The 5th Circuit just drove that point home in Hayes v. GStek, Inc., a case involving an Army contractor whose employee requested full-time remote work after being diagnosed with autism, depression, and social anxiety disorder.
And the court's message was unmistakable: just because a job could be performed remotely during COVID doesn't mean remote work is now a permanently reasonable accommodation under the ADA.
That distinction matters. A lot.
Hayes worked as an IT systems administrator at Fort Polk. During the pandemic, he worked remotely like millions of other employees. But when the Army transitioned contractors back to in-person work in 2022, Hayes struggled. After receiving multiple mental health diagnoses and inpatient psychiatric treatment, he requested full-time telework as a reasonable accommodation.
His employer, GStek, actually tried to make it work. The company allowed Hayes to work remotely two to three days per week. But the Army—which controlled the contract site and retained authority over telework decisions—refused to approve full-time remote work.
Eventually, after attendance problems and what Hayes himself described as a “mental breakdown,” GStek terminated his employment.
He sued under the ADA for failure to accommodate, discrimination, and retaliation. He lost across the board.
The ADA protects qualified employees who can perform the essential functions of the job with or without a reasonable accommodation. And the court concluded that in-person attendance was an essential function of this particular job.
The opinion leans heavily on a point courts have been making with increasing frequency post-COVID: temporary pandemic-era remote work arrangements did not permanently rewrite job descriptions.
The 5th Circuit quoted EEOC guidance directly:
The fact that an employer temporarily excused performance of one or more essential functions when it closed the workplace and enabled employees to telework … does not mean that the employer permanently changed a job's essential functions.
That's the key takeaway here.
Too many employees—and frankly some lawyers—still treat "you let me work remotely during COVID" as a trump card in ADA litigation. It isn't.
Courts continue to give substantial deference to an employer's judgment about what functions are essential, especially regarding attendance, supervision, teamwork, security, and operational needs. Here, the employer had an additional advantage: a government client that expressly required onsite work.
None of this means remote work can never be a reasonable accommodation. Sometimes it absolutely can. But this case is another reminder that the analysis remains intensely job-specific.
The stronger the evidence that physical presence matters to the role, the stronger the employer's defense becomes.
And COVID-era exceptions are increasingly being treated by courts exactly as they were intended: temporary exceptions.