A federal judge ruled the Trump administration seized control of FEMA and imposed a staffing cut “pulled from thin air.”
The order was filed Friday by U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, who sits in San Francisco in the Northern District of California. It was a response to a lawsuit filed against President Donald Trump.
Illston granted partial summary judgment to a coalition of unions and local governments. They had accused the Department of Homeland Security of stripping the Federal Emergency Management Agency of authority over its own workforce and ordering it to slash staffing by half.
The judge found that DHS pushed FEMA to submit a plan cutting its roughly 23,000 employees down to about 11,500 by the end of fiscal year 2026. FEMA supervisors and the agency’s own human capital chief had recommended keeping staffing flat or even raising it.
Illston was blunt about where the target number came from. She wrote that the figure “appears as if pulled from thin air.” The record showed that Karen Evans, who was then FEMA’s senior official, submitted the number first and worked backward to justify it. A December planning document said Evans “has tasked me to develop a strategy to cut the FEMA workforce by 50 percent.”
The ruling also faulted DHS and FEMA leaders for destroying evidence. Illston found that officials deleted messages on the Signal app using auto-delete timers they set themselves. She concluded that Evans “acted with the intent to deprive plaintiffs” of those messages. Going forward, the court will presume the deleted texts would have hurt the government’s case, Illston wrote.
Illston pointed to another sign of what she called arbitrary decisionmaking. FEMA halted its wave of non-renewals on January 22, only because a severe winter storm was approaching. The judge noted that a storm on any other date would have meant a different set of employees lost their jobs.
The judge denied the government’s cross-motion. She ordered both sides to meet and confer on the scope of relief and to report back by October 9.
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