doing now?

Larysa Kautz: Absolutely. So we created a training program called abilIT about seven years ago to teach neurodivergent individuals the skills they need to get a certificate in a cybersecurity field and then to be able to enter that field. And we worked with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to help them fill openings that they had for cybersecurity specialists and worked with them to understand the value of having someone who looks at things a little bit differently, is neurodivergent and found that the skills that they bring to the table are unlike other skills that organization had seen where they can catch mistakes, they can see patterns, they can really catch issues that weren’t being caught. So it worked wonderfully and we were able to adapt kind of the autism-at-work playbook for neurodiversity in the federal government playbook, which we hope to continue to do in the future. Right now, we’re taking our abilIT program nationwide and teaching other nonprofits around the country to do the training so that we can help fill the labor needs of national companies that are looking for cybersecurity, as well as now, AI technicians and individuals that can get certificates in those fields. And I think the neurodivergent population is perfect for the job.

Terry Gerton: It seems like such a crucial enabler because so many times folks who are neurodivergent have a difficult time getting through the hiring process, right?

Larysa Kautz: Absolutely, and that’s part of the program. It’s a 14-week program. A lot of it is on the substantive IT skills to get your certificate, but half of the time is spent on developing the skills that you need to get through an interview, to get though orientation, and then to grow your career and to be able to communicate with supervisors.

Terry Gerton: I want to also point out a recent study with Virginia Tech showed that Melwood’s model outperforms other employment mechanisms in both quality and cost effectiveness. What is it about the Melwood model, maybe the key ingredient to your soup, that makes it work so well?

Larysa Kautz: A lot of it is the wraparound supports and the professional development supports that we offer, not just to our students, but also to the employers. So having employers at the front end that have needs for the workforce really helps make sure we have the pipeline of workforce development training all the way through the job and then we stay with the individuals and we will coach them and if they don’t make it in the first job, we will help them find a second job. And maybe find a different line of IT tech to go into if the first one that they chose didn’t work.

Terry Gerton: I know you’ve been in this space for a while, but I’m wondering, are there still things that surprise you in encounters with employers as they encounter this population?

Larysa Kautz: Well, one of the employers that we’ve worked with, Enabled Intelligence in Falls Church, they do data annotation and labeling for computer vision models, teaching AI, essentially, to recognize what is on a picture or on a map. And they have both higher quality and speed in the work that they’re able to do. As a for-profit company, they’re recognizing the return on investment that they have by making their hiring practices inclusive of the neurodivergent population. So there really is an economic reason to do this.

Terry Gerton: And what would you recommend as best practices for other employers, public or private, who want to build more inclusive workforces?

Larysa Kautz: I would encourage them to not be afraid of the word disability and to include a conversation about inclusion and accommodations right up front in their job descriptions, in their hiring practices, in their orientation and create space for people to feel comfortable asking for accommodations, which frankly usually cost less than $400 per employee, often are free and will create an inclusive culture for all of your employees.

Terry Gerton: And find a workforce that’s liable to stick with them for a long time, right?

Larysa Kautz: Absolutely. You’ll find loyal employees that will not job hop, but will stay in a place where they feel welcome.

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