Judge rules Trump administration's FEMA staffing cuts violated federal law

A federal judge ruled Friday that the Department of Homeland Security broke the law when it moved to slash the workforce of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, finding the department usurped FEMA's own authority over its staffing at a time when the agency is chartered to respond quickly to hurricanes, wildfires and floods. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, of the Northern District of California, issued a 32-page order in a lawsuit brought by federal employee unions against the administration.

Illston found DHS violated both the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, a 2006 law written after the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, and the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires agencies to explain major policy shifts. She wrote that DHS had "acted arbitrarily and capriciously" in stripping FEMA of the ability to renew the contracts of thousands of on-call disaster reservists without justification.

The ruling arrives more than a year after President Trump first said he intended to scale the agency back sharply. "We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level," Trump told reporters in June 2025, arguing that governors, not Washington, should manage most disaster recovery. "A governor should be able to handle it, and frankly, if they can't handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn't be governor," he said, a stance reported at the time as the clearest signal yet that the administration intended to dismantle the agency rather than simply reform it.

The numbers

FEMA employed an average of roughly 25,134 people in fiscal year 2025, according to a Government Accountability Office report published last month, but the agency lost more than 4,300 employees that year alone, a 55 percent jump in separations over the prior year. A leaked internal plan had proposed cutting the workforce roughly in half, to about 11,383 positions, before the administration publicly backed away from that specific target. Even so, DHS kept new, shorter limits on renewal terms for the agency's on-call disaster reservists, known as CORE employees, who make up close to 40 percent of FEMA's workforce and are typically the first deployed after a disaster declaration. Those reservists had historically been offered two- to four-year contract renewals; under the new restrictions many were limited to six months to a year, undermining the continuity Congress intended to protect.

How we got here

Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act in 2006 specifically to insulate FEMA's operational decisions from its parent department after federal, state and local failures compounded the damage of Hurricane Katrina. The law bars DHS from substantially or significantly reducing FEMA's authorities, responsibilities or functions. The Trump administration nonetheless pursued a broad reduction of the federal workforce through 2025, and FEMA's leadership churned along with it: Karen Evans became the agency's third acting administrator under the administration when she took over in December, serving until May. During that tenure, Evans corresponded with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other officials over Signal, a messaging app configured to auto-delete conversations, using a personal phone despite department guidance that employees conduct official business only on government devices.

That mattered because the unions, led by the American Federation of Government Employees, argued the deleted messages would have shown how the staffing decisions were made. Illston agreed. She found DHS had provided no reasoned explanation for its "about-face" on FEMA's contracting authority, writing that the staffing target at the center of the case "appears as if pulled from thin air."

Reaction

On the destroyed Signal records, Illston was blunt about where responsibility lay.

"Evans should have known better."

The judge went further, ruling that the lost messages should be presumed unfavorable to the government, since officials had "acted with the intent to deprive plaintiffs of the use of the Signal chat messages" as evidence, according to a copy of the order. A FEMA spokesperson, asked about the ruling, said only that the agency was "ensuring workforce stability and a strong, deployable force" and that "DHS and FEMA are ready for the 2026 hurricane season." Skye Perryman, president and chief executive of Democracy Forward, which supported the unions' case, said in a statement that the ruling vindicated Congress's intent. "Congress created FEMA to operate with independence, given its mission to prepare and respond quickly when disasters arise," she said.

Illston has emerged as a recurring check on the administration's broader downsizing campaign. She blocked enforcement of a February 2025 executive order and an accompanying memo from the Department of Government Efficiency that directed agencies to shrink their staffs, ruling that such a large-scale overhaul required cooperation from Congress. In December, she ordered the reinstatement, with back pay, of roughly 680 employees at other agencies whose layoffs had been finalized during a government shutdown. Friday's FEMA decision extends that line of rulings to disaster response specifically.

Who is affected, and what happens next

The immediate effect falls on FEMA's disaster workforce itself, which a 2023 GAO review had already found to be roughly 6,200 positions, or 35 percent, short of the agency's own hiring goals even before the more recent departures. Emergency managers who rely on federal reservists to staff shelters, process aid applications and coordinate recovery after a disaster declaration are watching the case closely, as are the millions of Americans in disaster-prone states who depend on that response capacity being ready when a storm or wildfire hits. Friday's ruling did not order the administration to reverse any specific personnel action or set a remedy. Instead, Illston directed the two sides to confer on what relief is appropriate and report back to the court by October 9, with a further ruling on remedies expected to follow.