“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.”
As HHS restricts telework, CDC asks employees to ‘bypass’ reasonable accommodation process