cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36577114
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.
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.
I work daily with federal agencies, and state and local governments specifically in cyber security. There is absolutely no way that an agency such as FEMA would be able to both spend what is claimed and also not deliver any results for “decades”.
Additionally, firing dozens of IT staff does not begin to address their issues and likely just caused a mass exodus of integral knowledge of their environment.