A federal judge ruled Friday that the Department of Homeland Security acted unlawfully when it directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cut its workforce roughly in half, from about 23,000 employees to a target of 11,383.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston granted partial summary judgment to unions and other plaintiffs challenging the plan, finding that DHS had taken control of personnel decisions Congress assigned to FEMA and had not supplied a reasoned basis for the reduction. The September 11 court order did not immediately reinstate workers or specify a permanent injunction. Instead, Illston directed the parties to negotiate the scope of relief and file a joint statement by October 9 if they cannot agree.

The decision is significant beyond the federal workforce dispute. FEMA depends on a mix of permanent employees, full-time term staff and on-call reservists to move quickly when hurricanes, floods, fires and other emergencies overwhelm local capacity. The ruling does not prevent future restructuring, but it requires the executive branch to respect the legal separation Congress created after Hurricane Katrina and to connect major staffing decisions to evidence rather than a predetermined target.

The court found a number without an analysis

The dispute centered on an annual staffing plan developed under an October 2025 executive order. That directive required agencies to prepare and follow staffing plans. According to the court record, senior DHS officials told FEMA leadership to include an option reducing the agency by 50 percent by the end of fiscal 2026.

Illston found that the administrative record contained no workforce analysis supporting the figure. FEMA's chief human capital officer had recommended maintaining current staffing, and two contemporaneous assessments from program and regional offices did not support halving the agency. A December 2025 document instead said FEMA leadership had been tasked with developing a strategy to reach the target after the number had already been selected.

The judge concluded that this sequence failed the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires agencies to examine relevant information and explain the connection between the facts and the action chosen. Her ruling granted the plaintiffs judgment on claims that DHS and FEMA exceeded statutory limits and acted arbitrarily and capriciously. She did not decide separate claims alleging officials acted outside any lawful authority because the APA findings already resolved the central dispute.

The administration had argued that FEMA has broad flexibility to determine its staffing needs and that labor-law procedures, rather than a federal district court, should govern the dispute. Illston rejected those jurisdictional arguments. Reuters reported that FEMA and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment Saturday.

Post-Katrina law limits DHS control

FEMA is housed within DHS, but Congress deliberately preserved it as a distinct entity after the federal response to Hurricane Katrina exposed fragmented authority and weakened capacity. The relevant federal statute says the DHS secretary may not substantially reduce FEMA's authorities, responsibilities, functions or ability to perform its missions unless a later act of Congress specifically authorizes the change.

The court found that personnel authority is among the functions transferred to FEMA and that DHS had interfered with it. In 2025, the department began requiring FEMA to obtain approval before renewing Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery Employees, known as CORE staff. These are full-time term employees who work across disasters, unlike reservists who are activated intermittently for specific incidents.

FEMA describes CORE positions as two- to four-year appointments that can be renewed when disaster work and funding continue. Historically, supervisors initiated renewals and FEMA approved them without DHS involvement. The court found that DHS's new approval regime removed FEMA's long-standing discretion and shortened many renewals to six months or one year.

That distinction matters operationally. Experienced term employees administer grants, coordinate logistics, assess damage and support long recoveries that outlast a single storm season. Reservists, whom FEMA calls the backbone of its disaster response and recovery workforce on its careers page, provide surge capacity. Reducing either pool can leave the agency with fewer experienced people available when several disasters occur at once.

January nonrenewals exposed the practical risk

The ruling traces how the new policy affected employees whose terms expired in early January. FEMA managers prepared renewal paperwork for 303 CORE workers and sought authority to extend them. Those packets were not submitted to DHS. About 65 employees instead received nonrenewal notices around December 31, often only a day before or on the date their appointments ended, and immediately lost access to agency systems.

The offboarding stopped on January 22 as a severe winter storm threatened much of the country. Illston treated that reversal as evidence that the policy was not grounded in a measured assessment of mission needs. FEMA later offered some affected employees new appointments, and the agency was no longer systematically allowing all CORE terms to expire by the time of the ruling.

Those changed circumstances explain why the immediate result is narrower than the plaintiffs requested. The challengers sought reinstatement, back pay, rescission of nonrenewal notices and an order preventing implementation of the annual staffing plan. The government said that relief would be too broad and would interfere with DHS oversight. The court said some requests no longer fit the current facts, while noting that DHS still controlled renewal authority and that shorter terms remained in use.

A workforce already under strain

The case arrived after a year of heavy attrition. An August GAO report found that more than 4,300 employees—about 17 percent of FEMA's average fiscal 2025 workforce—left the agency, a 55 percent increase in separations from the previous year. FEMA also hired roughly 2,900 people, but agency officials told investigators that departures had depleted institutional knowledge and worsened long-standing staffing gaps.

GAO found that FEMA made 2025 and 2026 workforce decisions without a formal analysis of the number and types of employees needed to meet current and future missions. The agency rescinded its 2022–2026 strategic plan in May 2025 and had not replaced it as of July 2026. The watchdog recommended a new strategic plan, a formal workforce-planning process and congressional requirements tying major staffing decisions to that analysis.

The risk is most visible during simultaneous emergencies. FEMA told GAO that it deployed 13,500 employees after Hurricanes Helene and Milton struck the Southeast less than two weeks apart in 2024, the largest deployment in agency history. Some recovery workers had to be reassigned from other regions, and some personnel entered the field without complete response training. At the start of the 2024 and 2025 hurricane seasons, only 17 percent and 15 percent of the incident-management workforce, respectively, was available because so many employees were already assigned elsewhere.

Reform remains possible, but staffing must follow the mission

The ruling does not freeze FEMA in its current form. A presidential review council issued a May final report recommending broad changes to disaster declarations, payments and the balance of federal and state responsibility. The final plan called for a strategic review to determine appropriate staffing levels, rather than retaining a 50 percent cut that appeared in an earlier draft. Many structural proposals would require congressional action.

That approach is consistent with the legal distinction in Illston's decision. Elected officials may set policy priorities, Congress may revise FEMA's mission, and agency leaders may reorganize work within their authority. What DHS could not do, the judge found, was select a workforce ceiling first, transfer control over renewals away from FEMA and then search for a justification after implementation had begun.

The Associated Press reported that FEMA has rehired some workers after leadership changes and that the full 50 percent reduction was never completed. Those facts may limit the eventual remedy, but they do not erase the court's finding that the process violated federal law. The next stage will determine whether relief focuses on restoring FEMA's renewal authority, lengthening employee terms, reinstating separated staff or setting broader limits on the abandoned plan.

What happens next

The parties now have several weeks to negotiate. If they cannot agree, their October 9 filing will identify the remaining disputes, and the court said it would rule promptly. An appeal is also possible, meaning the boundaries of DHS's authority could remain contested even after the district court sets a remedy.

For communities facing disasters, the most important near-term consequence is institutional rather than numerical. FEMA needs enough trained people in the right specialties, available at the right time, while maintaining teams for recovery work already underway. The court did not decide the ideal size of that workforce. It decided that a department-wide staffing directive cannot substitute for the mission-based analysis, statutory authority and transparent reasoning that federal law requires.