Federal officials deleted Signal messages to cover their tracks. Thanks to our lawsuit, they didn’t get away with it

When we went to court to stop the administration from dismantling federal agencies, we knew that dismantling the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s workforce would put communities imminently at risk. But we didn’t know as much about how these decisions were being made.

Now, thanks to our lawsuit, we know a lot more. And the facts are worse than we imagined. Senior officials at DHS and FEMA used Signal on their personal phones to hash out a plan to slash FEMA. And then they destroyed those messages while a court order to preserve records was in place, hiding the evidence of what they’d done.

In a September 11 order, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston found that Karen Evans, FEMA’s former acting head, “acted with the intent to deprive plaintiffs” of evidence in this litigation. 

This wasn’t an oversight. Evans set her Signal chats to auto-delete on a timer she controlled. After she was sued as a defendant — and after the court had ordered DHS to preserve precisely this kind of evidence — she shortened that timer. 

And Evans is no technological neophyte. Before taking the helm at FEMA, Evans ran records preservation for the entire Department of Homeland Security as its chief information officer. Her own attorney told the court she “is more so an expert” on Signal “than anybody else here.”

Nor was Evans alone. Joseph Guy, DHS’s former deputy chief of staff, kept more than 25 FEMA-related Signal chats on his personal phone. On his final day in government, he reinstalled the app and wiped every one of them.

Now, they’ll pay a price for their destruction of evidence. In this month’s court order, the court stated that going forward — because of their conduct — it “will presume that the lost Signal messages would have been unfavorable to Defendants because they would have been further evidence of Defendants’ plan, DHS’s control, and Defendants’ implementing actions.”

This underscores that what those messages might have revealed goes to the heart of our case: that the decision to cut FEMA’s workforce was never DHS’s to make in the first place. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act to shield FEMA from exactly this kind of outside interference. The statute’s restriction is explicit: the DHS Secretary “may not substantially or significantly reduce” FEMA’s “authorities, responsibilities, or functions.” The court found DHS violated that restriction directly.

This case, like many of Public Rights Project’s others, is about ensuring that laws aren’t just words on paper; they’re enforceable — and we’re enforcing them.

—

“DHS acted unlawfully in usurping FEMA’s authority over its personnel, and FEMA — through former SOPDA Evans — acted unlawfully in acquiescing to DHS’s exertion of authority over FEMA’s CORE renewals and staffing numbers.”

— U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, AFGE v. Trump, No. 25-cv-03698-SI (N.D. Cal. Sept. 11, 2026), Dkt. No. 491

—

The story of how DHS sized FEMA’s cuts is similarly disturbing. Guy told Evans to include an option slashing FEMA’s workforce by half, against the recommendation of FEMA’s chief human capital officer, who recommended holding staffing steady.

In the court’s words, “Evans submitted the 11,383 figure [as a target staffing level] first and then worked backward to figure out how to support it.” Guy, for his part, could not explain where the number came from either, or, as the court concluded, “recall anything about his conversation with Evans.” There was no sign of “reasoned decision-making.”

—

“Frankly, the FEMA staffing plan number appears as if pulled from thin air.”

— U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, AFGE v. Trump, No. 25-cv-03698-SI (N.D. Cal. Sept. 11, 2026), Dkt. No. 491

—

One thing our lawsuit has done is bring into view what the public couldn’t see before — and put it in the official record.

In the meantime, all of this has real-world consequences. People across the country rely on FEMA to help them prepare for and recover from storms. The FEMA staff who work to get aid to those communities are the ones being shown the door. Now, communities are left wondering if anyone will be on the other end of the line when disaster strikes.