On February 11, 2026, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) jointly issued new guidance (in the form of a “Frequently Asked Questions” document) on the issue of telework as a reasonable accommodation in the federal sector. This issuance represents the latest step in the Administration’s return to office campaign, which has been previously analyzed in this blog.
Under the Rehabilitation Act, the federal government is required to provide reasonable accommodations to federal employees with disabilities, a process which requires individualized determinations regarding possible accommodations. As the Rehabilitation Act is a statute, neither OPM nor the EEOC can abrogate its requirements through any rulemaking issuance at the agency level. The new guidance instead is structured in an apparent attempt work around this statutory structure. Changes include the following:
- Agencies are encouraged to centralize decisionmaking on reasonable accommodation requests. Many agencies had delegated this decisionmaking authority to line managers or other lower-level officials placed closer to the requesting employee.
- Agencies are encouraged to reassess preexisting telework reasonable accommodations to see if there is a way to accommodate the employee in-office.
- EEOC and OPM state that “Now that the Federal workplaces are fully re-opened—and Federal employees restored to the full range of their pre-pandemic essential functions—agencies may find that regularly attending work on-site is essential to most jobs, especially the interactive ones. [] This includes positions that require ‘supervision and teamwork.’” This language appears intended to encourage agencies to find more positions to require on-site work attendance as an essential function.
- More generally, several points in the syntax of the guidance suggest that agencies should favor in-office accommodations over telework accommodations wherever both accommodations are available options, and should generally only provide telework accommodations when in-office accommodations are not feasible or effective; OPM and EEOC did specifically note that an individualized decision is required in each case, however.
- Agencies are also encouraged to discount medical evidence suggesting in-office accommodations would be ineffective or futile, if the requesting employee had not tried out the in-office accommodation first.
- Agencies are discouraged from providing telework accommodations if the accommodation is to help employees manage symptoms of their disability; for telework to be granted as an accommodation, a connection must be made between the telework as an accommodation and the employee’s ability to perform their duties or to participate in the workplace.
- Agencies are also being told to consider outside evidence (such as social media postings) showing the employees engaging in activities inconsistent with their alleged disabilities in deciding whether or not to grant telework as an accommodation (although OPM and EEOC claim that “this is not a license to engage in fishing expeditions to undermine an employee’s request for accommodation”).
- Agencies are discouraged from granting reasonable accommodations to facilitate the medical effects of an employee’s commute.
- Agencies are encouraged to use leave accommodations over telework if an employee’s duties are fungible, but not if the employee’s duties are unique and cannot be readily performed by a substitute during leave.
- Agencies are also discouraged from providing telework accommodations from situational flare-ups for episodic conditions and to facilitate employees’ scheduling of medical appointments.
By its express text, the FAQ document denied that it is binding authority, but the guidance document does suggest how the EEOC may potentially decide these telework accommodation issues in administrative adjudication of future denial of reasonable accommodation claims. However, neither OPM nor the EEOC can direct how the courts will analyze denial of reasonable accommodation claims for federal employees who file de novo lawsuits in federal court. Under the Supreme Court’s 2024 Loper Bright decision, courts only give limited deference to federal agency interpretations of statutes, and even before Loper Bright, EEOC interpretive guidance documents were only accorded a limited form of judicial deference called Skidmore deference.
Prior attempts to conduct across-the-board reassessments of reasonable accommodations in the federal sector without individualized determinations have resulted in substantial litigation for the agencies involved, as demonstrated by of the Postal Service’s 2006-2011 “National Reassessment Program” and is subsequent (and still ongoing) class action litigation.
If you are a federal employee with a disability that prevents you from successfully performing your job on-site or otherwise have concerns about these changes in telework and reasonable accommodation, and wish to discuss your rights, consider contacting Gilbert Employment Law, P.C. to request an initial consultation.