Judge Rules Trump Administration Broke Law With Plan to Halve FEMA Workforce

A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration acted unlawfully by directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency toward cutting its workforce roughly in half.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston found that the Department of Homeland Security exceeded its authority in pushing FEMA toward thousands of job cuts.

FEMA had projected that its workforce would fall to approximately 11,383 employees, around half its previous staffing level.

The dispute centres on a restriction Congress imposed following the federal government’s widely criticised response to Hurricane Katrina.

Congress subsequently enacted legislation providing that the Department of Homeland Security may not substantially or significantly reduce FEMA’s authorities, responsibilities or functions.

Illston found that DHS had effectively taken control of personnel decisions that belonged to FEMA and pursued workforce reductions without a reasoned basis for the scale of the cuts.

The ruling does not establish that FEMA’s existing staffing level can never be reduced.

Instead, it addresses whether the executive branch can impose reductions of this magnitude while Congress has expressly restricted its authority to substantially diminish the agency’s functions.

The case also produced a separate finding concerning communications between government officials.

Illston found that FEMA and DHS officials discussed the workforce reductions using Signal on personal mobile phones and subsequently deleted the messages.

Because those communications are no longer available, the judge said she would presume that the missing messages would have been unfavourable to the government and likely contained additional evidence relevant to the challenged conduct.

The court has not yet determined the remedies or any penalties arising from the case. Those questions will be addressed separately.

The administration can argue that FEMA should become smaller, that federal disaster bureaucracy should be reformed or that states should assume greater responsibility for disaster preparedness.

But the ruling raises a different question.

Congress writes federal law.

If Congress has specifically restricted an executive department’s authority to substantially reduce an agency’s responsibilities or functions, an administration seeking more fundamental change must operate within that law or persuade Congress to change it.

Government reform and executive efficiency do not remove that constraint.

A government committed to reducing bureaucracy still has to do it lawfully.

More to follow.

Source: Reuters, 12 September 2026