Roman Gonzales worked as a Security Police Officer for Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC, the Department of Energy contractor managing the laboratory where the federal government stores spent nuclear fuel. He held the position for more than a decade before his termination in January 2019.
Throughout his career, Gonzales disclosed to Battelle that he used prescription opioids to treat a chronic back injury he developed prior to being hired. Battelle accommodated him for years, allowing him to work provided he refrained from taking the medication within eight hours of a shift.
In late 2017, a new program physician began raising concerns about Gonzales’s medication use, and a licensed clinical social worker found him unreliable during a psychological evaluation. Battelle temporarily suspended his Human Reliability Program certification and later revoked his Section 1046 fitness-for-duty certification, which is required by DOE regulations for security personnel.
Battelle terminated Gonzales based on the revoked certification. He sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, alleging race and disability discrimination, retaliation, and unlawful disclosure of confidential medical information under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
A jury returned a mixed verdict, finding for Gonzales on his retaliation and "regarded as" disability discrimination claims while rejecting his race discrimination, unlawful medical disclosure, and denial of reasonable accommodation claims.
Battelle appealed, arguing that the revocation of the fitness-for-duty certification was a nonjusticiable national security determination shielded from judicial review under the Supreme Court’s 1988 decision in Department of Navy v. Egan.
Writing for the panel, Circuit Judge Morgan B. Christen held that the Section 1046 certification was subject to judicial review because its medical and physical standards were not tied to the predictive security determinations that Egan protects.
The panel distinguished the Section 1046 regulation from the DOE’s Human Reliability Program. The HRP involves counterintelligence evaluations, polygraph tests, and annual reviews of reliability, with final authority reserved to the DOE.
By contrast, Section 1046 establishes physical benchmarks such as hearing, vision, cardiovascular health, and a half-mile run with a maximum qualifying time of four minutes and forty seconds. The regulation expressly incorporates the ADA’s reasonable accommodation requirements.
Judge Christen wrote that Egan insulated from judicial review decisions concerned with the risk that individuals granted access to sensitive information may disseminate that information, not review of certificates concerned with whether employees are physically or psychologically capable of performing their jobs.
The panel also noted that Battelle had only temporarily suspended Gonzales’s HRP certification and never referred the matter to the DOE for a final determination as required by regulation.
The ruling aligns the Ninth Circuit with the Sixth Circuit’s 2016 decision in Hale v. Johnson, which rejected a similar Egan-based argument by the employer of a nuclear plant security officer.
The panel was unanimous. Circuit Judges Carlos T. Bea and Roopali H. Desai joined Judge Christen’s opinion. The case was argued February 4, 2026, in Portland, Oregon.