US court finds Trump administration plan to cut FEMA workforce unlawful
Federal Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco, United States, ruled that the administration of President Donald Trump acted unlawfully when it ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to cut its workforce by approximately half. The judge concluded that the US Department of Homeland Security improperly interfered with the agency’s personnel authority and directed it to eliminate thousands of jobs related to disaster response.
TimesLIVE reports on the court’s decision. FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security, but a law passed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 prohibits the department from substantially reducing the agency’s authority, responsibilities, or functions.
Union lawsuit
Illston supported the position of unions that challenged the decision not to extend temporary contracts for thousands of FEMA reservists. These employees are involved in emergency response. The judge noted that the case materials contained no evidence of a reasoned decision-making process or grounds for the conditions the Department of Homeland Security imposed on contract extensions.
In January, the unions supplemented a lawsuit filed last year against large-scale layoffs initiated by the Trump administration. They argued that the planned cuts would weaken FEMA’s key function of responding to disasters, had not been approved by Congress, and were initiated by former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem rather than by the agency itself.
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Further proceedings
The ruling issued on Friday does not determine specific remedies or sanctions. The judge said she would consider the matter separately next month, and the parties may submit written positions regarding the scope of possible relief for the unions.
In June, Illston declined to immediately block the cuts because FEMA had, at least temporarily, backed away from those plans at the time. However, the judge has now stated that the agency appears to be continuing their implementation: for the next fiscal year, FEMA projected a workforce of 11,383 employees — about half of its previous level — without providing grounds for choosing that particular figure.
In a separate ruling, Illston also criticized FEMA and Department of Homeland Security officials for discussing personnel cuts in the Signal messenger on personal phones and deleting the correspondence. The judge indicated that these messages could have been relevant to the case and therefore would henceforth assume that the lost messages would have been unfavorable to the defendants.
