A lot of discrimination happens out in the open. Many agencies use safety or physical requirements in hiring even after hiring to exclude people with specific medical conditions. Often this comes in the form of a set of safety rules, such as being able to lift 25 pounds. Or it can be a vision requirement. But these rules are often used to justify discrimination against people with disabilities both in the hiring process and after they have been hired.

This is not to say that all safety rules or physical requirements are illegal. Having such rules is not in itself illegal. It’s how the agency handles exceptions to these rules in the disability context that is the issue. The disability laws require agencies to have a defensible reason for the rule if it likely impacts persons with disabilities (also known as “job related” and “business necessity”).

For safety rules, federal employers must also meet the “direct threat” regulations when dealing with disabled persons who do not meet the literal requirements of the rules. In the case of safety rules, the employer must perform a complex “individualized assessment” of the employee’s actual ability to perform the job. This includes potential accommodations. The agency cannot just rely on whether that person complies with the safety requirement itself.

Unfortunately, agencies have a poor track record when it comes to compliance with these rules. Often agency hiring managers, HR, medical reviewers, and others are simply unaware of the requirements that they must meet. Agency policies are little help either, and are not geared to identify these kinds of situations. Medical reviewers, often doctors or nurses, frequently pass off responsibility for considering accommodations to management, who themselves have no idea how to handle these cases.

To help employees and managers begin to understand the requirements of the law, as Ciera B. v. U.S. Postal Serv., EEOC Appeal No. 2020003570 (Jan. 8, 2026) shows, it is also very difficult for agencies to defend against.

How Workplace Safety Rules Work

Agencies are generally permitted to have safety rules in the workplace, and this is equally true of federal agency workplaces. However, there are important limitations to those agency workplace rules. For federal employees and applicants, those limitations come from the Rehabilitation Act.

Probably the most important limitation is that rules that have the effect of keeping people with disabilities out of the workplace are subject to a couple of requirements.

Job Related and Business Necessity

The first requirement that federal employers must show for physical or safety rules (generally known as “qualification standards”) is that any rule must be job-related and consistent with business necessity. 29 C.F.R. § 1630.10(a). This is a general rule that just requires that an employer have a rational reason for making such a requirement, since it tends to exclude persons with disabilities.

But agencies can’t just make anything up and call it a good reason, and the EEOC has limited agencies from doing so. For example, in Elden R. v. Dept. of Interior, EEOC Appeal No. 0120122672 (February 24, 2017), the Fish and Wildlife Service required its Wildlife Officers to be able to touch their toes. In that case, the EEOC noted that “not one management official, human resources official, physical fitness official, law enforcement official, or coworker was able to state in the record how a Wildlife Refuge Specialist’s ability to reach over his toes while sitting down with his legs outstretched was related to any of the functions of the position.” (Note the frustration in the EEOC’s tone).

Agencies too often believe that having these rules, even when enforcing them across the board, will save it. That’s a mistake. Enforcing rules that tend to exclude persons with disabilities, when those rules have no relationship to actual job performance, is discriminatory.

Direct Threat

Even if a work rule does have some relationship with the job, applying safety rules to exclude persons with disabilities triggers the agency’s obligation to conduct a “direct threat” analysis before doing so.

The regulations require that agencies meet a raft of requirements before excluding individuals with disabilities. See 42 U.S.C. § 12113; 29 C.F.R. § 1630.2(r). This is not an easy test to meet for agencies. “[A]n employer must meet very specific and stringent requirements to establish that such a direct threat exists.” Ciera B. (2026). This means that the employer has to be able to show that there is:

• significant risk of substantial harm;
• The specific risk must be identified;
• It must be a current risk, not one that is speculative or remote;
• The assessment of risk must be based on objective medical or other factual evidence regarding a particular individual; and
• Even if a genuine significant risk of substantial harm exists the employer must consider whether the risk can be eliminated or reduced below the level of a direct threat by reasonable accommodation. Ciera B. (2026).

Most agency hiring decisions probably do not come close to meeting a majority of the requirements. For example, showing that there is a “significant risk of substantial harm” means more than just pointing to a set of safety requirements.

In practice, probably the most important of these requirements are: (a) the risk assessment, and (b) consideration of accommodations as an alternative.

Risk assessment

The risk assessment is important because agencies cannot rely on just basic information about what conditions a person has. Often agencies will apply a rule that, for example, someone with a heart condition cannot perform a specific type of job, without considering the specifics of that person’s heart condition. For example, in Mark D. v. Dept. of Justice (FBI), EEOC Appeal No. 0120162225 (July 27, 2018), the FBI did not hire an individual who had a ventricular arrhythmia, a type of heart condition. Even though he was cleared by the FBI’s own doctor, the FBI’s medical reviewer stated that the condition was “not compatible with safe and efficient job performance.”

That’s not even the right standard. A risk assessment is not about whether someone can do the job to the satisfaction of the medical reviewer. It’s about whether the job can be performed without causing a “significant risk of substantial harm” that cannot be avoided by reasonable accommodation.

Risk assessments are not typically what medical reviews (and certainly not even less medically-qualified management) believe them to be. It is not simply a question of whether the person meets the medical or safety standard or not. Compliance with those safety requirements alone, unfortunately, is not enough.

Accommodation as an Alternative

Speaking of the FBI, in another case brought against the Bureau, the FBI failed to consider alternatives and accommodations in its hiring process in Nathan v. Dept. of Justice (FBI), EEOC Appeal No. 0720070014 (July 19, 2013). There, the FBI denied a job as a special agent to a former green beret who was injured during his military service and had vision only in one eye. The FBI failed to evaluate whether the applicant could perform sweeps of rooms successfully despite this condition, even though he had done this in actual war zones previously.

Most accommodation issues in hiring are less dramatic than this. Sometimes the issue is obvious, such as when an agency medical reviewer believes that anyone with PTSD cannot perform the job. Cleckler v. Dept. of Defense, EEOC Case No. 0120091162 (2013).

Other accommodation issues are just that the agency fails to consider how someone might work around their disability to accomplish the job, such as in Nathan, or that the issue might be resolved by a simple accommodation that is routinely granted, such as allowing the employee to take insulin shots as in Lewis v. Department of Defense, EEOC Appeal No. 01A24984 (Aug. 10, 2004).

A recent case from the EEOC shows how both of these can be misapplied in a simple situation where the employee’s medical needs seemingly run counter to low-level safety rules.

Ciera B. (2026) and the Difficulty of Direct Threat

The difficulties with direct threat analysis are probably best exemplified by the recent Ciera B. case. In this case, the employee was working with the U.S. Postal Service for 15 years using a specific running shoe that did not meet safety requirements. The shoe did not have a leather upper part. A leather upper presumably would help to prevent some forms of damage to employees’ feet that might arise from dropping the heavy loads that Postal Service workers are sometimes required to carry.

After 15 years of wearing technically noncompliant mesh shoes, the Postal Service began requiring the employee to wear shoes that complied with its workwear rules. Those shoes worsened her medical conditions and caused her to miss work. The Postal Service gave her a choice: wear the required shoes and miss work, or be sent home. Because this was a safety rule, it triggered the Postal Service’s direct threat obligations.

The EEOC found that the Postal Service failed the direct threat test at two critical points: First, it did not conduct a real risk assessment as to whether the employee’s shoes increased her risk of getting hurt (15 years without incident showed that it did not). Second, the postal service did not consider waiving or modifying its rules as a reasonable accommodation. These two failures doomed the agency’s direct threat defense.

Risk Assessments Require Analysis

Conducting the risk assessment is not always straightforward. To do that, the Agency must review what might happen in the future and in some cases speculate about how certain situations might develop.

As the EEOC has stated, “for an individual with a disability to be considered a direct threat, the risk of harm must be significantly likely to occur AND the amount of potential harm must be substantial.” Ciera B. (2026). The inverse of this, as the EEOC explained, is that “if a risk would not be significantly likely to occur and cause substantial harm if it were to happen, then such a situation would not qualify for the direct threat defense.” Ciera B. (2026).

Typically, in a direct threat case, risk assessment requires input from the individual, experience of the individual in previous jobs, and documentation from medical doctors or others who have knowledge of the disability. See EEOC, Technical Assistance Manual for Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This clearly did not happen in this case.

In Ciera B., the agency never really analyzed whether wearing non-compliant shoes would cause a genuine safety issue. The Agency simply pointed to the safety rules. But, as the EEOC pointed out, the employee had been wearing the mesh shoes that worked for her for 15 years without incident. The Agency “ignored the best available evidence showing that [the employee] posed no significant risk of substantial harm to herself or others.” Ciera B. (2026).

This further highlights that just because a rule is considered a safety rule, that doesn’t mean that non-compliance is unsafe. Whether it is unsafe depends on actual practice and experience, not just what the rules say.

Accommodation May Require That Safety Rules Be Waived or Modified

The other issue was that the Agency refused to consider modifying its safety rules. Safety rules are not set in stone and must be modified. That means that even if there is a safety rule, the agency must consider whether it can relax or eliminate that rule for someone who has a disability need and can otherwise perform the job.

In the context of Ciera B., the agency did not consider simply not requiring the employee to comply with the leather shoes rule. Instead, it forced her to wear leather shoes, which aggravated her medical conditions, forcing her to take leave. As the EEOC noted, “forcing an employee to take leave when another accommodation would permit an employee to continue working is not an effective accommodation.” Forcing her to take unpaid leave for two years was not effective for her, and the agency knew that.

The deeper issue is that management so often tries to bend the employee to the rule, rather than the rule to the employee. But the disability laws really require the latter.

Just having a safety requirement in the workplace is not enough to justify excluding individuals with disabilities when a reasonable accommodation for a disability would provide essentially the same level of safety.

What These Cases Mean for Federal Workplaces

These cases show that federal employers often have a very poor track record of complying with the disability laws. The problem, in this author’s view, is that almost nobody knows about these requirements enough to see them through to enforcement.

Often these issues come up in what might be called ‘edge cases’ — uncommon and often never-before-seen situations. This makes them tough to predict when they will arise (though, for medical officers, that’s more likely an everyday occurrence). Both hiring managers and prospective/current employees would be well served by understanding this process better.

For Employees: Safety Requirements Can Be Waived / Modified

Federal employees and applicants often see safety requirements as being set in stone. If there is a medical need for an accommodation, however, this is not always the case. Many times such requirements have to be waived to be able to allow an employee or an applicant for a position to perform the job.

This comes up a lot more often than it ultimately reaches the EEOC. Oftentimes people with disabilities are used to being denied jobs because of their physical limitations and have come to accept this as a common practice. But in many cases it can be illegal.

Speaking up about this matters, and filing an EEO complaint is necessary to preserve your rights. Federal employees and applicants generally must contact an EEO counselor within 45 days of the discriminatory action, so it is important not to wait. Complaints are also how these unlawful and discriminatory practices get stopped.

For Managers: Rigid Rules Create Legal Risk

For managers, a similar “set in stone” belief seems to drive a lot of decision-making and exposes managers to potential claims of discrimination. A lot of this goes under the radar especially in the hiring process, because hiring managers are often not aware that the safety rules can and sometimes must be waived or modified for disability reasons. It would seem contrary to the point of having a safety rule; but the law requires complex responses to a complex world.

A deeper problem is that agencies have not committed the resources necessary to educate the people involved in hiring on the disability laws, and specifically how to handle reasonable accommodations in the context of workplace requirements. Managers, medical review officers, reasonable accommodation coordinators, and HR professionals need to approach safety rules with an eye towards flexibility and understanding how the needs of the employee can be met through reasonable accommodation without then creating an undue risk to the employee or others.

Getting the hiring process right supports both the agency’s mission and disability rights.

Mr. Ingram has been representing clients with disabilities for 15 years, including many years devoted exclusively to representing federal employees.

This post is for general informational purposes only and is not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.