Karen Evans is coming back to the DHS management directorate after spending the last 18 months working for CISA and FEMA.
Karen Evans is returning to the headquarters office at the Department of Homeland Security. The former DHS chief information officer will now lead the department’s waste, fraud and abuse task force.
Brian Cavanaugh, the DHS undersecretary for management, announced Evans’ return to the department yesterday as part of the email to staff announcing changes in the agency’s CIO’s office.
“Karen’s extensive background in federal IT and cybersecurity leadership, along with her deep experience in public service, makes her well suited to lead this important effort,” Cavanaugh wrote in an email to staff, which Federal News Network obtained. “As director, Karen will lead the department’s support for Executive Order 14395, ‘Establishing the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud,’ a governmentwide priority chaired by the Vice President. In this role, she will coordinate DHS efforts to eliminate waste, safeguard taxpayer funds and ensure the department remains a responsible steward of public resources.”
Evans returned to DHS starting in January 2025, having worked at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Federal Emergency Management Agency over the last 18 months in assorted senior roles.
The White House nominated her to be the undersecretary of Homeland Security for Management, but withdrew her nomination in July 2025. She also served as the senior official performing the duties of administrator at FEMA from December 2025 to May 2026.
The Trump administration has made ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse a major initiative under the President’s Management Agenda. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March creating a new fraud task force.
The Government Accountability Office said in April that in fiscal 2025 15 agencies reported a total estimate of about $186 billion in improper payments across 64 programs, an increase of $24 billion from the prior fiscal year. Most of these improper payments were a result of overpayments.
But fraud has been a growing concern, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic ended.
“We estimated that the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion—3% to 7% of average federal obligations governmentwide— annually to fraud, according to data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022,” GAO said in a report to House lawmakers in July.
Of the 20 programs GAO looked reviewed, auditors flagged DHS’s public assistance program for presidentially declared disasters as a program at risk of fraud.
The White House launched the Fraud Ledger last week, highlighting its progress in stopping and recovering fraud over the last 18 months. The task force says at DHS, it has uncovered $1.3 billion in fraud, stopped $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent payments from going out the door and recovered $121.5 million through indictments, civil monetary penalties or settlements over the last year.
This is Evans’ second stint in a role at DHS headquarters. She served as DHS CIO for eight months starting in June 2020.
Evans has been in government for more than 35 years. She started as a career employee and moved into the political positions in 2003 when she joined the administration of President George W. Bush as the administrator of the Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology (IT) at the Office of Management and Budget, now more commonly known as the federal CIO.
She also worked during the first Trump administration as first assistant secretary for Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) in the Energy Department.
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