WASHINGTON — Unionized workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency won a big victory in federal court last week, but the ruling isn’t likely to stop the Trump administration’s plans to push more of the agency’s work to the states, potentially shedding more jobs.

Under then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, officials drew up plans last year to terminate half of FEMA’s staff, though they never actually implemented cuts that deep.

Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for Northern California ruled Friday that even making the plans violated a law passed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that protects FEMA’s independence from political decisions of officials at the Homeland Security Department, its parent agency.

But the ruling won’t force the government to rehire the thousands of workers that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency pushed out at FEMA, because those cuts weren’t part of the lawsuit. And it’s unlikely to stop the Trump administration from off-loading more disaster relief responsibility to states and local governments, said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies disaster policy.

“This doesn’t restore people’s jobs,” Rumbach said. “It just continues to highlight the severity of the problem, and the need to make sure FEMA has the workforce it needs to be effective.”

FEMA maintains “experienced leadership” and “a strong, deployable” workforce during hurricane and wildfire seasons, said Charles Wollenhaupt, a spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department. FEMA officials said they do not comment on ongoing litigation.

Administration officials also violated rules about retaining government records by purposely deleting messages about the staffing proposals, Illston ruled. FEMA and Homeland Security officials discussed those plans in self-deleting, encrypted messages on the Signal app. The judge ordered the agencies and officials to cover a portion of the plaintiffs’ attorney’s fees for failing to preserve that evidence.

FEMA has a sprawling workforce that is designed to fluctuate as disasters come and go, while remaining large enough at all times to handle the most trying emergencies.

FEMA employed 18,862 people who can deploy to help coordinate disaster relief and recovery as of Monday, nearly 4,000 fewer than on Jan. 1, 2024, according to daily updates the agency issues.

The sharp job cuts led by DOGE — even without FEMA carrying out the planned 50% job cuts — still left the agency badly short-handed, a Government Accountability Office report found last month. More than half of FEMA’s most senior and experienced leaders left in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the GAO found.

The court ordered the agency to reverse a small number of terminations carried out in January that the ruling deemed illegal, but otherwise did not direct FEMA to hire or rehire additional personnel.

Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal and advocacy organization based in Washington, led the litigation on behalf of plaintiffs that included unions representing government workers; the governments of communities including Baltimore, Chicago, and Harris County, Texas; and scientific groups including the American Geophysical Union.

Skye Perryman, the organization’s CEO, said the groups hoped the ruling would “protect the American people so that FEMA can do the job Congress created it to do and that our brave civil servants are protected.”

But Rumbach said the ruling may have laid out a path for Cameron Hamilton, the newly confirmed FEMA administrator, to shrink the agency more methodically, basing staffing decisions on policies that reduce the federal role in disaster response.

A road map to overhaul FEMA that a Trump administration panel approved in May called for potential staffing cuts as the agency seeks to reduce its role after disasters, but did not offer specific numbers. Earlier, unpublished versions of the report reviewed by The New York Times had called for halving FEMA’s workforce, aligning with the plan that sparked the lawsuit.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Scott Dance/Al Drago
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