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A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration’s plan to cut the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s workforce roughly in half was unlawful, finding that the Department of Homeland Security took control of staffing decisions Congress had deliberately placed beyond its reach.
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Shop NowIn a 32-page order issued Friday, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, held that DHS “acted unlawfully in usurping FEMA’s authority over its personnel.” The plan would have reduced the agency from roughly 23,000 employees to about 11,500.
Illston also found that DHS had blocked the renewal of hundreds of temporary disaster-response workers.
The ruling turns on reforms Congress passed after Hurricane Katrina, written to preserve FEMA’s independence inside DHS and to leave its own leadership in control of its staff. Illston concluded the department had overridden that structure without congressional authorization.
Those changes followed the agency’s widely criticized response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and were intended to stop FEMA’s core functions from being absorbed into the larger department around it.
The order records internal dissent. “Supervisors within FEMA, and FEMA’s Chief Human Capital Officer at the time, did not agree with the 50% staffing cut,” according to court documents.
Illston also faulted officials for deleting Signal messages about the reductions, writing that the court would presume “the lost Signal messages would have been unfavorable to Defendants.” That finding, known as an adverse inference, permits a court to read destroyed evidence against the party that destroyed it.
The case was brought by federal employee unions, among them the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal workers.
Illston stopped short of ordering a remedy. She imposed no penalties and reinstated no positions, directing the parties instead to submit joint filings on the remaining disputes by October 9, with a separate ruling on relief to follow. That leaves the central practical question unresolved: how much of the reduction already carried out must be reversed, and on what timetable.
Newsweek reported it had sought comment from FEMA and DHS and had received no response by the time of publication.
For now the decision establishes only that the process was unlawful, not what follows from it.
The agency’s permitted staffing level, the status of the temporary disaster-response workers whose renewals were blocked, and whether any of the departures can be undone all remain before the court.
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