Sitting behind Leandro “Lee” Rizzuto Jr., Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas Kristi Noem attends the Organization of American States meeting where visiting Ecuador”s President Daniel Noboa is to speak, Thursday, May 14, 2026, in Washington (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
Federal employee unions have raised serious concerns, accusing the Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers of at least being “willfully blind” to the erasure of significant Signal messages involving former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem. This controversy emerges as a judge prepares to deliberate on whether to prevent the Trump administration from drastically reducing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) workforce.
Attorneys representing the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) have petitioned Senior U.S. District Judge Susan Illston of California, appointed by Bill Clinton, to intervene. They seek an injunction against a proposed plan to cut FEMA staffing by half by the fiscal year’s end, a move the government claims is not a definitive agency action.
In late May, a motion for a preliminary injunction highlighted the need for judicial oversight, arguing that the Trump administration should not be trusted to self-regulate. The motion alleges, “a sustained effort by Defendants to conceal and even destroy documents and information pertaining to DHS decision-making,” reinforcing the necessity for court intervention.
The filing details that between 2025 and early 2026, DHS leadership initiated a strategy to reduce FEMA’s workforce from approximately 23,000 to 11,500 employees by the close of the 2026 fiscal year. This reduction would primarily affect the elimination of CORE employee positions.
A clarifying footnote explained that CORE employees are “Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery Employees,” a category of federal workers authorized and funded by the Stafford Act and the Disaster Relief Fund. These employees constitute over half of FEMA’s full-time workforce, underscoring the significant impact of the proposed staffing cuts.
From there, the filing stated that discovery so far has “conclusively” shown that the plan the government denies — following a shift in March to Markwayne Mullin atop DHS — still hangs over the plaintiffs like a sword of Damocles.
On Wednesday, days ahead of a scheduled June 23 hearing, the plaintiffs made “serious” allegations that DOJ attorneys were to blame for discovery violations, either because they were “willfully blind to their clients’ extensive use of disappearing Signal messages in disregard of their obligation to investigate” or because they “knowingly participated in the concealment” of a practice that “all but ensure[s] the automatic destruction of those communications before discovery.”
Regardless, the plaintiffs said, the judge has ample reason to find the DOJ’s clients “intentionally deprived Plaintiffs of discovery” through a “systematic violation of federal records requirements.” After all, the DOJ acknowledged the “lost” messages “should have been preserved,” the filing continued.
“Defendants do not dispute that their high-level officials regularly used disappearing Signal messages on their personal phones for agency business, in violation of their responsibility to preserve federal records. That is a serious admission that top DHS and FEMA officials blatantly disregarded federal law and agency policy,” court documents added. “But they downplay the significance of the loss to this litigation and argue that the loss was at most grossly negligent, but not intentional.”
The auto-deletion of months’ worth of “relevant” and “discoverable” messages in chats involving “high-level officials” — including Noem, “Chief Advisor to the DHS Secretary Corey Lewandowski, and even agency counsel” — means that the Trump administration “should not be allowed to rely on self-serving testimony that is insulated against impeachment,” the plaintiffs said, asking Illston to go beyond an order awarding fees as the “DOJ tries to wash their hands of these discovery issues.”
“To remedy these prejudicial and intentional actions, the Court should exclude hindsight testimony from Defendants’ witnesses that serves Defendants’ narrative, and it should adopt a presumption that lost information would have been unfavorable to Defendants,” the filing concluded.