Return-to-office mandates are revoking remote work accommodations that disabled federal workers already had approved

The January 2025 federal return-to-office mandate explicitly exempted employees with disabilities — but agencies are ordering disabled workers back to the office anyway. The CDC told employees with disabilities they would no longer be approved for telework or remote work as a reasonable accommodation, a direct violation of the Rehabilitation Act, and only reversed course after union pressure. Department of Justice employees with documented disabilities have had telework accommodation requests denied despite providing medical documentation. Across federal agencies, disabled workers report ever-shifting rules around telework that change month to month, forcing them to repeatedly re-justify accommodations they already had approved. This is not just a federal government problem — it is a preview of what happens across the entire economy. Remote work was the single largest driver of disability employment gains since 2020. Research from the St. Louis Fed and NBER shows that approximately 75% of the increase in full-time employment among people with physical disabilities post-COVID can be attributed to remote work, representing roughly 250,000 additional employed disabled workers. The disability employment rate hit a historic high of 22.7% in 2024, up from around 19% pre-pandemic. Return-to-office mandates threaten to reverse these gains. For many disabled workers, remote work is not a perk — it is the accommodation that made employment possible in the first place. Taking it away does not just inconvenience them; it pushes them out of the workforce entirely and back onto disability benefits, costing the government more than the telework arrangement ever did. This persists because reasonable accommodation law is reactive, not proactive. The ADA and Rehabilitation Act require employers to accommodate on a case-by-case basis, but they do not prevent employers from issuing blanket policies that effectively revoke accommodations and force each individual to fight for reinstatement. The power asymmetry is enormous: a disabled GS-9 federal employee challenging their agency's interpretation of an executive order has no realistic path to timely relief. Filing an EEO complaint takes 6-18 months. By then, many have resigned, retired, or been pushed out through poor performance reviews that resulted from being forced into an inaccessible work arrangement.