An outside contractor once described as the “shadow administrator” of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was actually working, for at least part of her time in government, for a company owned by a member of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, according to recent court filings.
The filings show that from fall 2025 to spring of this year, Kara Voorhies, a special government employee and contractor whose work at FEMA has drawn scrutiny from Congress as well as the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, was subcontracted by a company owned by Kyle Schutt, a DOGE operative whose own company was contracting with DHS.
The documents were filed in a lawsuit contesting President Donald Trump’s vast cuts to the federal workforce. Previous filings have indicated that for several months, authority over some of the spending operations of FEMA, a constituent agency of DHS, was seemingly illegally influenced by Voorhies. An April letter from three Democratic members of Congress alleges that she had outsize “power to not only influence the award of contracts and grants but also to punish entities.”
“Federal law prohibits government contractors from performing work that is characterized as ‘inherently governmental functions,’” Mississippi Democratic congressman Bennie G. Thompson wrote in the letter.
These new details from the court filings raise even further questions about DOGE members’ roles within government and the depth of possible corruption at DHS under former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. DHS, Voorhies, and Schutt did not respond to a request for comment.
In a deposition filed as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Federation of Government Employees, Voorhies describes herself as having a “financial background” with “executive level leadership and experience.” She says she joined DHS in April 2025, coming from Crest Investment Company—a financial fund run by Jamal Daniel, an investor and founder of the Middle East–focused news outlet Al-Monitor.
According to her deposition, Voorhies was serving as chief financial officer for the company and running special projects when Daniel asked if she would be interested in working with FEMA. He introduced her to Corey Lewandowski, who at the time was a senior adviser and effectively the chief of staff for Noem. Lewandowski did not respond to a request for comment.
Voorhies, who had no previous government experience, was not paid by the government as a special government employee. SGEs are subject to fewer transparency and disclosure requirements than federal employees but are limited to working in government for 130 days per year.
Though Voorhies says she was brought in to improve “efficiency and responsiveness of FEMA,” she struggled during the deposition to define what exactly “efficiency” meant and said she was never given a formal job description. According to her deposition, Voorhies was responsible for "reviewing memos" that accompanied contracts and grant requests above $100,000 and was involved in reviewing and terminating FEMA grants. She says she did not “have authority to make decisions” at the agency, and Lewandowski and a former top aide to Noem, Joseph Guy, did not provide her with much information about FEMA.
“I recall Kyle Schutt having provided most of the information from things they had collected from DOGE,” she testified. Schutt is a software engineer who formerly served as the chief technical officer of Revv, a fundraising platform, before he joined DOGE. Schutt was, during this time period, stationed across several agencies, including the General Services Administration, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, and DHS. Last year, WIRED reported that Schutt was making $195,000 as a GSA employee, and ProPublica found that Schutt was part of shuttering DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. In May 2025 it was revealed that Schutt’s login credentials had been compromised by malware, after DropSite News reported that Schutt had been given access to FEMA’s payment software.
Voorhies testified that though she was not part of DOGE, she was working alongside the DOGE team at DHS. Part of that work involved analyzing documents that Schutt and the other DOGE FEMA members collected, such as “financial statements” and “organizational charts.” After her time as an SGE ran out in the fall of 2025, though, she spoke to Schutt and Lewandowski about how she could continue working with DHS, she said. The solution, as she explained in her deposition: Voorhies would be brought on as a subcontractor to another subcontractor, owned by Schutt.
In her deposition, Voorhies said that in September 2025, she started LV Consulting, a company where she was the only employee. In October, this company began serving as a subcontractor to AnchorCode Technologies, which was owned by Schutt and was itself already serving as a subcontractor to another company, IMGE.
IMGE was the “prime” contractor—the company with the direct contract with DHS. As subcontractors, AnchorCode and LV Consulting did not have direct contracts with DHS and do not appear in the System for Award Management, the system that shows which companies contract with the government.
AnchorCode did not respond to a request for comment.
IMGE describes itself as a “full-service” marketing agency that offers “audience intelligence, advanced advertising, AI-powered analytics, influencer marketing, advocacy toolsets, and always-on testing.” It appears to be a subsidiary of a much larger communications agency called GP3 Partners and has worked with US Senator Rand Paul’s campaign and Advancing American Freedom, a conservative advocacy organization founded by former vice president Mike Pence.
IMGE and GP3 did not respond to a request for comment.
A federal employee with expertise in the government’s contracting system, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, tells WIRED that the overlying companies and their various government contracts seem to be highly suspect.
“If you’re a senior adviser to an agency and that agency is giving you contracts or subcontracts, that’s a huge no-no,” says the federal employee. “This is literally the reason ethics rules even exist.”
Schutt’s employment at GSA, the employee says, raises additional concerns. “An important ethics question would also be whether he became privy to procurement-sensitive data while he was a federal employee at DHS, which is highly likely if he was at GSA, because the main thing they do is acquisition and procurement,” they say.
In order to keep this kind of deal aboveboard, the federal employee says, Schutt and Voorhies would have needed to go to the agency’s ethics officer as well as to the Office of Government Ethics to ensure there was no conflict of interest. For someone who was a government employee, as Schutt appeared to be at GSA, the federal employee says, there would normally need to be a “cooling-off period” between a person’s government tenure and their contracting work.
Margaret Dylus-Yukins, senior legal counsel for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center and a former attorney adviser to the Office of Government Ethics, tells WIRED that Voorhies was seemingly powerful enough within FEMA that she would likely have been subject to a two-year ban on communicating with the agency after ending her time as an SGE, unless she had been granted a special waiver. (WIRED was not able to find a waiver for Voorhies or Schutt on the Federal Register.) Based on her understanding of Voorhies’ situation, Dylus-Yukins alleges, "this is illegal under 18 USC 207 of the criminal code.”
Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University, says that if there is an appearance of a conflict of interest, other contractors could sue IMGE, alleging that in subcontracting to Schutt and Voorhies, the company had an unfair advantage.
Tillipman notes that if someone sets up a company to contract with an agency while still a government employee, that could be a violation of the law. AnchorCode was founded in 2023 but registered on the System for Award Management in October 2025. But even so, it could still be an ethics concern. “Some of this is still murky, but at its core, at minimum, there does seem to be an appearance issue. And it raises red flags.”
It is not clear from Voorhies’ deposition when AnchorCode’s contract with IMGE began, but Voorhies says that her contract with AnchorCode ran from October 1, 2025, until mid-March 2026, when it was terminated a week after Trump announced that he would be replacing Noem as Homeland Security secretary.
AnchorCode’s website does not list any team members and describes the company as building “mission-specific software for government.” In her deposition, when asked about Schutt, Voorhies says that “he was AnchorCode.” For her work as a contractor with AnchorCode, Voorhies testified that she was paid $325 an hour and said that she did not have to go through any sort of public bidding process in order to win it.
Both Schutt and Voorhies retained their titles as senior advisers, even though they were contractors, and Voorhies says in her deposition that she never informed her colleagues at DHS that her position had effectively changed.
Schutt is not the only DOGE member who appears to have used their time in government to possibly access government contracts. In May, WIRED reported that former DOGE member Ethan Shaotran, one of the young engineers who comprised some of the group’s core members, was starting a defense tech startup positioning itself to receive government contracts.
Tillipman says that these hiring situations involving the private sector, DOGE, the Trump administration, and SGEs undermine trust in the government.
“When you have a huge number of special government employees that are also maintaining outside business interests with organizations or entities or firms that continue to do business with the government, it raises those optics concerns,” she says.
The Trump administration has repeatedly indicated that it wants to eliminate FEMA, and last week, 25 Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit alleging that FEMA’s disaster aid had been cut to their states in retaliation in order to force them to use the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services’ SAVE database to check their voter rolls against DHS’s immigration records.
Update: 8/12/2026, 2:45 PM EDT: WIRED has corrected the US Code cited by Margaret Dylus-Yukins.
Source: Wired
