DOE dragged to court for sidelining an employee’s religious accommodation request

What happened next is what landed the agency in court. 

According to the complaint, the Department of Energy told Desmarais in December 2021 that his request would be processed in a specific order – one that, in practice, meant religious accommodation requests were being set aside entirely while medical requests were handled first. The agency allegedly gave no timeline for when, or even whether, it would get around to religious requests at all. 

A federal injunction paused the vaccine mandate in January 2022, and Desmarais was no longer required to get the shot. President Biden eventually revoked the executive order in May 2023. Desmarais filed suit that same month. 

By the time the case reached its most recent hearing, most of Desmarais’s claims had already been narrowed. The one that survived – and the one the court was asked to throw out – was his claim that the agency’s accommodation process itself was discriminatory. The Department of Energy argued that Desmarais had not sufficiently alleged any harm from the deprioritization of his request, contending that waiting for an adjudication did not amount to a real injury. 

The court disagreed. Under the standard set by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2024 ruling, employees do not need to show a significant or serious injury to pursue a discrimination claim. They only need to show some harm to the terms or conditions of their employment. The court found that being subjected to a policy that treated religious requests as a lower priority – leaving Desmarais in uncertainty for months while colleagues with medical requests moved through the process – was itself a harmful working condition.