Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, has dismissed around 24 FEMA IT staff members, including some in senior positions, for allegedly breaking security protocols, which led to sensitive data being compromised. Reports suggest they also lied when confronted with these issues.
“FEMA’s IT leaders failed comprehensively and endangered the American public,” stated Secretary Noem. “When the Department of Homeland Security tried to address the issue, some entrenched officials hindered our efforts and downplayed the severity of this breach. These individuals, more concerned with covering up their shortcomings than safeguarding the country and citizens’ personal information, were terminated immediately. The American people deserve a government that delivers effective results.”
I have to admit that seeing federal IT types fired for incompetence does give me hope that there is a new day dawning in Civil Service.
The exact specifics are unclear at this time, but Noem’s drastic actions suggest there were significant issues. Here’s how it was described by DHS.
During a routine cybersecurity assessment, the DHS Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) identified major security flaws that allowed a threat actor to infiltrate FEMA’s network. The investigation revealed multiple significant security oversights, which enabled the breach of FEMA’s network, thus endangering the Department and the nation at large.
Long-term FEMA IT leaders opposed efforts to resolve the issue. They skipped planned inspections and misrepresented the extent of the cyber vulnerabilities to officials.
The failures included the absence of agency-wide multi-factor authentication, continued use of banned legacy protocols, neglecting to address known critical vulnerabilities, and a lack of adequate operational oversight.
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.
According to a FEMA spokesman, “DHS was able to identify and finally get the bad actor. But they turned off their credentials and then, somehow, the FEMA IT team turned their credentials back on.”
The speculation is that the hackers were based in China and targeted Microsoft SharePoint servers.
While Secretary Noem may be correct that the American people got nothing for the expenditure of half a billion dollars, that isn’t to say that the money bought nothing. It padded the resumes of the people allegedly overseeing the contracts, employed contractors, and likely purchased equipment that hasn’t been installed. That contractor money, in return, probably went to well-heeled Democrat donors. So, it wasn’t a total loss, after all.
While the proximate cause of the firing of the Dirty Two Dozen was a failed response to a cyberattack, it is all a part of Trump’s and Noem’s efforts to convert the bloated, effervescent puddle of FAIL that is FEMA into an effective agency. We had a demonstration of just how inept FEMA is at carrying out anything that doesn’t resemble a coffee break or nap time last summer during Hurricane Helene.
RELATED:
FEMA Illustrates Perfectly What’s Wrong With Government When Hurricane Victim Asks for New Window – RedState
North Carolina Whistleblower: FEMA Has Housing Units but Has No Timeline to ‘Release’ Them – RedState
FLASHBACK: Was FEMA Punishing Trump Supporters in North Carolina? – RedState
The administration seems to be making some progress; see After Decades of Failure, the Trump Administration is getting FEMA Back on Track | Homeland Security.
Two additional stray threads. Earlier this week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth took action to keep vendors located in China from making changes to DOD cloud computing systems. In the process, he intimated that DOD was working with other agencies, which suggests that the problem is a government issue, rather than a DOD issue. It would be interesting to know if foreign nationals also maintain FEMA’s IT systems; see Did Pete Hegseth Just Save the Day, Or Is He a Contender for the ‘Too Little, Too Late’ Award? A second possible data point comes from the U.S. Navy: Navy’s top cybersecurity official abruptly leaves.
The Department of the Navy’s chief information officer left her post after nearly two years. Jane Overslaugh Rathbun, who served as the Department of the Navy’s top expert for cybersecurity, electromagnetic threats and privacy, suddenly announced her retirement last week. She is the latest senior Navy official to leave or be fired this month.
Rathbun shared the news in a LinkedIn post on Aug. 22, saying that it was hard to sum up more than three decades working in national security.
“It is with gratitude, pride, and humility that I close out this chapter of my career as a civil servant,” she wrote.
In her post, Rathbun did not give a reason for why she was retiring or if she was leaving the post immediately. However, a Navy official confirmed to Task & Purpose that she has since left her position.
While the events may not be related, Hegseth pulling the plug on Chinese vendors, Noem firing two dozen FEMA IT people over security issues, and the abrupt, no-notice retirement of the Navy’s top cybersecurity official seem too closely related to be explained by mere serendipity.
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