Days after reinstating a group of Federal Emergency Management Agency employees who raised concerns about the government’s disaster preparedness, federal officials have placed those whistleblowers back on administrative leave.
The move comes hours after CNN first reported the return to work of 14 staffers who had remained on paid leave since late August. Those workers were awaiting the results of an internal investigation into their participation in an open letter that criticized President Donald Trump’s cuts to FEMA, which sits under the Department of Homeland Security.
Though FEMA had recently called the employees back to work, a DHS spokesperson said in a statement that the workers “were wrongly and without authorization reinstated by bureaucrats acting outside their authority,” adding that “the unauthorized reinstatement was swiftly corrected by senior leadership” who returned the group to administrative leave.
“I’ve never seen a retraction on a retraction like this,” said David Seide, a lawyer for the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, which is helping some workers press whistleblower complaints against FEMA with the federal Office of Special Counsel. “In my decades of experience in these spaces, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
The reversal comes as FEMA staff await the final recommendations of an expert council that Trump convened to evaluate the agency’s future. The council is expected to approve its final report at a meeting scheduled for Dec. 11.
Topics FEMA
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