A federal judge will decide this month whether to block the Trump administration from further reducing the federal disaster workforce as labor unions warn that states and localities could be overwhelmed by disasters.
Judge Susan Illston of the Northern dDistrict of California has scheduled a hearing for Feb. 27 on a request Tuesday by federal labor unions and other groups to stop the administration from continuing to shrink the Federal Emergency Management Agency workforce.
Plaintiffs led by the American Federation of Government Employees asked Illston, who was nominated by former President Bill Clinton, to temporarily block FEMA staff reductions, calling them illegal and saying they would hurt local governments “that rely on FEMA staff and services.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, started reducing FEMA’s disaster staff on Jan. 1 by not renewing contracts of its on-call employees, who account for a large share of the agency’s disaster workforce. The employees, classified as the Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery, or CORE, are spread across the nation and work on two- or three-year contracts that the union says have been renewed routinely.
