Kristi Noem is Not Yet Gone, Not So Forgotten

She’s out of the Cabinet, but the political obituary of the former South Dakota governor will have to wait. And we’ll be dealing with the repercussions for a long time.

Kristi Noem rose — despite confessing in her own memoir to shooting her dog — to become Secretary of Homeland Security.

She fell, fired by President Trump last week, the first Cabinet secretary shown the door in his second term. It’s amazing it took this long given her questionable decisions, even more so that she’s been given a soft landing as a Special Envoy to something called the “Shield of America,” a role still within government, with a salary yet to be disclosed.

The last hearing seemed to call for a reckoning. So she was fired. But I don’t think it’s time for her political obituary. We’ve seen the comings and goings of some in politics who rise questionably and fall fast to fade.

But Noem hasn’t left yet. She’s still in the building, literally, until March 31. And the department she ran — the third largest in the federal government with around 260,000 employees — is currently closed, unable to get funded, while the people actually guarding our borders, patrolling our coasts, staffing our airports aren’t getting paid.

The political obituary can wait. The accountability shouldn’t.

The Numbers We Should Be Discussing

Here is what happened to DHS’s budget under Noem’s watch, and almost none of it has been properly examined.

In July 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill, handing DHS more than $170 billion — the largest supplemental appropriation in the department’s history — with, as the Congressional Research Service noted, “limited specificity as to how the funding was to be divided.” Republicans handed over the money and trusted leadership to sort it out.

ICE’s budget tripled, from roughly $10 billion to nearly $29 billion. Meanwhile, FEMA was cut. CISA, the agency protecting American infrastructure from cyberattack, lost a third of its workforce. Noem proposed slashing intelligence analysts from 1,000 to 275. And she reportedly required her personal sign-off on every funding obligation over $100,000, creating backlogs in disaster relief programs.

She centralized the money, hobbled oversight, and gave the border the cameras. Everything else got cut.

Well, not the ad budget. On February 13, 2025 — nineteen days after she was sworn in — DHS awarded two no-bid contracts: $143 million to Safe America Media, and $77 million to People Who Think. Safe America then subcontracted to the Strategy Group, run by Benjamin Yoho, Noem’s 2022 campaign manager, whose wife was Noem’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs — the office that issued the contracts.

When Noem said Trump approved the ad campaign, he reportedly called allies and said he hadn’t. And while she’s out, questions about that spending linger, as does the priorities set forth.

Loyalty and Its Discontents

I saw a tweet recently by Pamela Hensley — a MAGA influencer with 217,000 followers — who argued that Gavin Newsom can’t be trusted in office because he once betrayed his marriage vows. “A man who betrays his faith and his marriage lacks the character to lead.”

I’ve had some questions about that for some time, so I replied: “Agree. Now apply the same theory to the current President and his Cabinet. Who’s left?”

JD Vance, maybe. There are some strange things happening in Washington these days. The Labor Secretary is under active inspector general investigation over alleged misconduct — drinking on the job, an alleged affair with a member of her security detail, misuse of taxpayer funds for personal travel — while her husband was barred from the building after at least two female staffers accused him of sexual assault.

Clearly there were some real questions about Kristi Noem’s marriage loyalty too. Those came out in the last hearing. But it feels like the firing was intended to brush everything under the rug.

And more than loyalty to one person I often think about loyalty to the job. Are we safer with the changes Kristi Noem made? I’m not so sure. Time will test that theory.

The Premature Obituary Problem

One of the things in Washington I get most frustrated with is our short memories. When a firing happens, we’re expected to move on. Even when the individual who was under question gets a still more ridiculous title, Shield of America or whatever.

But there are still lingering questions. The ad contract is only one of them. The private prison companies — look into GEO Group, for example — that are getting the ICE contracts after political donations, seeing record profits under this administration. Money paid for by taxpayers.

I sometimes get into debates with Republicans about things like this. “Finally seeing clearly,” they’ll say, implying I let the Biden team slide. But I remember being so frustrated with Pete Buttigieg when I found out that while running the Department of Transportation he was flying on private planes. That was absurd.

I think we have to be clear-eyed on it all, especially if we want the money to go to the places intended.

That brings us back to an important department, currently unfunded, that won’t get new leadership until the end of the month, during a war that Trump changes the timeframe on every few minutes.

Markwayne Mullin will soon take over, and I don’t know what to expect. It is worth noting — as almost no one has — that he will be the first Native American to lead DHS, a genuinely historic milestone that has received approximately zero coverage. That said, more important is that he’ll inherit all of their open ledgers. I’m guessing, because I’ve seen this before, that if there are issues, he’ll try to quietly fix them and move on (if he’s capable or competent which we’ll find out). All the while Kristi Noem will be doing whatever she’s doing at Shield of America.

But I think that isn’t enough. We deserve to know what happened, and we deserve to know how we’re keeping the country safe.

Demand the audit. The obituary can wait.