Secretary Noem Terminates Inept FEMA Employees After Uncovering Massive Cyber Failures, Demands Accountability | Homeland Security
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DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that she is firing two dozen members of FEMA's IT department after it was discovered that they brazenly neglected basic security protocols.

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.

  • xorollo@leminal.spaceEnglish
    27·
    14 days ago

    So these guys wouldn’t or couldn’t hand over some data or install some malware or something?

  • Solano@piefed.socialEnglish
    26·
    14 days ago

    So DOGE goes in and messes everything up, allowing Russia to easily get in, and then they blame it on FEMA employees as a good excuse to remove actual professionals that weren’t hired by the regime, aka non-sycophants?

  • thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    261·
    14 days ago

    while I have little sympathy for them if the accusations are true, cutting all those people at the same time is just stupid and dangerous. Hopefully there’s still people around the know how the systems work…

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      14 days ago

      It’s Nazi sidekick Kristi Noem. I have little doubt this is all part of the coup to purge antifascists from the ranks of every agency.

  • maus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    21·
    14 days ago

    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.

  • ChicoSuave@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    14 days ago

    The lady who killed a puppy for a performance issue has butchered an entire IT department for performance issues. Who could have guessed such a reaction? They’re lucky she didn’t take them to a quarry.

  • Carvex@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    14 days ago

    Coming from the woman who as the head of a government department was quoted as saying “You can’t trust the government”, and had to be reminded by Dana Bash that “you are the government”.

    She forgot her new talking points after being appointed. She reel smrt.