Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem fired two dozen employees at the Federal Emergency Management Agency following a major cybersecurity breach.
The 24 employees include FEMA Chief Information Officer Charles Armstrong and Chief Information Security Officer Gregory Edwards.
According to Noem, the Department of Homeland Security’s [DHS] internal network was accessed by a “threat actor,” compromising sensitive information and putting department operations “at risk.”
“Fortunately, this problem was caught before any American citizens were directly impacted,” a DHS statement issued on Friday revealed. “Despite this failure and neglect, no sensitive data was extracted from any DHS networks.”
The statement went on to gush over Noem, claiming that she was the “only” reason that the security vulnerability was discovered because she ordered a review into FEMA’s operations and IT systems.
“The entrenched bureaucrats who led FEMA’s IT team for decades resisted any efforts to fix the problem,” DHS claimed. “Instead, they avoided scheduled inspections and lied to officials about the scope and scale of the cyber vulnerabilities.”
Taking to social media, Noem claimed that FEMA’s IT leadership had “failed on every level” and said that “their incompetence put the American people at risk.”
“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,” Noem raged on X.
“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.”
