WASHINGTON:- Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that she is firing two dozen members of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) IT department after it was discovered that they brazenly neglected basic security protocols.
Fortunately, this problem was caught before any American citizens were directly impacted. Despite this failure and neglect, no sensitive data was extracted from any DHS networks.
FEMA Chief Information Officer (CIO) Charles Armstrong, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Gregory Edwards, and 22 other FEMA IT employees directly responsible were immediately terminated.
“FEMA’s career IT leadership failed on every level. Their incompetence put the American people at risk,” said Secretary Noem. “When DHS stepped in to fix the problem, entrenched bureaucrats worked to prevent us from solving the problem and downplayed just how bad this breach was. These deep-state individuals were more interested in covering up their failures than in protecting the Homeland and American citizens’ personal data, so I terminated them immediately. The American people deserve results from their government”
This vulnerability was only discovered because Secretary Noem ordered a review of all of FEMA’s operations and IT systems.
While conducting a routine cybersecurity review, the DHS Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) discovered significant security vulnerabilities that gave a threat actor access to FEMA’s network. The investigation uncovered several severe lapses in security that allowed the threat actor to breach FEMA’s network and threaten the entire Department and the nation as a whole.
The entrenched bureaucrats who led FEMA’s IT team for decades resisted any efforts to fix the problem. Instead, they avoided scheduled inspections and lied to officials about the scope and scale of the cyber vulnerabilities.
Failures included: an agency-wide lack of multi-factor authentication, use of prohibited legacy protocols, failing to fix known and critical vulnerabilities, and inadequate operational visibility.
FEMA spent nearly half a billion dollars on IT and cybersecurity measures in Fiscal Year 2025 alone and delivered virtually nothing for the American people. Despite burning hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, FEMA’s IT leadership still neglected its basic duties and exposed the entire Department to cyberattacks.
“This unacceptable behavior will not be tolerated in the Trump administration,” added Secretary Noem