Eight Washington state firefighters who lost their jobs for refusing a COVID-19 vaccine on religious grounds are now asking the Supreme Court to intervene, and they are not alone. Nearly half of U.S. states, twenty-two Republican attorneys general, military service members, former federal officials, and the very man whose name sits atop the landmark religious-accommodation precedent have all lined up behind the firefighters' petition, as Just the News reported.
The coalition's target: the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that an employer's "reasonable concern" about potential hardship is enough to deny a worker's religious accommodation request, even when the employer never suffered any actual hardship at all.
Three years after the Supreme Court expanded religious workplace protections in Groff v. DeJoy, lower courts in at least three federal circuits are reading those protections so narrowly that the victory is starting to look hollow. The firefighters' case, brought by First Liberty Institute, asks the justices to settle a deepening split among the circuits before the right to religious accommodation becomes a right in name only.
The firefighters worked for Snohomish Regional Fire and Rescue in Washington state. When then-Governor Jay Inslee's administration imposed a COVID vaccine mandate on healthcare providers, the department denied all eight employees' requests for religious accommodations. The mandate lasted roughly seven months.
The employer's stated reasons were speculative. Snohomish Regional Fire and Rescue argued it might lose a "lucrative contract" with a state prison if accommodations were granted. Its insurer warned it would not cover liability claims arising from unvaccinated employees allegedly infecting patients, yet the insurer confirmed it had never actually faced such a lawsuit.
The 9th Circuit's three-judge panel sided with the employer anyway, granting summary judgment. The panel held that "an undue hardship may include an evaluation of the risk of hardship, not just an accounting of damages actually suffered." In plain English: an employer can fire a religious employee based on a worry, not a fact.
First Liberty Institute, in its petition, put the problem bluntly: "If 'empirical evidence disproving an employer's claimed undue hardship is not good enough to create a triable issue of fact... it is hard to see what could.'"
The Groff decision was supposed to fix a half-century of erosion. Gerald Groff, a postal worker fired for refusing to work Sundays, won a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that raised the bar employers must clear before denying religious accommodations. For nearly fifty years before that decision, as Groff's own brief in this case notes, "religious accommodations were rejected for only slight difficulty to employers."
Groff himself filed a friend-of-the-court brief through the Independence Law Center urging the justices to take the firefighters' case. So did Ronald Hittle, a former fire chief in Stockton, California, who says he was fired for his Christian associations. Hittle's own petition for Supreme Court review was rejected, over a pointed dissent from Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, who argued the Court must revisit its framework for evaluating circumstantial evidence in discrimination disputes, a framework they said has no grounding "in Title VII or any other source of law."
The Court has shown willingness to act unanimously on First Amendment questions in other recent cases. Whether it will do so here depends on how seriously the justices take the circuit split now forming beneath them.
Hittle's brief, filed through Baker Botts, lays out the divide. Three circuits, the 3rd, 7th, and 8th, have rejected the idea that an employer's "good-faith yet mistaken" reasons for denying an accommodation can survive scrutiny after Groff. Those courts require actual evidence of hardship, weighed by a jury when facts are in dispute.
"As three circuits have now recognized, the fact-intensive standard" the Supreme Court imposed in Groff "demands jury resolution of disputed evidence about whether accommodating an employee's religious beliefs would pose an undue hardship."
But three other circuits, the 1st, 6th, and 9th, allow employers to prevail on a showing of "mere reasonable concern." The practical result is that a firefighter in Chicago has stronger religious protections than a firefighter in Seattle, even though both are covered by the same federal statute.
The 9th Circuit, often described as the most overturned appeals court since 2007, has doubled down. Earlier this month, a separate panel upheld a regional healthcare system's denial of religious accommodations to employees, crediting "evidence of substantial risks to health, safety, and operations" and clarifying that employers need not prove exclusively financial hardship or grant individualized accommodations.
Nebraska Attorney General Michael Hilgers led a coalition of twenty-two Republican attorneys general in filing their own brief. Their argument carried a particular sting: as the officials responsible for managing large public workforces, they said they had "little trouble granting the vast majority of their employees' requested religious accommodations," even for "otherwise mandatory vaccine requirements" at the height of the pandemic.
"Even when important governmental functions like firefighting and first response are implicated," the attorneys general wrote, they managed to accommodate religious employees without operational collapse.
The brief accused three federal circuits of adopting "an untenable and underprotective interpretation of Title VII" that endangers their "predominantly religious citizenry." If state governments running fire departments and emergency services can make accommodations work, the attorneys general argued, private and local employers can hardly claim the sky will fall.
That argument dovetails with a separate brief filed by former EEOC General Counsel Sharon Gustafson and Rachel Morrison, a former EEOC attorney-adviser now at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The two pointed to the EEOC's own guidance manual, which places the "burden of persuasion" on employers to show that an accommodation would "in fact" create an "actual" undue hardship. Three circuits, they argued, are simply ignoring the agency's guidance.
Gustafson and Morrison noted that neighboring fire departments managed to grant accommodations without incident. "While not dispositive," they wrote, "the fact that" comparable employers could do so "suggests that there was not an actual undue hardship."
Three military service members, Hunter Doster, Robert Schelske, and Nickolas Kupper, who successfully challenged the military's own COVID vaccine mandate as religious discrimination also filed a brief. Their argument focused on what courts call "comparator evidence": when an employer grants exceptions to a policy for non-religious reasons that pose comparable safety risks, that evidence should weigh heavily in evaluating whether a religious accommodation truly creates undue hardship.
"When an employer grants exceptions to a policy that poses comparable risks from a safety perspective, or comparable employees in the same industry are accommodated without incident, that evidence bears directly on" the burden of religious accommodation requests.
The service members accused the 9th Circuit of "casually dismissing" such evidence as irrelevant "hindsight," charging that the court has "repeatedly failed to grasp the import of comparator evidence in the religious discrimination context."
The Supreme Court has recently shown it can reach unanimity on cases touching conservative principles, including religious liberty and associational rights. The question is whether the justices see the circuit split as urgent enough to act now.
The firefighters' petition arrives against a backdrop of Supreme Court interest in jury-trial rights more broadly. In 2024, the Court forbade the SEC from using administrative law judges to apply civil penalties in lieu of federal court. Last month, the justices heard oral argument in a challenge to the FCC's practice of forcing regulated entities to choose between forfeiture penalties and guaranteed appeals-court review without a jury.
The Groff standard, at its core, demands the same thing: let juries weigh disputed facts rather than allowing judges to resolve them on summary judgment in the employer's favor.
One complication emerged from an unlikely direction. The Trump administration's Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to reject a separate petition filed by fired New York healthcare workers who challenged COVID vaccine mandates on religious grounds. That move surprised Trump supporters, though the firefighters' case has drawn far more amicus support than the New York petition.
The tensions between the White House and its own Supreme Court appointees on other matters have added an unpredictable variable to how the administration approaches religious-liberty cases going forward.
Meanwhile, the 7th Circuit, one of the courts that has taken Groff seriously, remanded the case of John Kluge, a Christian teacher in Indiana who was fired for refusing to use gender-confused students' preferred names and pronouns. That case settled earlier this year for $650,000, a concrete measure of what religious-discrimination claims are worth when courts actually let them proceed to trial.
First Liberty Institute, the firm behind the firefighters' petition, has been active on related fronts. It recently convinced a court to block a Washington school district's alleged "viewpoint discrimination" against a Christian ministry. The ongoing debate over whether the Supreme Court functions as a political body will inevitably color how the justices handle a case with such clear pandemic-era political overtones.
The petition is now before the justices. The 9th Circuit panel that ruled against the firefighters was nominated by Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, a detail that undercuts any easy partisan narrative and underscores that the problem is doctrinal, not simply ideological. Judges across the political spectrum are reading Groff in incompatible ways, and workers in different parts of the country are living with different levels of legal protection for the same federal right.
The open questions are significant. Has the Supreme Court already signaled enough interest, through the Thomas-Gorsuch dissent in Hittle, through its broader jury-rights jurisprudence, to take this case? Will the Trump administration weigh in differently here than it did in the New York healthcare workers' petition? And can the 9th Circuit's "reasonable concern" standard survive contact with a Court that unanimously rejected the old, weaker framework just three years ago?
The firefighters did their jobs, asked for a religious accommodation their neighbors down the road received without incident, and got fired over a hypothetical lawsuit that never materialized and a contract loss that was never proven. If that passes for "undue hardship" under federal law, the word "undue" has lost its meaning.
