A judge found that Mary Comans unlawfully lost her job at FEMA amid cuts by the U.S. DOGE Service.
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A senior Federal Emergency Management Agency official fired early last year is seeking to clear her name after Elon Musk blamed her for allowing payments to New York City to house immigrants, which she said was approved by a U.S. DOGE Service aide.
In early February last year, Musk posted on X that DOGE, which stands for the Department of Government Efficiency, discovered FEMA sent $59 million to “luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants,” calling the payment unlawful and an act of “gross insubordination.” Musk shared FEMA’s former chief financial officer Mary Comans’s name and photo in a post accusing her of “a criminal action.”
Last month, a judge ruled that the Trump administration unlawfully fired Comans in February 2025. As part of U.S. District Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff’s decision, which the government is currently appealing, Comans is now entitled to a name-clearing hearing after Musk and conservative influencers attacked her and shared her personal information on social media.
Comans’s attorneys filed a new statement Tuesday explaining she had no role in authorizing the payments in question and that, days before she was fired, a DOGE official had explicitly endorsed FEMA’s decision to continue sending money to state and local governments.
The filing provides the most detailed account yet of the events surrounding her firing, and reveals how the government haphazardly responded to social media claims made by Musk and others during the early, harried days when DOGE exerted extensive power across the federal government. The statement from Comans alleges that senior officials at FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security knew she had not authorized the payments even as the administration publicly blamed her for them.
The case marks one of the first to reach this phase of resolution. While other fired federal workers have appealed to the Merit Systems Protection Board — a quasi-judicial, independent agency that is supposed to protect federal employees from unfair firings — Comans took her case to federal court, arguing MSPB has been ineffective and her dismissal is a constitutional question because the administration has cited the president’s Article II powers to remove subordinates.
Comans’s dispute centers on FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, a congressionally funded grant program that reimbursed state and local governments and other organizations for certain costs of sheltering migrants released from federal custody.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump ordered agencies to review federal funding to nongovernmental organizations that provided services to immigrants and pause payments while that review was underway. DHS Secretary Kristi L. Noem later directed the department to halt certain immigration-related grant payments to nonprofit organizations.
FEMA’s chief counsel sought guidance from DHS about whether the freeze applied only to nongovernmental organizations or to all recipients of the Shelter and Services Program. Officials at FEMA raised concerns in a February meeting that there was a court order mandating that DHS send states and local governments this money, and they told DOGE they needed to restart payments, according to two current and former FEMA officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
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The following day, FEMA’s grants office — not Comans — approved payments to New York City and Colorado, one of the officials said.
Days later, DOGE representatives met with FEMA and DHS officials to discuss the grants. According to Comans’s account, DOGE aide Brad Smith asked whether payments to nonprofit organizations had stopped and was told they had. When a FEMA official said payments to state and local governments were still being made, Smith responded, “that’s the right answer,” the filing says.
But on Feb. 9, a DOGE official working at the Treasury Department flagged the New York payments, and DOGE officials alleged they violated Trump’s and Noem’s directives. The next day, Musk began posting about it on X, the social media platform he owns.
Comans was then tasked with helping recover the money. Her filing says she coordinated with Treasury and banks to return roughly $80 million and reported by that evening that the funds were being sent back. FEMA’s acting administrator thanked her for the work, according to the filing.
The next morning, Feb. 11, Comans was told she had been fired and had about 15 minutes to leave the building.
Though her termination letter didn’t list a reason for her firing, DHS publicly announced that she had been fired for “circumventing leadership to unilaterally make egregious payments for luxury NYC hotels for migrants.”
Corey Lewandowski, then Noem’s top adviser and a special government employee, provided information to conservative activist Laura Loomer that led her to post Comans’s name and accuse her of illegally funding hotel stays in violation of Trump’s executive order, according to the filing. Loomer and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Courtney Mickman, a federal employment attorney representing other workers who was not involved in Comans’s case, said it could become more common to see name-clearing hearings for other federal employees who are fired and attacked publicly by administration officials.
“We will see more of these because there have been other public statements about others that would similarly qualify for entitlement of a name clearing,” Mickman said.
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