Eight Washington state firefighters fired for refusing a COVID-19 vaccine on religious grounds are asking the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has gutted the very religious workplace protections the justices expanded just three years ago.
The firefighters, employed by Snohomish Regional Fire and Rescue, sought religious accommodations after then-Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee's vaccine mandate classified them as "healthcare providers." Their employer refused, citing the potential loss of a lucrative contract with a state prison. The Ninth Circuit upheld the firings. Now, with backing from 22 Republican attorneys general, former federal officials, military service members, and the man whose own Supreme Court case set the current legal standard, the firefighters want the high court to settle a deepening split among federal appeals courts over what counts as an "undue hardship" when a worker asks for a religious accommodation.
The legal backdrop begins with Gerald Groff, a Christian postal worker fired for refusing to work on Sundays. His case reached the Supreme Court around 2023, and the justices handed down a landmark expansion of religious rights in the workplace. Before that decision, as Groff's own brief in the current case notes, religious accommodations had been "rejected for only slight difficulty to employers" for "nearly 50 years."
The Groff ruling was supposed to change that, raising the bar employers must clear before denying a faith-based request. But as Just the News reported, multiple federal circuits have interpreted the new standard in ways that critics say make it nearly meaningless.
In the Snohomish firefighters' case, the Ninth Circuit ruled that employers can deny religious accommodations based on speculative risk alone. The panel's own language was blunt: "An undue hardship may include an evaluation of the risk of hardship, not just an accounting of damages actually suffered."
In plain English, the employer didn't have to show it actually suffered harm. It just had to say it was worried it might.
The facts underlying the Ninth Circuit's decision deserve close scrutiny, because they reveal how thin the employer's justification really was. Snohomish Regional Fire and Rescue argued it might lose a contract with a state prison if it granted religious exemptions. Its insurer said it would not cover liability claims for unvaccinated employees allegedly infecting patients.
But the insurer also confirmed something else: it had never actually faced such a lawsuit.
The vaccine mandate itself lasted only seven months. And the firefighters' briefs point out that neighboring fire departments granted the same religious accommodations without incident, no lost contracts, no liability claims, no operational disruption. The Ninth Circuit panel, in the characterization of military amici who filed supporting briefs, "casually dismisses" that evidence as irrelevant "hindsight."
Former EEOC General Counsel Sharon Gustafson and former EEOC attorney-adviser Rachel Morrison, both of whom helped establish the agency's Religious Discrimination Work Group, filed a joint brief challenging the Ninth Circuit's reasoning head-on. They noted that EEOC guidance gives employers the "burden of persuasion" to show an accommodation would "in fact" create an "actual" undue hardship. A speculative fear, they argued, doesn't meet that bar.
"While not dispositive, the fact that [neighboring fire departments] could grant accommodations without a problem suggests that there was not an actual undue hardship."
That's a diplomatic way of saying the employer's excuse was contradicted by what happened next door.
The firefighters' petition doesn't arrive in a vacuum. It lands amid a growing fracture among federal appeals courts over how to apply the Groff standard, a fracture that is leaving religious workers' rights dependent on geography rather than law.
Three circuits, the Third, Seventh, and Eighth, have rejected the idea that an employer's "good-faith yet mistaken" reasons are enough to deny a religious accommodation. Those courts require fact-intensive review, often by a jury. But three others, the First, Sixth, and Ninth, allow employers to prevail on "mere reasonable concern," a far lower bar that can be decided by a judge before a case ever reaches trial.
The Ninth Circuit has drawn sharp internal criticism in recent years for decisions that critics say reflect ideological priorities over legal rigor. It has been described as the most overturned appeals court since 2007. In the COVID era, the same circuit rejected an emergency injunction against California's restrictions on religious gatherings, even as the state permitted unrestricted secular gatherings.
Ronald Hittle, a fire chief in Stockton, California, knows the pattern firsthand. Hittle was fired for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine based on his Christian beliefs. The Ninth Circuit granted summary judgment to the city, and the Supreme Court declined to review his case, though Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented. Their dissent argued that the legal framework used to evaluate circumstantial evidence in discrimination disputes has no grounding in Title VII employee rights "or any other source of law."
Hittle, represented by the law firm Baker Botts, filed a brief in the current case urging the court not to let the issue fester.
"As three circuits have now recognized, the fact-intensive standard [Groff] imposed demands jury resolution of disputed evidence about whether accommodating an employee's religious beliefs would pose an undue hardship."
The brief filed by 22 Republican state attorneys general, led by Nebraska's Michael Hilgers, may carry the most practical weight. These aren't outside advocates. They are the officials who manage vast public workforces, including firefighters, first responders, and law enforcement, across more than twenty states.
Their message to the court was direct: even during the height of COVID, granting religious accommodations to public employees was manageable.
"Even when important governmental functions like firefighting and first response are implicated, [we've] had little trouble granting the vast majority of [our public] employees' requested religious accommodations, even for otherwise mandatory vaccine requirements."
If twenty-two state governments can do it, for cops, firefighters, and emergency workers, it's hard to see how a single fire district in Washington state faced a genuine hardship it couldn't absorb.
The attorneys general went further, arguing that three federal circuits "have adopted an untenable and underprotective interpretation of Title VII", one that lets employers dodge the Groff standard through speculative claims and summary judgment, denying workers their day before a jury.
Hunter Doster, Robert Schelske, and Nickolas Kupper, current and former military service members who successfully challenged the military's COVID vaccine mandates as religious discrimination, also filed a brief. Their experience is instructive: the military granted non-religious exemptions more readily than religious ones, a pattern that courts found discriminatory.
Their brief zeroed in on the Ninth Circuit's refusal to credit evidence from comparable employers.
"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]."
That argument cuts to the heart of the case. If the fire department next door can accommodate religious objectors without any operational fallout, the claim that accommodation is an "undue hardship" starts to look less like a legal conclusion and more like a pretext.
The Snohomish case is not the only recent signal that post-Groff religious rights remain fragile. Earlier in May 2026, the Ninth Circuit upheld a regional healthcare system's denial of religious accommodations, crediting the employer's "evidence of substantial risks to health, safety, and operations" and ruling that an employer need not prove "exclusively financial hardship" or grant "individualized accommodations" if any single one causes an undue hardship.
Meanwhile, in Indiana, the Groff standard worked as intended, at least in the Seventh Circuit. Christian teacher John Kluge, fired for refusing to use gender-confused students' preferred names and pronouns, had his case reinstated and remanded for a jury trial. The school district settled for a reported $650,000. That outcome shows what happens when courts take the Groff framework seriously rather than finding ways around it.
Courts around the world have also grappled with the tension between religious expression and institutional authority. In one notable example, Finland's highest court convicted a Christian member of parliament over a decades-old pamphlet, a reminder that the erosion of religious liberty is not a uniquely American problem.
There is also an uncomfortable wrinkle for some on the right. The Trump administration's Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to reject a petition by fired New York healthcare workers who challenged their COVID vaccine mandate on religious grounds, a move that, as Just the News noted, stunned Trump supporters. And the Ninth Circuit panel that ruled against the Snohomish firefighters was composed of three judges nominated by Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
That detail matters. It shows this isn't a simple partisan story. The legal framework that lets employers dodge religious accommodations through speculative hardship claims has found support even among GOP-appointed judges. The problem is structural, embedded in how courts interpret and apply the post-Groff standard, and it will persist until the Supreme Court clarifies the rules.
First Liberty Institute, the legal organization representing the eight firefighters, has built a record that gives the Supreme Court a clean vehicle to resolve the circuit split. The employer's hardship claim rested on a hypothetical lawsuit that never happened, a contract risk that never materialized, and an insurer's liability concern contradicted by its own admission. Neighboring departments granted the same accommodations without incident. The mandate itself lasted only seven months, and the employer suffered no documented hardship before, during, or after it.
The question before the justices is whether the Groff standard means what it says, or whether lower courts can hollow it out by letting employers win on speculation alone, without ever facing a jury.
If the answer is the latter, then the Supreme Court's 2023 expansion of religious workplace rights was a promise written in disappearing ink. Eight firefighters in Washington state are asking the justices to make it permanent.
When the government can fire you for your faith based on a hardship that never happened, the accommodation isn't the burden. The bureaucracy is.
