Friday, September 25, 2026
A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that the Department of Homeland Security acted unlawfully in directing FEMA to cut its workforce roughly in half. The record contained no reasoning for the cut, the officials who discussed it used Signal and deleted the messages, and the judge will now presume those messages would have shown unlawful conduct.
Massachusetts asked in April for a major disaster declaration covering a February blizzard that dropped up to 37 inches and cut power to about 290,000 households. The request was denied in July and the appeal denied on Thursday, on the ground that winter weather is not new to the Northeast and federal aid is not a backstop for routine state budgeting.
The former FEMA leader who worked to abolish it says the administration has dropped that goal. Meanwhile the agency has shed more than a thousand career staff since 2024, and the mitigation grants that reduce the cost of the next disaster have gone unauthorised for almost every major declaration since February 2025.