Promised raises vanished, evaluations dropped, and most of the claims survived dismissal
A federal judge cleared two former DC health workers to pursue age-bias and retaliation claims against their old employer, while throwing one claim out.
On June 25, 2026, the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on a request by the District of Columbia Department of Health to dismiss a lawsuit from two former program coordinators. Most of the case will go on.
Both employees were over 40 and worked on a CDC initiative called Project Firstline. According to the complaint, they earned less than two younger colleagues - a fellow program coordinator and an epidemiologist - who were brought on at higher salaries. The complaint calls one of them "younger and less experienced."
The pair say they took on heavier workloads and were promised raises that never arrived. Their supervisor had promised one of them a Quality Step Increase, a merit-based pay bump, citing her "exceptional performance," and repeated the promise more than once, the filing states. Neither got it.
After the two complained internally in August 2023 about what they described as "age-based pay disparities, harassment, and retaliation," two senior managers agreed they had "gone above and beyond their job descriptions" and ordered the raises processed by October 31, 2023. That did not happen, the complaint says. Instead, their supervisor cut their travel, training and conference budgets, and in November 2023 lowered their performance ratings below the 4.0 score needed for a merit increase. One employee had been tracking at 4.10.
The pair took their complaint to the DC Office of Human Rights in February 2024, wrote to HR in April 2024, and filed EEOC charges in June 2024. That December, they received non-renewal notices citing "lack of funding" - even though, the complaint says, internal budget spreadsheets and their supervisor had earlier indicated funding was secure through 2027.
The judge let the age discrimination claim proceed, finding the plaintiffs had met the low threshold for this early stage by alleging that younger, less-experienced colleagues in comparable roles were paid materially more.
The retaliation claim survived too, but only in part. The court saw a plausible link between the complaints and the withheld raises and downgraded reviews, which landed within about three months. The non-renewal notices fell short: they came about six months after the EEOC charges and from different managers, a gap and a disconnect the court said could not, by themselves, show retaliation.
The hostile work environment claim was dismissed. The judge said the plaintiffs had tried to "bootstrap" a series of separate personnel decisions into one broad claim, and that piling up discrete acts spanning more than two years, made by different people, does not amount to the severe or pervasive abuse the law demands.
For HR leaders, the decision is a tidy lesson in retaliation exposure. Timing is everything: trimming someone's review or pay soon after they complain invites a retaliation claim, even when the performance call is sound. So does inconsistency - the leap from "funding secure through 2027" to a "lack of funding" non-renewal is the kind of contradiction a plaintiff will pounce on. And weak pay-comparator records clear the dismissal bar with ease, so pay for similar roles should hold up on its face.
A motion-to-dismiss ruling decides only whether a case can move forward, not whether the claims are true. The court accepted the allegations as true for that narrow purpose. The surviving claims now head to the next stage.
