President Donald Trump speaks outside the Oval Office at the White House on Monday, April 13, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The Trump administration violated federal law by allowing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to cut the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) workforce, a federal judge ruled this week.
In a 32-page order resolving competing motions for summary judgment, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Bill Clinton appointee, determined that DHS had “unlawfully usurped the authority” FEMA holds to make its own personnel decisions through reductions in force carried out during 2025.
The original lawsuit covered a far wider range of issues. In April 2025, several unions led by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) sued the administration, describing President Donald Trump’s actions as “the unconstitutional dismantling of the federal government.”
As the case progressed through successive filings over several months, its scope narrowed. The litigation was divided into more specific claims, with agency-related issues addressed separately.
In the FEMA portion of the case, Illston found that DHS improperly took control of FEMA’s authority to renew Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery Employees (CORE) contracts. The court defines CORE personnel as “full-time employees hired for two- to four-year terms to work across disasters rather than being hired for a particular disaster.”
“DHS acted unlawfully in usurping FEMA’s authority over its personnel, and FEMA [through a former official] acted unlawfully in acquiescing to DHS’s exertion of authority over FEMA’s CORE renewals and staffing numbers,” the order states.
Throughout the lengthy case, several key circumstances changed after the layoffs and other alleged personnel violations began.
Most notably, the administration abandoned a leaked proposal to cut FEMA’s workforce in half. After details of the plan became public, the Trump administration backed away from it entirely.
That change led the court to express some reservations about the scope of the requested relief.
“The Court agrees with defendants that some of the relief plaintiffs seek is quite broad and no longer seems to fit with the facts as they have unfolded over the months of this litigation,” the order states. “In particular, since January 22, 2026, FEMA is no longer systematically non-renewing the COREs…At the same time, the record reflects that DHS continues to usurp FEMA’s authority to renew CORE terms and that COREs are currently being renewed for shorter terms (six months to one year) than the historical two-year, or more recent four-year, terms.”
Even so, the judge also criticized the government for other actions.
“The factual findings at this stage must be viewed against the backdrop that plaintiffs have been hamstrung in their ability to prove their claims, and the Court in its ability to evaluate the claims, by defendants’ intentional deletion of relevant Signal messages,” the order goes on.
The court elaborates here:
[T]he Court has found that high-level officials at FEMA and DHS communicated regarding FEMA and CORE staffing over the Signal messaging app, on their personal cell phones, using auto-delete timers that the officials themselves set, often deleting messages within one to four weeks. As a result, Signal messages from the time period most relevant to the DHS/FEMA claims…have been deleted and cannot be recovered. The Court has found that the deleted messages were relevant to this litigation, that plaintiffs have been prejudiced by the irrecoverable loss of these messages, and that defendants…acted with the intent to deprive plaintiffs of the use of the Signal chat messages in this litigation.
“This begs the question: if FEMA supervisors and the FEMA CHCO did not recommend a 50% staffing cut, where did that number come from?” the judge muses before speculating about the discarded plan.
In terms of relief, due to the changing facts on the ground and the decided lack of information, the court directed the parties to meet and confer to try to determine a path forward.
“Should the parties be unable to reach agreement, they shall file a joint statement on what relief remains outstanding, no later than October 9, 2026,” Illston goes on. “The Court will then issue a ruling on relief forthwith.”
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