Late on Friday, September 11, 2026, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco ruled that the Trump administration broke the law when it ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cut its workforce from about 23,000 to 11,500 by the end of fiscal 2026.
The ruling rests on a law Congress passed after the government's failures during Hurricane Katrina. It gives FEMA control over its own functions, including personnel, and says the Department of Homeland Security “may not substantially or significantly reduce” FEMA's authorities, responsibilities or functions. Illston found that DHS acted unlawfully by usurping FEMA's authority over its personnel and steering it to cut thousands of disaster-response jobs. She also found DHS acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” when it revoked FEMA's long-standing authority to renew the appointments of its on-call disaster reservists.
She was pointed about how the target was set. A December 2025 staffing plan projected a FEMA of 11,383 employees, and Illston wrote that the figure “appears as if pulled from thin air.” Karen Evans, then acting FEMA administrator, “submitted the 11,383 figure first and then worked backwards to figure out how to support it,” the judge wrote. She added that FEMA's own supervisors, and its chief human capital officer at the time, “did not agree with the 50% staffing cut.”
In a separate decision, Illston faulted FEMA and DHS officials for using the Signal app on their personal phones to discuss the staffing cuts and deleting the messages. Going forward, she said, she would presume “that the lost Signal messages would have been unfavorable to Defendants because they would have been further evidence” of unlawful conduct.
No remedy has been set. Illston, who in June declined to immediately block the cuts after FEMA appeared to back away from them at least temporarily, ordered the parties to negotiate and, if they cannot agree, to file a joint statement of remaining disputes by October 9. The administration has argued FEMA has considerable flexibility to set staffing levels, and a FEMA spokesperson said, “Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin's leadership, DHS and FEMA are ready for the 2026 hurricane season.”
The next night, the White House's Rapid Response 47 account quote-posted meteorologist Chris Martz, who noted that for the first time in the satellite era no Atlantic hurricane had formed by September 12, and added: “Thank you, President Trump!” The Daily Beast reported there is no evidence Trump had anything to do with the quiet season, which NOAA attributes to El Niño (see Trump Administration Freezes FEMA Disaster Deployments During DHS Shutdown Despite $7 Billion in Available Funds).