US Judge Rules FEMA Workforce Cuts Broke Federal Law

A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration acted unlawfully when it ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cut its workforce in half, handing a victory to unions that challenged the move.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco found that the Department of Homeland Security overstepped its authority by taking control of FEMA's personnel decisions and pushing the agency to eliminate thousands of disaster-response positions. FEMA sits within DHS, but a law passed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 bars the department from substantially or significantly reducing the agency's authorities, responsibilities or functions.

The dispute centres on a decision last year to stop FEMA from renewing the temporary contracts of thousands of on-call reservists who are deployed during disasters. Illston wrote that the record contained no evidence of reasoned decision-making for the reversal or for the conditions DHS later placed on FEMA's renewal authority.

The ruling did not include remedies or penalties. Illston, appointed by President Bill Clinton, said those would be addressed in a separate decision next month and invited the parties to submit briefings on the scope of relief the unions should receive.

FEMA, DHS and the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal worker union and a plaintiff in the case, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The unions amended an earlier lawsuit in January to challenge the planned cuts, arguing they would undermine FEMA's core disaster-response mission, were not approved by Congress and were ordered by then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem rather than initiated within the agency. The administration has argued that FEMA has considerable flexibility to set staffing levels.

President Donald Trump has previously suggested FEMA should be abolished and that states should handle their own emergency preparedness, and last year he created a council to review the agency's operations.

Illston declined in June to immediately block the job cuts after finding FEMA had at least temporarily backed away from its plans. On Friday, however, she wrote that the agency appeared to be proceeding, noting it had projected staffing of 11,383 employees for the coming fiscal year — roughly half of previous levels — without any basis for that figure.

In a separate decision, the judge faulted FEMA and DHS officials for discussing staffing cuts on the Signal messaging app using personal cell phones and then deleting the messages. She said the messages would have been relevant to the lawsuit and that she would presume going forward that the lost communications would have been unfavourable to the defendants as further evidence of unlawful conduct.