The government’s emergency response agency developed a topline figure to which it would slash its workforce before it developed an analysis of how to reach that total, according to new documents and testimony from a lawsuit challenging an initial round of cuts, leaving staff to then reverse engineer a pathway to implement the potential reductions.
Officials at the Homeland Security Department tasked Federal Emergency Management Agency leadership with developing various staffing cut scenarios, including one that would have led to the dismissal of half of FEMA’s workforce, new court records show. That plan was ultimately developed and sent back to DHS, as well as the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management, Karen Evans, the senior official currently serving as FEMA’s said in a recent deposition.
Excerpts of the deposition and internal communications on the staffing cuts were recently made public in court filings.
“We didn’t have a plan,” Evans said of the goal to get FEMA to 11,383 employees, roughly half of FEMA’s existing workforce. “That’s why I was tasking the plan.”
Evans, who replaced David Richardson as head of FEMA on Dec. 1, requested that other top officials at FEMA develop a process for meeting the already determined staff cut goal. Richardson had spearheaded the analysis that led to that figure based on “mission essential functions,” Evans said, though she acknowledged the final call on the plan—which she said included various options—came from her parent agency.
“I was told to include an option that would include a 50% cut,” she said, recalling a conversation she had with then-DHS Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Guy.
Evans sent that plan to DHS on Dec. 4 and it was subsequently passed on to OMB and OPM.
The FEMA chief was deposed on March 31 after a chaotic court hearing in which attorneys for the Trump administration contradicted previous, written testimony Evans had provided over the provenance of the staffing cut goals. A federal judge ordered top DHS and FEMA officials to provide depositions, and thousands of pages of related documents, to straighten out the discrepancy.
A union representing FEMA employees brought the lawsuit after the agency terminated hundreds of workers by declining to renew their expiring two or four-year contracts. The non-renewed employees were all part of FEMA’s Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery workforce, who serve in the short-term stints that are typically renewed. The employees, however, have been systematically dismissed at the end of their agreements since late last year, with an exception for the winter storms that hit much of the country in January.
CORE employees are often the first to deploy following a disaster and, according to the lawsuit, some of the terminated workers were in the middle of hurricane relief deployments. FEMA has so far slashed more than 1,000 of the employees since 2024, or about 10% of that workforce. FEMA also employs about 4,000 reservists, who serve on a part-time basis and only activate during disasters, and around 5,000 permanent, full-time staff.
Work on the plan to implement widespread staffing cuts is “put on hold” to implement the CORE non-renewal plan, Evans said. She suggested the shedding of COREs was related only to right-sizing the workforce and not necessarily connected to the larger workforce plans.
In February, however, Victoria Barton, a FEMA spokesperson, said while there was no plan to eliminate COREs en masse, the agency in recent years had been “inflating the workforce beyond sustainable levels” and the reductions would address that. She added the cuts Evans implemented to that workforce “brought a level of scrutiny and accountability” to the agency that it had been lacking.
Evans, DHS human resources chief Roland Edwards and FEMA HR head La’Toya Prieur all confirmed in their depositions that various DHS officials were involved in the decision making related to CORE non-renewals, attorneys for the plaintiffs said.
Plaintiffs in the case released the testimony and documents in asking the judge to compel further document disclosure and depositions from the government. Evans revealed that she chatted with DHS officials, including former Secretary Kristi Noem and her top advisor Corey Lewandowski, on Signal and using personal devices. The government stated those conversations were not related to the case. Evans also produced her own daily notes that she took on the job, but self-redacted them to screen for what she deemed to be inappropriate for disclosure. The plaintiffs are also seeking an unredacted copy of those notes.
