The complaint, a copy of which was obtained by the Washington Examiner, was filed Tuesday by the Center to Advance Security in America. The national security watchdog group is pressing for an investigation into whether employees at FEMA violated federal law when they apparently deleted an LGBT “pride” chat on the Microsoft Teams software just as President Donald Trump took office in January.

“The American public deserves to know when the ‘pride’ chat was created in Microsoft teams, how it was managed, how it functioned, and how it was deleted,” CASA Director James Fitzpatrick wrote in the complaint letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the acting archivist of the United States. “The investigation into this matter will shed light on the allegations regarding the possible wrongful deletion of federal records.”

The complaint comes as DOGE, the Trump administration’s cost-cutting effort that counts businessman Elon Musk as its leader, takes aim at FEMA. In a Sunday social media post, Musk said the disaster aid agency is “broken,” while noting on Monday that DOGE uncovered $59 million in recent FEMA payments to “luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants.”

“FEMA spent tens of millions of dollars in Democrat areas, disobeying orders, but left the people of North Carolina high and dry,” Trump said Tuesday in a social media post. “It is now under review and investigation. THE BIDEN RUN FEMA HAS BEEN A DISASTER. FEMA SHOULD BE TERMINATED! IT HAS BEEN SLOW AND TOTALLY INEFFECTIVE. INDIVIDUAL STATES SHOULD HANDLE STORMS, ETC., AS THEY COME. BIG SAVINGS, FAR MORE EFFICIENT!!!”

Days after Trump’s swearing-in, Slate published a report in January that characterized federal employees as fearful over the change of power. The story said a “pride” chat was deleted at FEMA “for fear the membership list might fall into the wrong hands.”

In the telling of CASA, a Washington, D.C.,-based nonprofit group, the reported chat deletion likely violated the Federal Records Act, a law approved in 1950 that aims to ensure agencies preserve public documents and do not destroy them.

CASA said the report is indicative of unjust politicization at FEMA, an agency under DHS. FEMA notably came under fire in November 2024 following a report in the Daily Wire that said a FEMA supervisor told workers surveying damage from Hurricane Milton in Florida to avoid homes with Trump signs.

The FEMA employee, Marn’i Washington, was since fired from her job.

Federal law holds that any agencies that learn of destruction of records must notify the National Archives and Justice Department to initiate an investigation. The Washington Examiner reached out for comment to the DOJ and the inspector general for the DHS.

“The Federal Records Act is in place to ensure that government records are diligently maintained for transparency and accountability purposes,” CASA wrote in the complaint. “Circumventing the protocols in place inhibits the transparency needed for governance. Furthermore, it creates distrust in the government.”

FEMA did not respond to a request for comment.

Since Trump’s inauguration, DOGE has launched a sprawling effort across agencies to cut spending and change government processes, facing lawsuits from progressive nonprofit groups in the process. FEMA said this week it halted payments to the New York City program to house migrants that Musk criticized. The agency also fired four employees involved in the program, according to DHS.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in an interview with CNN on Sunday that she supported getting rid of FEMA as it “exists today.”

“I would say, yes, get rid of FEMA the way it exists today,” Noem said. “We still need the resources and the funds and the finances to go to people that have these types of disasters, like Hurricane Helene and the fires in California, but you need to let the local officials make the decisions on how that is deployed.”