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CDC ends telework for disabled employees, laws be damned [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-09-18
The Trump administration is hell-bent on making Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees miserable, at least that’s the only explanation for these ongoing cruelties.
On Wednesday, CDC employees received an email telling them that telework is no longer a reasonable accommodation—a policy that has supposedly been in effect since Aug. 13. That means that anyone with disabilities or temporary health issues will have to return to the office.
A cartoon by Clay Jones.
What temporary health issues, you might be wondering? Well, some folks were working from home after being literally pinned down for hours by a gunman who was empowered by the types of anti-vax conspiracies spewed by President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Who wouldn’t want to return to an office that’s still covered in bullet holes?
The agency is well within its rights, regrettably, to say that telework is no longer an option. But under the Americans with Disabilities Act, any request for accommodations requires an individualized analysis to assess whether the requested accommodation is reasonable. So an employer actually can’t just end telework altogether without assessing individual needs.
While it may be permissible to declare that people with disabilities can’t telework because “no one can,” those employees would still be entitled to different reasonable accommodations—which still requires an individualized assessment.
Though the Trump team obviously can’t be bothered to do its research, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has a whole page on how telework is, in fact, a reasonable accommodation, explaining that the determination of whether it’s reasonable has to be made between the employer and the individual.
See? Individualized assessment!
Put another way, the CDC is required to sit down with each disabled employee to determine what reasonable accommodations are needed, even if telework is off the table.
Former CDC Director Susan Monarez testifies before the Senate Committe on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Sept. 17.
Hilariously, the entire telework site for the federal government is intact, but there’s a big banner saying that any guidance is superseded by Trump’s demand that people return to the office. They’re wrecking the government—and it's monstrous. But it’s also just so lazy and tawdry.
The ending of remote work at the CDC seems to be part of the Trump administration’s outright war on the agency’s employees. Under Kennedy, the CDC has been wrecking science, and now it apparently wants to wreck people, too.
But what Kennedy doesn’t understand—or just doesn’t care about—is the level of trauma experienced by CDC employees.
Debra Houry, who resigned as chief medical officer the same day that CDC Director Susan Monarez was fired, explained that “each bullet was meant for a person, and each of my staff were very traumatized afterwards.”
The Trump administration’s war on science also means that CDC employees are reluctant to perform their normal job duties, like speaking or writing about vaccines. But surely hauling them back to the office will fix that, right?
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