FEMA's ‘Shadow Administrator’ Was Paid by a DOGE Member's Startup for Months

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 USD 207 of the criminal code.”