Multiple employees with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in Virginia were fired Tuesday after allegedly using their government-issued devices to access especially deviant sexual content.
Some of the pornography accessed on the job was racist and involved animals, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem expressed outrage at the behavior, which was uncovered during an internal investigation by the DHS’ Insider Threat Operations Center (ITOC).
“These individuals had access to critical information and intelligence and were entrusted to safeguard Americans from emergencies — and instead they were consuming pornography,” Noem said.
Noem added that “in at least one case the pornography consumed was racially charged and involved bestiality.”
The investigation also found that approximately half of taxpayer-funded FEMA employees are perusing social media during working hours.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are cleaning house at FEMA to make this dysfunctional agency work for the American people the way that it was intended,” Noem added. “For decades some of these bureaucrats engaged in every act imaginable instead of safeguarding the American people from natural disasters. That ends now.”
One of the employees allegedly used his government-issued device to type sexually explicit content into a chatbot, which then read it aloud “in an accent,” according to the release.
Two of the people terminated were stationed at the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, a government command facility located in Clarke County, Virginia, that monitors potential national threats, according to The New York Post.
Agency sources who spoke to the outlet noted that one of the fired employees was obsessed with “bestial fantasies” and “racism-infused sexual encounters.” The other reportedly logged extensive time sharing sexual content with users on Reddit, a large network of online forums.
FEMA has come under intense scrutiny within the past year, especially after catastrophic hurricanes that left large swaths of destruction in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, western North Carolina and throughout Appalachia last September.
Amid the devastation of Hurricane Helene, many residents near Asheville, North Carolina — the epicenter of the storm’s destruction — were especially critical of FEMA’s response in the area. Residents of Bat Cave, a community outside Asheville, said at the time they preferred that workers with the agency stay away, with one claiming a FEMA worker told her they were not “allowed” to drive around a “Road Closed” sign.
In an internal memo after Hurricane Milton last year, FEMA supervisor Marn’i Washington instructed relief workers to “avoid homes advertising Trump” during their surveys amid the devastation in Highlands County, Florida, according to The Daily Wire. Washington was subsequently fired.
President Donald Trump made FEMA’s hurricane response a key element of his 2024 presidential campaign during its final weeks, and visited the devastation in North Carolina and Georgia himself.
Vice President JD Vance tore into the agency at the time, likening it to the “DMV at an industrial scale.”
FEMA again drew criticism this summer following the deadly flooding at Camp Mystic, a private Christian girls’ summer camp in Hunt, Texas, where 27 girls and workers died. An analysis by NPR, PBS’s FRONTLINE and data scientists found the agency failed to include multiple buildings on its flood risk map.
Jon Brown is a reporter for The Christian Post. Send news tips to jon.brown@christianpost.com
