The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has ruled that a federal agency unlawfully discriminated against three of its employees by refusing to grant them religious exemptions from the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate — and the decision comes with some unusually pointed language about how the agency treated those employees when they asked for accommodation.
The May 15, 2026 decision found that the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it denied exemption requests from three employees at Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, California.
The federal employees in the case cited their sincerely held religious beliefs in the sanctity of human life, informed by their Christian faith, as grounds for their opposition to the COVID vaccine, specifically because the vaccines were developed using human fetal cells obtained through abortion.
The agency denied their requests, claiming that allowing the employees to test and mask instead of getting vaccinated would be unsafe and prohibitively expensive.
The EEOC’s decision found that the agency failed to present any evidence to support its claim that masking and regular testing would create an unsafe environment and that the agency’s cost-based objection fell apart once it conceded that the cost of purchasing vaccine testing supplies was underwritten by congressional funding through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act).
An “Inquisitorial Panel”
The case drew particular attention not just for the denial itself but for how the BIE handled the employees’ requests. The agency acknowledged it had no established process for religious accommodation requests when the vaccine mandate came down and had to improvise one on the spot.
What it came up with was, in the EEOC’s view, something well beyond a reasonable inquiry. According to the decision, employees who objected to the vaccine on religious grounds were “summoned to an inquisitorial panel to be quizzed and lectured on their medical history and knowledge of other medicines derived from human fetal cells.”
According to the decision, “One panel member described the panel’s purpose as [sic] to determine ‘whether the employee expressed a sincerely held religious belief and whether the belief was in conflict with the vaccination mandate.'”
The panel required each employee to review and sign a document listing 23 medications developed using fetal cell lines and to acknowledge that his or her stated religious objection to the COVID vaccine would logically apply to those medications as well — a clear attempt to expose what the agency apparently saw as inconsistency in the employees’ beliefs.
The EEOC concluded that this approach of using “invasive gotcha-style questioning” was “a thinly veiled and discriminatory attempt to expose supposed hypocrisy and convince Complainants to recant their objections,” and found an independent Title VII violation based on the discriminatory process alone — separate from the wrongful denial of accommodation.
The decision noted that while employers are permitted to ask reasonable questions to understand the sincerity of a religious belief, the inquiry is necessarily narrow; it cannot assess the reasonableness or theological correctness of a belief, only whether the conviction is genuinely held.
What DOI Must Do Now
As a result of the ruling, DOI must compensate the three employees for the harm caused by the agency’s actions and, under EEOC supervision, develop a “fair and non-adversarial process for employees to pursue religious accommodations in the workplace.”
EEOC has also ordered the agency to require the management officials involved in the 2021 decision to complete four hours of civil rights training within 90 days of the date of the decision, with an emphasis on accommodating employees’ religious practices.
Private Sector: A $4.25 Million Settlement on the Same Day
The DOI case was not the only vaccine mandate decision the EEOC announced on May 18. On the same day, the agency announced that A G Equipment Company, an Oklahoma-based compressor manufacturer, agreed to pay $4.25 million to settle religious and disability discrimination charges related to its own COVID vaccine mandate.
According to the EEOC’s complaint, the company told workers in fall 2021 that no vaccine exemptions would be permitted for any reason, then fired every employee who did not provide proof of vaccination — including those who had submitted religious accommodation requests — without any real inquiry into whether granting an accommodation would have caused the company undue hardship.
That settlement, covering more than 40 workers, is a private sector matter that does not directly affect federal employees. But the fact that the EEOC issued press releases about both cases on the same day underscores how seriously the agency is currently pursuing accountability for pandemic-era vaccine mandate violations on religious grounds — in both public and private workplaces.
A Shift in Posture Under the Trump Administration
The DOI decision is notable not only for its outcome but for its context: this is a Trump-era EEOC going back and revisiting a Biden-era policy and finding it was unlawfully applied to federal employees.
EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, an appointee of President Donald Trump, said the decision is “a step toward justice for federal employees who suffered under the pandemic-era policies of the Biden Administration,” adding that “the government clearly fell short of its obligation under the law.”
That framing reflects a broader and well-documented shift in how the agency has approached vaccine mandate cases since the change in administration.
The EEOC said in an April 2026 press release that it received more than 10,000 charges of discrimination related to COVID-19 since January 2021, and nearly all of them — about 9,800 — alleged a Title VII violation for failure to accommodate religion. Of those thousands of charges, the Biden EEOC found cause in roughly 400, less than 4%, and filed only four small lawsuits against private employers.
Lucas has said that “during the previous administration, workers’ religious protections too often took a backseat to woke policies,” and has pledged to restore what she calls “evenhanded enforcement of Title VII.”
Lucas also told the Daily Caller that the Biden EEOC had previously recovered $55 million for individuals who filed religious or disability accommodation charges related to vaccine mandates, but that “almost none of it was public,” describing them as “confidential settlements that were really hushed up.” In a complete reversal of this approach, she said the agency intends to publicize its enforcement actions.
Since January 2025, the EEOC has filed four lawsuits alleging religious discrimination related to COVID vaccine mandates and has resolved multiple large-scale settlements totaling nearly $19 million for affected workers.
Conclusion
Although the BIE case only involved three individuals, it is a reminder that federal employees’ religious rights during the COVID pandemic are still being reviewed, litigated, and remedied years after the fact. It will be worth watching to see whether additional cases surface as EEOC continues its review of the Biden-era vaccine mandate.
