Vernon Lee v. Douglas A. Collins, Secretary of Veterans Affairs1

United States Court of Appeals
For the Eighth Circuit
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No. 24-2028
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Vernon Lee
lllllllllllllllllllllPlaintiff - Appellant
v.
Douglas A. Collins, Secretary of Veterans Affairs1
lllllllllllllllllllllDefendant - Appellee
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Appeal from United States District Court
for the Western District of Missouri - Kansas City
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Submitted: June 10, 2025
Filed: July 10, 2025
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Before COLLOTON, Chief Judge, ARNOLD and GRUENDER, Circuit Judges.
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ARNOLD, Circuit Judge.
Vernon Lee, an African-American former employee of the Kansas City
Veterans Administration Hospital, brought disparate treatment, hostile work
1Douglas A. Collins has been appointed to serve as Secretary of Veterans
Affairs and is substituted as appellee pursuant to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure
43(c).

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environment, retaliation, and constructive discharge claims against the Secretary of
Veterans Affairs under Title VII. See 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-16. He alleged that the
Department of Veterans Affairs had engaged in race discrimination as well as other
forms of discrimination. But the district court held that Lee failed to exhaust the first
three claims and that Lee’s work conditions were not intolerable enough to support
the last claim, so it granted the Secretary summary judgment. Because we conclude
that the first holding is erroneous, but not the second, we affirm in part, reverse in
part, and remand for further proceedings.
All the relevant evidence concerning exhaustion is undisputed. Before he
brought this suit, while he still worked at the hospital, Lee filed an administrative
complaint with the Department of Veterans Affairs. He asserted that the department
discriminated against him because of his race and other protected characteristics,
allowed a work environment hostile to African-American employees to persist, and
retaliated against him for supporting his wife when she testified in a separate
employment discrimination matter. The department treated the filing as both an
individual complaint, see 29 C.F.R. § 1614.106, which it held in abeyance, and a class
complaint. See id. § 1614.204.
Then Lee resigned and filed another administrative complaint. In that
complaint, he alleged that he had suffered continued discrimination, harassment, and
retaliation, which led to his constructive discharge. On May 17, 2021, the department
allowed the constructive discharge claim to proceed, but it dismissed the new
allegations of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation and treated them as an
amendment to the individual portion of the earlier complaint. Almost eight months
later, on January 10, 2022, the department dismissed the remainder of the second
complaint outright. Though his prior complaint was still pending, Lee brought his
present claims in the district court on February 9, 2022.
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At that point, Lee had exhausted his disparate treatment, hostile work
environment, and retaliation claims because he presented them in his first
administrative complaint and waited as long as necessary before advancing them in
court. When one hundred and eighty days pass from his filing of an administrative
complaint and no final action has yet resolved the matter, an employee of the
Department of Veterans Affairs may bring his Title VII claims in a civil action. See
42 U.S.C. § 2000e-16(c). So, even if we assume that an amendment to an
administrative complaint restarts the one-hundred-and-eighty-day period, cf. 29
C.F.R. § 1614.106(e)(2), the department’s delay in processing Lee’s first
administrative complaint entitled him to sue in court. That is because, between the
last amendment to that complaint, on May 17, 2021, and the commencement of Lee’s
federal action, on February 9, 2022, more than two hundred and fifty days passed
without any disposition of that complaint.
It is irrelevant, for present purposes, that the department held the individual
portion of the complaint in abeyance while processing the class portion. Although we
doubt that the department can unilaterally toll the one-hundred-and-eighty-day clock
by announcing that it will not process an administrative complaint for a period of its
choosing, it is enough to observe that the Secretary does not rely on that pause here.
Nor, incidentally, does the Secretary contend that the pendency of the class portion
of the complaint prevented Lee from exhausting his claims. Cf. Monreal v. Potter,
367 F.3d 1224, 1233–34 (10th Cir. 2004).
The Secretary argues instead that Lee failed to exhaust his disparate treatment,
hostile work environment, and retaliation claims because he never incorporated
allegations from his first administrative complaint in his complaint in the district
court, but we cannot agree. Even assuming that the failure to incorporate the
allegations would present an exhaustion issue, the difficulty is academic because
Lee’s complaint in the district court will not bear the Secretary’s interpretation. In
that complaint, Lee stated no fewer than five times that he was drawing allegations
from the first administrative complaint. And those allegations took up more pages in
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the court complaint than allegations drawn from the second administrative complaint,
on which the Secretary admits that Lee relied. So they were properly presented for the
court’s consideration.
Though we conclude that the district court erred in dismissing Lee’s disparate
treatment, hostile work environment, and retaliation claims on exhaustion grounds,
we see no error in its dismissal of his constructive discharge claim. In response to the
district court’s holding that his working conditions would not compel a reasonable
person to resign, see Watson v. McDonough, 996 F.3d 850, 856 (8th Cir. 2021), Lee
does not cite a single piece of countervailing evidence. His references to the bare
allegations of his complaint are no substitute. See Thomas v. Corwin, 483 F.3d 516,
530 (8th Cir. 2007); Parker v. USDA, 129 F.4th 1104, 1113–14 (8th Cir. 2025). That
leaves us without enough information to say that the constructive discharge claim
should have survived summary judgment, and we decline to search the record for
evidence supporting Lee’s argument to that effect. See Doe v. Univ. of Iowa, 80 F.4th
891, 899 n.6 (8th Cir. 2023). “That is his job, not ours.” See Couch v. Am. Bottling
Co., 955 F.3d 1106, 1108 n.2 (8th Cir. 2020). We therefore affirm the dismissal of
Lee’s constructive discharge claim, reverse the dismissal of his other claims, and
remand for further proceedings.
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