Sitting behind Leandro “Lee” Rizzuto Jr., Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas Kristi Noem attends the Organization of American States meeting where visiting Ecuador”s President Daniel Noboa is to speak, Thursday, May 14, 2026, in Washington (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
Federal employee unions are accusing Justice Department lawyers of being, at best, “willfully blind” to the destruction of potentially discoverable Signal messages involving former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, as a federal judge prepares to weigh whether the Trump administration can move forward with deep staffing cuts at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The dispute is now before Senior U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in California. Lawyers for the AFL-CIO are asking Illston, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, to stop what they describe as a plan to reduce FEMA’s workforce by half before the end of the fiscal year. The administration, however, argues that no such final agency action exists.
In a motion for a preliminary injunction filed at the end of May, the unions urged the court not to simply accept the administration’s assurances. They argued that the case must be viewed in light of what they called “a sustained effort by Defendants to conceal and even destroy documents and information pertaining to DHS decision-making.”
According to the filing, top Department of Homeland Security officials developed and began carrying out a plan in 2025 and early 2026 to shrink FEMA from about 23,000 employees to roughly 11,500 by the close of fiscal 2026. The cuts, the unions said, would begin with the elimination of CORE positions.
The filing notes that CORE refers to the “Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery Employees,” a category of federal workers authorized and funded under the Stafford Act and the Disaster Relief Fund. Those employees make up more than half of FEMA’s full-time workforce.
The unions also said evidence gathered in discovery has already “conclusively” shown that the downsizing plan remains very much alive, despite the government’s denials. Their filing argues that, even after a leadership change in March that placed Markwayne Mullin at the top of DHS, the threat of sweeping FEMA cuts still hangs over the plaintiffs “like a sword of Damocles.”
On Wednesday, days ahead of a scheduled June 23 hearing, the plaintiffs made “serious” allegations that DOJ attorneys were to blame for discovery violations, either because they were “willfully blind to their clients’ extensive use of disappearing Signal messages in disregard of their obligation to investigate” or because they “knowingly participated in the concealment” of a practice that “all but ensure[s] the automatic destruction of those communications before discovery.”
Regardless, the plaintiffs said, the judge has ample reason to find the DOJ’s clients “intentionally deprived Plaintiffs of discovery” through a “systematic violation of federal records requirements.” After all, the DOJ acknowledged the “lost” messages “should have been preserved,” the filing continued.
“Defendants do not dispute that their high-level officials regularly used disappearing Signal messages on their personal phones for agency business, in violation of their responsibility to preserve federal records. That is a serious admission that top DHS and FEMA officials blatantly disregarded federal law and agency policy,” court documents added. “But they downplay the significance of the loss to this litigation and argue that the loss was at most grossly negligent, but not intentional.”
The auto-deletion of months’ worth of “relevant” and “discoverable” messages in chats involving “high-level officials” — including Noem, “Chief Advisor to the DHS Secretary Corey Lewandowski, and even agency counsel” — means that the Trump administration “should not be allowed to rely on self-serving testimony that is insulated against impeachment,” the plaintiffs said, asking Illston to go beyond an order awarding fees as the “DOJ tries to wash their hands of these discovery issues.”
“To remedy these prejudicial and intentional actions, the Court should exclude hindsight testimony from Defendants’ witnesses that serves Defendants’ narrative, and it should adopt a presumption that lost information would have been unfavorable to Defendants,” the filing concluded.
