Babu K. Thomas v. David Steiner, Postmaster General, et al.

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 incorporates the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA) to prohibit federal agencies from discriminating against qualified individuals with disabilities and mandates that the definition of disability "shall be construed in favor of broad coverage... to the maximum extent permitted." 42 U.S.C. § 12102(4)(A); 29 U.S.C. § 791 et seq. Under standard labor and civil rights principles, federal employees are further guaranteed procedural due process and fair representation before their constitutionally protected employment interests are extinguished. The questions presented are:

1. Whether, under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, an employer that has notice of an employee’s disability and request for reasonable accommodation may completely fail to engage in the required interactive process—and disregard its own procedures governing that process—yet obtain summary judgment because the employee did not independently establish the precise accommodation that the interactive process was designed to identify; or whether an employer-caused breakdown of the interactive process itself constitutes evidence of failure to accommodate and shifts responsibility for the resulting evidentiary uncertainty. This question implicates a recurring division among the courts of appeals concerning the legal consequences of an employer’s failure to engage in the interactive process. Some courts treat an employercaused breakdown as independently significant evidence in determining liability for failure to accommodate, while others require the employee to establish the availability of a reasonable accommodation notwithstanding the employer’s failure to participate. The decision below implicates the more restrictive approach and warrants this Court’s review to establish a uniform rule governing an affirmative federal accommodation obligation.

2. Whether, when federal law and the governing collective-bargaining regime vest an exclusive bargaining representative with exclusive authority to prosecute a career federal employee’s contractual grievance, the employee may be deprived of a constitutionally protected property interest in continued employment solely because the exclusive representative negligently fails to satisfy a ministerial grievance deadline—causing binding arbitration to dismiss the grievance as procedurally non-arbitrable without any adjudication on the merits or whether due process and the representative’s duty of fair representation require a meaningful remedy where the employee himself had no control over the missed deadline.

3. Whether a federal court of appeals may, consistently with the Fifth Amendment and ordinary principles of appellate review, refuse to consider properly briefed challenges to wrongful termination and the grievance-arbitration process as supposedly raised for the first time on appeal when those claims were expressly pleaded in the original district-court complaint, maintained in subsequent proceedings, specifically preserved in objections to the Magistrate Judge’s Recommendation, and presented in the appellant’s opening brief.

4. Whether the ADA Amendments Act’s command that disability be construed in favor of broad coverage permits summary judgment on the ground that a Rehabilitation Act plaintiff failed to create even a genuine dispute as to disability where an EEOC Administrative Judge, following an evidentiary hearing, expressly found that the employee “has established he is disabled within the meaning of the Rehabilitation Act,” and the court of appeals relied in part upon the employee’s ability to continue working for years after earlier diagnoses—although enabling qualified employees with disabilities to continue working is the very purpose of reasonable accommodation.

5. Whether Rule 56 permits summary judgment where court-ordered discovery concerning the employee’s medical and personnel records, alleged AWOL records, grievance-arbitration file, and other material evidence remained disputed or incomplete, while the record contained conflicting documentary evidence concerning accommodation requests, medical submissions, LWOP/AWOL status, protected activity, and the asserted basis for removal.