House lawmakers to mark up major FEMA reform bill
The FEMA Act of 2025 would break FEMA out of DHS and make it an independent agency, along with other major disaster management reforms.
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Wednesday will consider legislation that would move the Federal Emergency Management Agency out from under the Department of Homeland Security and make other major FEMA reforms.
The committee is scheduled to mark up the “Fixing Emergency Management for Americans (FEMA) Act of 2025” during a Wednesday morning meeting. The bill is sponsored by Chairman Sam Graves (R-Mo.) and Ranking Member Rick Larsen (D-Wash.).
The legislation would make FEMA an independent agency that reports directly to the president.
It would also overhaul FEMA’s disaster assistance processes, with the goal of delivering aid faster to both states and individual survivors. The bill additionally takes aim at reforming FEMA’s mitigation framework and programs to help better protect communities from disasters.
“FEMA is in need of serious reform, and the goal of the FEMA Act of 2025 is to fix it,” Graves said when introducing the bill in July. “This bill does more than any recent reforms to cut through the bureaucracy, streamline programs, provide flexibility, and return FEMA to its core purpose of empowering the states to lead and coordinating the federal response when it’s needed.”
FEMA IT staff fired
The House mark up comes after a turbulent final week of August at FEMA.
On Friday night, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem fired 24 FEMA IT employees over alleged cybersecurity “failures.” Among those terminated are FEMA Chief Information Officer Charles Armstrong and Chief Information Security Officer Gregory Edwards.
The sudden and highly unusual firings come the same week some FEMA employees signed a public letter warning about the Trump administration’s changes at the emergency management agency. Those employees were then placed on administrative leave.
In a Friday evening news release, DHS said the 24 IT staff were fired after a “routine cybersecurity review” conducted by the DHS office of the chief information officer uncovered “significant security vulnerabilities that gave a threat actor access to FEMA’s network.”
The press release said the threat actor was discovered “before any American citizens were directly impacted” and “no sensitive data was extracted from any DHS networks.”
DHS’s press release did not detail which threat actor breached FEMA’s network, the extent of the threat actor’s access to the network or details about the specific vulnerability or vulnerabilities that the threat actor used to access FEMA’s network.
DHS said the problems uncovered by the FEMA review generally included an “agency-wide” lack of multi-factor authentication, the use of “prohibited legacy protocols,” failing to fix “known and critical vulnerabilities,” and “inadequate operational vulnerability.”
DHS charged that “the entrenched bureaucrats who led FEMA’s IT team for decades resisted any efforts to fix the problem” and that “they avoided scheduled inspections and lied to officials about the scope and scale of the cyber vulnerabilities.”
Armstrong had been FEMA’s CIO since 2022. He had previously served in other federal roles, including as CIO at Customs and Border Protection, and had co-founded an IT consulting firm. Edwards had served as FEMA CISO since mid-2020.
Armstrong could not immediately be reached for comment.
FEMA changes
The firings come as the Trump administration enacts sweeping changes at FEMA. Noem has repeatedly said FEMA “must be eliminated as it exists today” and undergo reforms that shift more disaster management responsibilities to state and local governments.
Hundreds of FEMA employees have already left the agency under the Trump administration.
Those changes came under the microscope over the past week after more than 190 current and former FEMA staff signed the public letter criticizing Noem and the administration’s changes. The letter argues the cuts and other changes risk leaving FEMA less ready for a major disaster than it was for Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago.
Earlier this year, Noem also fired FEMA’s chief financial officer and three other employees for allegedly “circumventing leadership to unilaterally make egregious payments for luxury NYC hotels for migrants.”
However, FEMA’s CFO said she had received clearance to make those payments, which were part of a congressionally mandated program to house migrants.
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