Judge Rules DHS Plan to Cut FEMA Staff in Half Violated Post-Katrina Law

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the Department of Homeland Security broke the law when it directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cut its workforce by half and took personnel authority away from FEMA’s own leadership.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Clinton appointee on the Northern District of California, issued the 32-page order on cross-motions for partial summary judgment late Friday in American Federation of Government Employees v. Trump. Coverage of the decision moved Saturday and Sunday. She granted the unions’ Administrative Procedure Act claims, denied the government’s cross-motion, and ordered the parties to meet and confer on the scope of relief.

The plan Illston reviewed would have dropped FEMA from roughly 23,000 employees to about 11,500 by the end of fiscal 2026, starting with Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery employees — CORE staff who make up about 40 percent of the workforce and are often the first federal teams at a hurricane or wildfire. DHS leadership last year told FEMA to put a 50 percent cut into the annual staffing plan over objections from FEMA supervisors and the agency’s then-chief human capital officer.

“Frankly, the FEMA staffing plan number appears as if pulled from thin air,” Illston wrote.

She held that DHS “unlawfully usurped the authority” of FEMA to make its own personnel decisions. The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 says Homeland Security “may not substantially or significantly reduce” FEMA’s authorities, responsibilities, or functions. Illston found the staffing directive and the non-renewal of CORE contracts ran through that limit and also violated the APA as action “in excess of statutory authority and contrary to law.”

The government had already backed off a blanket policy of letting CORE contracts lapse. Since Jan. 22, FEMA has not been systematically non-renewing those workers. Illston noted the change and said some of the relief the unions want no longer matches the facts. She also found that DHS still constrains FEMA’s renewal authority and that CORE terms are now being written for six months to a year instead of the older two- or four-year terms.

In a separate finding that will matter on appeal as much as the head-count math, Illston faulted FEMA and DHS officials for using Signal on personal phones to discuss the cuts and then deleting the messages. She said the government “acted arbitrarily and capriciously” when it revoked FEMA’s authority to renew CORE appointments and that the record showed no reasoned explanation for the reversal.

DHS and FEMA did not issue an immediate comment in the first wave of stories. The ruling does not, by itself, restore a 23,000-person roster. It declares the 50 percent directive unlawful and pushes the parties to draft an order on what happens next to CORE renewals and to DHS’s residual control over FEMA hiring.

The case is one piece of a larger AFGE docket against second-term workforce cuts. The FEMA slice is the one that now has a merits ruling tied to a specific post-Katrina statute written after the last time Washington was accused of hollowing out disaster response.