“FEMA’s career IT leadership failed on every level. Their incompetence put the American people at risk,” Noem said in a statement.

“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 said. “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.”

Among the 24 terminated employees were FEMA Chief Information Officer Charles Armstrong and Chief Information Security Officer Gregory Edwards.

The terminations come amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown on FEMA, which he has promised to dramatically overhaul and refocus, leaving natural disaster response largely to states rather than the federal government.

Noem did not specify how the employees failed to implement proper security procedures, but said no Americans were directly affected.

The issue was discovered after a review of all FEMA operations and IT systems that Noem requested earlier this year.

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The DHS Office of the Chief Information Officer discovered several serious security lapses that allowed a threat actor to access FEMA’s network. Those lapses resulted from FEMA workers’ efforts not to fix the root problem.

“Instead, they avoided scheduled inspections and lied to officials about the scope and scale of the cyber vulnerabilities,” the DHS press release stated.