Trump admin 'unlawfully usurped the authority' of FEMA and violated post-Katrina reform law, federal court rules

The Trump administration violated federal law when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) slashed the workforce for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a court ruled this week.

In a 32-page order on cross motions for summary judgment, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Bill Clinton appointee, found DHS “unlawfully usurped the authority” of FEMA “to make its own personnel decisions” with reductions in force (RIFs) throughout 2025.

The original litigation, however, was much broader in scope. In April 2025, several unions led by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) sued over what they termed “the unconstitutional dismantling of the federal government” by President Donald Trump.

Over several successive months and pleadings, the contours of the case have been whittled down to consider more specific claims and cordoned off to deal with agency-specific portions of the case in turn.

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The court eventually ordered expedited discovery and now the briefing on the FEMA portion of the case is complete. Oral argument over the summary judgment motions occurred earlier this month.

Now, Illston has ruled in the plaintiff unions’ favor by finding the government violated a federal law which reformed FEMA on an organizational level in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. These violations also ran afoul of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), the federal statute that broadly governs administrative agencies.

“Here, the Court finds plaintiffs are entitled to judgment on their APA claims that DHS and FEMA have acted in excess of statutory authority and contrary to law, based on the defendant agencies’ actions that violate both the Post-Katrina Act and the appropriations act that ended the recent government shutdown,” the order reads.

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Specifically, the judge found the government erred when DHS usurped the authority of FEMA itself to renew Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery Employees (CORE) hires. The court describes such staff 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 continues.

In the long and winding case, several facts have shifted since the layoffs and other personnel-related violations began.

Of particular note is the wholesale abandonment of a leaked plan to slash FEMA’s workforce by 50%. Once word got out about that idea, the Trump administration backed off entirely.

In that vein, the court expressed some hesitancy.

“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 goes on. “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.”

Still, the judge also took the government to task for other behavior.

“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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