Judge: FEMA staffing plan number appears pulled from thin air
A federal judge ruled Friday that the Department of Homeland Security broke the law when it moved to halve the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s workforce earlier this year. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California found DHS acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner when it enacted a plan to reduce the agency from 23,000 employees to less than 12,000.
“Frankly, the FEMA staffing plan number appears as if pulled from thin air,” Illston wrote in court papers obtained by The Washington Post. The reduction would have amounted to cutting the agency roughly in half.
The cuts violated the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, the judge wrote. That statute bars DHS from “substantially or significantly” reducing the “authorities, responsibilities, or functions” of FEMA. DHS, Illston wrote, “acted unlawfully in usurping FEMA’s authority over its personnel.”
Illston’s findings laid out a sharp disagreement between DHS leadership and FEMA’s career staff over the size and justification of the reduction. “Supervisors within FEMA, and FEMA’s Chief Human Capital Officer at the time, did not agree with the 50% staffing cut,” Illston wrote, according to court documents obtained by Newsweek.
DHS leadership nonetheless submitted a “FEMA annual staffing plan that included a 50% cut, over the objections and analyses of FEMA’s own supervisors,” the judge wrote. The findings detail how the staffing reduction was pushed forward over the documented opposition of the career staff who carry out the agency’s mission.
In addition to reducing the permanent workforce, DHS refused to renew the contracts of hundreds of temporary disaster first responders. The nonrenewals added a second front to the workforce cuts beyond the permanent-staff reduction.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the federal employee union that represents federal workers, sued over the cuts. Friday’s ruling is a victory for the union.