Judge rules fired FEMA employees deserve relief

In a pair of rulings, a judge said the feds acted unlawfully when they tried to cut half of FEMA's staff and intentionally deleted chats about the plan.SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — A federal judge shot down the Trump administration’s plan to cut half of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s staff on Friday, but stopped short of deciding what relief fired employees deserve.In a ruling for partial summary judgment, Senior U.S. District Judge Susan Illston determined the Department of Homeland Security “usurped the authority” of FEMA last year when it instituted a plan to decrease staff from 23,000 to 11,500 employees by the end of this year. She said the plaintiffs showed the department’s plan was final agency action, arbitrary and capricious, and in excess of its authority — factors that are core tenants to proving Administrative Procedure Act claims.Although FEMA is not currently taking action toward staffing cuts while litigation proceeds, the agency is renewing COREs — the “cadre of on-call response and recovery,” a temporary workforce program for disaster response that makes up about 40% of FEMA’s staff — for six months to a year instead of the standard two to four years.“The undisputed evidence shows that defendants violated the Post-Katrina Act when DHS revoked FEMA’s authority to renew COREs (and then granted it back, but only for a limited time and for term lengths that DHS prescribed) and ordered that FEMA submit a staffing plan to DHS with a 50% FEMA staffing cut,” the Bill Clinton appointee wrote in her 32-page ruling.However, Illston agreed with the government that the relief the plaintiffs seek is “quite broad,” including asking FEMA to return separated employees to the position they would have been in before the terminations. She ordered the parties to meet and confer on the scope of the relief, in light of her granting the plaintiffs’ APA claims. If they fail to reach an agreement, the judge will resolve any outstanding issues of relief next month.“Among other things, plaintiffs seek a declaration that DHS’s usurping of FEMA authority to renew CORE contracts is unlawful and seek an injunction barring DHS from continuing to do so in the future," Illston said. “These claims are still at issue, and defendants have not met their burden of showing that there is no effective relief the court can provide.”Represented by the American Federation of Government Employees, FEMA employees sued in April 2025, challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order that instructed federal agencies to create annual staffing plans. A month later, the workers won a temporary restraining order blocking the mass firings of federal workers, followed by a preliminary injunction just a few weeks later.However, the Supreme Court cleared Trump to move forward with mass firings just a few months later, finding the president would likely prove the executive order was lawful. In a statement, the justices said they were not expressing any views on the legality of any agency cuts or reorganization plans produced pursuant to the executive order.The feds insisted the employees didn’t have standing because the government terminated its collective bargaining agreement with union employees. But Illston was not convinced, noting some employees who continue to work at FEMA are still union members and may be in line to have their positions terminated.The feds’ mootness arguments, due to Karen Evans no longer leading FEMA, also failed.In a separate ruling, Illston also knocked the feds for their handling of discovery evidence after it was revealed that Evans intentionally deleted Signal app chats with Joseph Guy, former DHS deputy chief of staff, about the plan to cut FEMA’s staff.“These actions violated federal law and DHS policy,” Illston wrote in a 30-page order. “Signal messages from the time period most relevant to this litigation have never been produced. And defendants admit that Evans’ and Guy’s Signal messages are now lost and cannot be recovered. Evans should have known better. She previously served as chief information officer at DHS, in charge of the agency’s records preservation policies.”For some of her text conversations, Evans set up an automatic four-week timer to delete messages, while others were deleted on a case-by-case basis.Illston ruled the feds could not rely on hindsight evidence about staffing cuts and ordered them to pay attorney fees associated with “uncovering and addressing defendants’” deletion of chats.“We welcome the court’s findings that DHS leadership unlawfully ordered FEMA to slash its workforce in half, over the objections of FEMA supervisors,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, an organization that represents the plaintiffs. “Congress created FEMA to operate with independence, given its mission to prepare and respond quickly when disasters arise.”Attorneys representing the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads