US judge rules that Trump plan to halve Fema workforce violated law - TimesLIVE

A US judge has ruled that the Trump administration broke the law by ordering the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to cut its workforce in half.

US district judge Susan Illston in San Francisco, in a decision issued late Friday, said the US department of homeland security acted unlawfully by usurping Fema’s authority over its own personnel and steering the agency to cut thousands of disaster-response jobs.

While Fema is part of DHS, a federal law adopted after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 says the department “may not substantially or significantly reduce [FEMA’s] authorities, responsibilities, or functions.”

Agreeing with unions that sued, Illston said the department violated the law when it moved last year to stop Fema from renewing the temporary contracts of thousands of on-call reservists who respond to disasters.

“There is no evidence in the record reflecting reasoned decision-making for this about-face or for the subsequent conditions DHS placed on Fema’s renewal authority,” Illston wrote.

Friday’s ruling did not include remedies or penalties. Illston, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, wrote those would be addressed in a separate ruling next month and said the parties may submit briefings on the scope of relief she should provide to the unions.

Fema, DHS and the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest US federal worker union and a plaintiff in the ​case, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday.

The unions in January amended a lawsuit they had filed last year that more broadly challenged mass layoffs initiated by the Trump administration.

The planned cuts at the emergency management agency are unlawful, the unions say, because they would undermine its core disaster‑response mission, were not approved by Congress, and were ordered by former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem rather than initiated within Fema itself.

There is no evidence in the record reflecting reasoned decision-making for this about-face or for the subsequent conditions DHS placed on FEMA’s renewal authority.

The Trump administration has argued that Fema has considerable flexibility to decide proper staffing levels. President Donald Trump previously has suggested that Fema should ​be abolished and that states ⁠should be responsible for their emergency preparedness. Trump last year created a council to review the agency’s operations.

Illston in June declined to immediately block the job cuts, finding that Fema had at least temporarily backed away from its plans.

But she wrote on Friday that Fema appeared to be moving ahead with the cuts. Fema projected its staffing levels for the upcoming fiscal year at 11,383 employees, or about half of prior levels, without any basis for choosing that number, Illston said.

The judge in a separate decision also faulted Fema and DHS officials for using the Signal messaging app on their personal cell phones to communicate about staffing cuts and deleting the messages.

Illston said those messages would have been relevant to the lawsuit and that moving forward she would presume “that the lost Signal messages would have been unfavourable to defendants because they would have been further evidence” of unlawful conduct.