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WASHINGTON — The Federal Emergency Management Agency has begun offering jobs back to the disaster workers it pushed out in January, the Trump administration told a federal judge in a Friday night court filing, reversing one of the most controversial workforce decisions of the post-DOGE era just weeks before the start of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season.
U.S. Attorney Craig H. Missakian wrote in a notice submitted to the U.S. District Court in San Francisco that FEMA had initiated contact to offer new appointments to term-limited staff whose contracts expired during the first three weeks of January. The filing came in response to a lawsuit brought by the American Federation of Government Employees and a coalition of scientific groups and local governments, who alleged the nonrenewals were part of a broader plan to cut FEMA’s workforce by half.
FEMA’s Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery employees, known as COREs, make up roughly half of the agency’s workforce. They are the people who arrive after a hurricane, set up disaster recovery centers, walk survivors through paperwork, and stay in communities for years to help them rebuild. They work on two- to four-year contracts that, until this year, had been routinely renewed.
That changed at the start of 2026. As contracts came up, FEMA stopped renewing some entirely and extended others by only 90 days at a time. By late January, 159 COREs had not been renewed, according to a sworn declaration from FEMA’s temporary leader Karen S. Evans. The agency paused the nonrenewals only after a severe winter storm bore down on multiple states.
The plaintiffs argued the cuts were not a routine personnel adjustment but the visible edge of a plan, championed by then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, to slash FEMA’s workforce by half. Noem was later fired as DHS leader and replaced by Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, whose tenure has been marked by a sharp reversal of her approach.
According to the court notice, FEMA officials informed staff this week that COREs whose contracts end between January and May, and who had previously been extended for only 90 days, may now be reappointed for up to one year. Those whose contracts end after May are eligible for the same. Eligible FEMA reservists, the email to staff said, will be renewed for two years.
Roughly 7,000 reservists in FEMA’s surge workforce had contracts expiring May 2.
“Our readiness directly impacts our ability to help Americans in need, and every employee plays a critical role in meeting these challenges,” the internal email said, according to reporting by The Associated Press.
FEMA did not immediately respond to questions about how many employees received offers to return. Plaintiffs’ attorneys told the court they would respond after a proper factual investigation, and a planned deposition of former DHS Deputy Chief of Staff Joseph Guy is still on the calendar for next week.
Earlier in the week, FEMA also reinstated 14 employees who had been placed on paid administrative leave for eight months after signing a public letter of dissent against agency and DHS policies.
The FEMA reversal is not an isolated event. It is the latest entry in a year-long pattern in which the Department of Government Efficiency cut federal workers, agencies discovered the cuts had broken something essential, and the workers were quietly called back.
The first and most striking example came on Feb. 13, 2025, when the Trump administration fired more than 300 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Energy agency responsible for the safety and security of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Within days, after multiple members of Congress petitioned newly installed Energy Secretary Chris Wright and warned of national security risks, 322 of those 350 workers were rehired. It took less than a week.
The pattern repeated:
Department of Agriculture. Fifty-eight USDA facilities responsible for responding to the H5N1 bird flu outbreak were notified that 25 percent of their staff were being laid off. They were quickly rehired after Republican lawmakers on the House Agriculture Committee pushed back, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution.
Indian Health Service. Hours after laying off 950 IHS employees on Feb. 14, 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reinstated all of them, according to public reporting on the federal layoffs.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. HHS reinstated 450 CDC employees fired in an April 2025 reorganization, including more than 200 at the National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD and Tuberculosis Prevention, 158 at the National Center for Environmental Health, 71 in the Office of the Director, and roughly two dozen at the Global Health Center. Another 328 workers focused on mine safety at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health were also brought back, according to CNN reporting.
Food and Drug Administration. The FDA rehired staff responsible for reviewing medical devices and food safety after early cuts.
Bonneville Power Administration. The Department of Energy power agency in Portland, Oregon, brought back 30 employees it had fired the previous week.
NASA. The administration paused layoffs of nearly 1,000 probationary civil servants at NASA facilities on Feb. 18, 2025, including young scientists and engineers working on the Mars program.
National Weather Service. After losing more than 560 employees to layoffs and early retirement, the agency was given permission to hire roughly 125 new meteorologists and specialists despite a federal hiring freeze, with hurricane season looming.
General Services Administration. GSA brought back about 285 of the 600-700 Public Building Service employees it had cut, after 131 leases expired without the government actually vacating the properties.
By March 2026, approximately 25,000 fired federal workers had been rehired as essential to agency operations, according to Brookings Institution senior fellow Elaine Kamarck. Courts had ordered reinstatements at 18 agencies covering more than 24,000 workers.
The financial case for DOGE has not held up under scrutiny. U.S. Treasury Department data shows the federal deficit grew by nearly $2 trillion from October 2024 through August 2025, an increase of $76 billion over the same period the previous year. Federal spending actually rose by approximately $376 billion, about 6 percent, during that window.
A DOGE staffer named Nate Cavanaugh, deposed in March 2026, testified that DOGE did not reduce the federal deficit. Elon Musk, asked about the effort, told an interviewer DOGE was only somewhat successful and said he would not do it again.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has been the hardest case. The department lost 40,000 employees in fiscal year 2025, with 88 percent of those losses in health care, including 1,000 physicians, 1,500 patient schedulers, and 3,000 registered nurses. A Senate Veterans Committee report on the impact was titled “Cuts, Cover-Ups, and Chaos.” VA hired the fewest new employees since 2005, and clinicians have been rescinding job applications citing agency instability.
For Brevard County and the rest of Florida’s Atlantic coast, the FEMA reversal is not an abstract Washington story. The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season officially begins June 1.
Forecasts are mixed. Colorado State University and Tropical Storm Risk both project a slightly below-normal season, citing the likely development of El Niño conditions that tend to suppress Atlantic hurricane formation. CSU is forecasting 13 named storms, six hurricanes, and two major hurricanes. AccuWeather predicts 11 to 16 named storms and three to five direct impacts on the United States. The University of Arizona, by contrast, is calling for an active season with 20 named storms and four major hurricanes.
Even a below-average season is not a quiet season for Florida. The 2025 season featured three Category 5 hurricanes, just one shy of the all-time record, with most activity occurring after Sept. 10. And a slower season is no guarantee of a quieter one for any single community: it only takes one storm to find Brevard.
FEMA’s CORE workforce is the part of the agency that shows up after the storm, sets up disaster recovery centers, walks homeowners through Individual Assistance applications, and works with county and municipal governments on long-term rebuilding. When those positions go unfilled, the gap is not bridged by the state. Florida Chief Resilience Officer Wesley Brooks told the Florida congressional delegation last spring that the state has a strong working relationship with FEMA and uses the agency’s resources to manage and accelerate aid distribution on a peninsula with unique logistical challenges.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has argued Florida would do better if FEMA were converted to a block-grant funding agency and the state handled mitigation directly. Florida’s congressional delegation, including Republicans like Rep. John Rutherford of Jacksonville, has openly questioned what a restructured FEMA would mean for hurricane response. Rep. Kathy Castor, a Tampa Democrat, told the same hearing she did not know how Florida could function without a robust FEMA after the worst hurricane season in Tampa Bay history.
FEMA has also ended its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which had directed nearly $300 million in hurricane mitigation aid to Florida — the largest BRIC allocation of any state.
The FEMA reversal raises a question the federal government has been quietly answering for more than a year: was the workforce ever as bloated as DOGE claimed?
The pattern of fire-and-rehire across the nuclear weapons agency, the bird flu response, the CDC, the FDA, the National Weather Service, and now FEMA suggests that the people doing the cutting did not always know what the cut workers did. In some cases, supervisors were uncertain how to even contact fired employees because those employees no longer had access to government email accounts.
FEMA’s reversal does not end the lawsuit. Plaintiffs’ attorneys have signaled they want to know more before responding. The deposition of former DHS Deputy Chief of Staff Joseph Guy, scheduled for next week, may shed more light on who made the decision to refuse renewing the CORE contracts and why.
For now, what is clear is this: with hurricane season weeks away, FEMA is calling its disaster workers back. And whether those workers say yes will go a long way toward determining what kind of agency shows up on the Space Coast if the next storm finds Florida.
The Space Coast Rocket will continue to follow the lawsuit and FEMA’s hurricane season readiness. Tips: editor@thespacecoastrocket.com.
