The Department of Homeland Security has suspended former Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, cutting the Florida Democrat off from all federal contracts, grants, aid, and other government funds after a federal grand jury indicted her for allegedly stealing $5 million in FEMA COVID-19 relief money.
DHS General Counsel James Percival did not mince words. The suspension, he said, follows findings by both a federal grand jury and the U.S. House of Representatives that Cherfilus-McCormick exploited a national crisis for personal enrichment.
The action marks the latest consequence for a congresswoman who resigned from office in late April, just ahead of a House Ethics Committee vote that could have led to censure or expulsion, and who now faces a federal criminal case in Miami. Yet Cherfilus-McCormick insists she did nothing wrong and says she is still running to reclaim her seat in Florida’s 20th Congressional District this November.
DHS announced that Cherfilus-McCormick, her brother Edwin Cherfilus, and other associates and affiliated entities named in the federal indictment have all been suspended. The designation temporarily bars every one of them from receiving federal funds of any kind, contracts, grants, or disaster-relief aid, Fox News Digital reported.
Percival framed the suspension as a direct response to what he called fraud on a massive scale.
“Former Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick abused Americans’ trust in the most egregious way possible. She manipulated the COVID-19 crisis to funnel over $5 million of FEMA relief funds to her and her family members.”
He went further, calling the scheme “outright fraud” and saying he was “proud that my office is taking the first step to ensure she is held accountable and American taxpayers’ money is protected from further misuse.”
DHS tied the suspension to President Donald Trump’s executive order establishing the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which was directed to combat fraud, waste, and abuse in federal benefit programs and to “restore integrity to taxpayer-funded safety-net programs.”
A Miami grand jury indicted Cherfilus-McCormick in November 2025 on charges of stealing $5 million in COVID-19 FEMA funds and making illegal campaign contributions. Federal prosecutors allege she and her brother funneled approximately $5 million in FEMA relief money through multiple accounts to obscure the source, with at least $3.6 million eventually reaching her 2021 congressional campaign, the New York Post reported. The alleged scheme revolved around a COVID-19 vaccination staffing contract with FEMA.
The House Ethics Committee’s findings were no less damning. The panel determined that Cherfilus-McCormick committed 18 campaign finance violations, five counts of false financial disclosures, three counts of misusing official funds, and one count of lack of candor, at least 25 violations in total.
The committee was scheduled to recommend punishment. But Cherfilus-McCormick resigned before it could act. Republicans had vowed to force a vote to expel her from the chamber, and the ethics panel was on the verge of voting on censure or possible expulsion when she stepped down on April 21.
The House has dealt with other high-profile misconduct cases in recent months. The Ethics Committee launched a separate investigation into Rep. Eric Swalwell over sexual misconduct allegations, a reminder that accountability measures can move forward when the political will exists.
The former congresswoman has denied wrongdoing and attacked the process that led to the ethics findings. In her resignation statement, she cast herself as the victim.
“This was not a fair process.”
She accused the committee of having “refused my new attorney’s reasonable request for time to prepare my defense” and said she could not “stand by and allow my due process rights to be trampled on, and my good name to be tarnished.”
Her resignation letter framed the departure as a principled choice rather than an admission of guilt. She told colleagues she chose “to step away so that I can devote my time to fighting for my neighbors in Florida’s 20th district” and resigned from the 119th Congress “effective immediately.”
Fox News Digital reached out to her campaign for comment. The fact pack does not include any response.
One detail stands out in the timeline: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., never called on Cherfilus-McCormick to step down before she announced her resignation. The contrast with how swiftly Republican leadership has moved to hold its own members accountable, or how quickly Democrats demand resignations from political opponents, is hard to miss.
When misconduct allegations hit members on the other side of the aisle, Democratic leaders have shown far more urgency. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi scrambled to distance herself from Swalwell only after the political cost of association became undeniable. The pattern suggests that for some in Democratic leadership, accountability is a matter of political convenience, not principle.
Cherfilus-McCormick was sworn into her current term on January 27, 2025, at the Broward County Commission chambers in Fort Lauderdale. She lasted barely three months before the walls closed in.
The Cherfilus-McCormick suspension fits into a much larger effort. Vice President JD Vance, who leads the Trump administration’s fraud task force, said last week that the team has been “working around the clock to root out fraudsters who have taken advantage of Americans’ generosity for far too long.”
The numbers behind that effort are staggering. The U.S. Small Business Administration has referred more than 560,000 fraudulent COVID-era loans totaling $22 billion to the Treasury for collection. Separately, 447 California hospices were suspected of more than $600 million in fraud. Just The News reported that DHS and FEMA indefinitely suspended Cherfilus-McCormick and her associates from receiving federal funding while their criminal case proceeds.
The COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented flood of federal spending, trillions of dollars pushed out the door with minimal oversight, under the theory that speed mattered more than safeguards. The result was predictable. Fraudsters of every stripe lined up to help themselves, and the full scope of the theft is still being tallied years later.
What makes the Cherfilus-McCormick case different is the rank of the alleged perpetrator. This was not some anonymous scammer filing fake loan applications from a basement. This was a sitting member of Congress, someone entrusted with writing the very laws that govern how taxpayer money gets spent. If the charges hold up, she used that position to steer FEMA disaster-relief dollars into accounts controlled by her family and then into her own campaign coffers.
The consequences for public officials who abuse their positions have taken different forms in recent months. The California Supreme Court disbarred attorney John Eastman over his role in the 2020 election challenge, a case that, whatever one thinks of its merits, shows that professional and legal consequences can follow political actors. The Cherfilus-McCormick case involves something far more straightforward: the alleged theft of money meant for Americans in crisis.
Perhaps the most remarkable detail in this saga is what comes next. Cherfilus-McCormick, now barred from receiving any federal funds, under federal indictment, and found by the House Ethics Committee to have committed at least 25 violations, says she is still running to regain her congressional seat this November.
Nothing in federal law prevents an indicted person from running for or serving in Congress. The Constitution sets only three qualifications for House members: age, citizenship, and residency. But voters in Florida’s 20th District will have a clear picture of what they are being asked to endorse.
The DOJ investigation into Swalwell that led to his resignation showed that federal scrutiny can end a political career. Whether the same proves true for Cherfilus-McCormick depends on whether her constituents care more about party loyalty or about the $5 million in disaster-relief money that prosecutors say never reached the people it was meant to help.
When a member of Congress allegedly steals from a fund designed to help Americans survive a pandemic, the system owes those Americans more than a resignation letter and a campaign relaunch. It owes them a full accounting, and consequences that stick.
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