A person sits at a desk inside of a mobile FEMA command center after tornadoes ripped through several U.S. states in downtown Dawson Springs, Kentucky, December 14, 2021.
Jon Cherry | Reuters
A U.S. judge has ruled that the Trump administration broke the law by ordering the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cut its workforce in half.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco in a decision issued late Friday said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security acted unlawfully by usurping FEMA’s authority over its own personnel and steering the agency to cut thousands of disaster-response jobs.
While FEMA is part of DHS, a federal law adopted after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 says the department “may not substantially or significantly reduce (FEMA’s) authorities, responsibilities, or functions.”
Agreeing with unions that sued, Illston said the department violated the law when it moved last year to stop FEMA from renewing the temporary contracts of thousands of on-call reservists who respond to disasters.
“There is no evidence in the record reflecting reasoned decision-making for this about-face or for the subsequent conditions DHS placed on FEMA’s renewal authority,” Illston wrote.
Friday’s ruling did not include remedies or penalties. Illston, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, wrote those would be addressed in a separate ruling next month and said the parties may submit briefings on the scope of relief she should provide to the unions.
FEMA and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday.
Democracy Forward, a left-leaning group that represents the plaintiffs in the case, applauded the ruling in a statement.
“Congress created FEMA to operate with independence, given its mission to prepare and respond quickly when disasters arise,” said Skye Perryman, the group’s president and CEO.
The unions in January amended a lawsuit they had filed last year that more broadly challenged mass layoffs initiated by the Trump administration.
The planned cuts at the emergency management agency are unlawful, the unions say, because they would undermine its core disaster‑response mission, were not approved by Congress, and were ordered by former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem rather than initiated within FEMA itself.
The Trump administration has argued that FEMA has considerable flexibility to decide proper staffing levels. President Donald Trump previously has suggested that FEMA should be abolished and that states should be responsible for their emergency preparedness. Trump last year created a council to review the agency’s operations.
Illston in June declined to immediately block the job cuts, finding that FEMA had at least temporarily backed away from its plans.
But she wrote on Friday that FEMA appeared to be moving ahead with the cuts. FEMA projected its staffing levels for the upcoming fiscal year at 11,383 employees, or approximately half of prior levels, without any basis for choosing that number, Illston said.
The judge in a separate decision also faulted FEMA and DHS officials for using the Signal messaging app on their personal cell phones to communicate about staffing cuts and deleting the messages.
Illston said those messages would have been relevant to the lawsuit and that moving forward she would presume “that the lost Signal messages would have been unfavorable to Defendants because they would have been further evidence” of unlawful conduct.
