During her reign atop DHS, Noem made people around the United States less safe. The material impacts of her short-lived tenure will continue to be felt for years to come.
On March 24, 2026, Kristi Noem officially exited her role as Secretary of Homeland Security. Her disastrous tenure at the helm of DHS exemplifies the Trumpian approach to governing, which combines an insatiable appetite for grift with an endless zeal for inflicting cruelty. She should be remembered for leading an agency that killed Americans, left communities in the lurch after extreme weather disasters, and facilitated kickback schemes for her close allies.
ICE’s Terror Campaign
State-Sanctioned Murder: Noem operationalized President Trump’s mass deportation agenda, overseeing Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deadly terror campaign. ICE and Border Patrol agents killed U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis, and shot Marimar Martínez in Chicago. According to The American Prospect, the unchecked militarization of ICE and Customs and Border Protection has led to the deaths of 28 people since January 2025.
Deadly Detention Facilities: That count does not include those who died in notoriously dangerous detention facilities. The Prospect reports that 48 people have died in custody, including Geraldo Lunas Campos, whose death has since been ruled a homicide. All told, the Trump administration’s doubling of the number of detainees to over 70,000 in the past year has led to a record-breaking number of deaths in the country’s expansive, privatized immigration detention network.
Destroying FEMA
Noem stated repeatedly that she thinks the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be “eliminated.” Noem occasionally amended her calls to abolish FEMA with qualifiers like “as it exists today.” In practice, that’s precisely what she did. Noem effectively destroyed the agency she inherited by pushing out thousands of experienced workers and disrupting the flow of billions of dollars in disaster-related money.
The latter stems primarily from two moves bearing the imprint of Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought: 1) Noem in March 2025 made the allocation of federal resources—including funds used to train and pay state and local emergency management staff—contingent on cooperation with Trump’s mass deportation policies; and 2) Noem in June 2025 began requiring her personal approval of every grant or contract valued over $100,000, which affects virtually all FEMA spending.
A recent congressional report found that Noem’s review procedure delayed or left in limbo more than 1,000 funding awards, collectively worth billions of dollars, during the first three months it was active. More than six months later, Noem’s directive remains in force, and the full extent of its havoc is still coming into view. In the words of one former FEMA official, “It’s going to take a decade to rebuild FEMA from the catastrophic damage that [Noem has] dealt to that agency.”
Undermining Disaster Mitigation and Preparedness: Noem gutted efforts aimed at reducing the likelihood, scale, and unequal impacts of extreme weather disasters. Under her leadership, FEMA in April 2025 unilaterally canceled the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program and rescinded more than $3 billion for climate adaptation projects (e.g., elevating homes and hospitals and constructing new levees) that had been approved but not completed. (In response to a court order, FEMA in March 2026 restored the program, but it only made $1 billion available, far less than before.) Due to Noem’s de facto spending veto, the allocation of money from FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation program has ground to a halt since the summer of 2025. When the West Coast was inundated in December, Noem was sitting on tens of millions of dollars in flood prevention grants that might have helped the region, to highlight just one example of the recklessly harmful effects of such moves.
Hindering Disaster Response and Recovery: Noem also undercut the ability of all levels of government to respond to and recover from bouts of extreme weather. During last July’s deadly flooding in Central Texas, for instance, Noem waited three days to authorize FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue teams, postponed the delivery of aerial imagery to state officials, and allowed the contracts for hundreds of disaster assistance call center workers to lapse. In March 2026, search-and-rescue crews in the Midwest were forced to work without the aid of a key tornado-tracking tool that pinpoints the hardest-hit areas because Noem allowed a $200,000 contract to expire.
As California, Oregon, and Washington recovered from devastating winter floods, Noem in January 2026 refused to renew the contracts for dozens of employees from FEMA’s Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) teams. DHS in mid-December revoked FEMA’s authority to independently renew the positions, making Noem’s approval necessary. As a result, FEMA expected to lose roughly 1,000 CORE workers with expiring contracts in January alone, and thousands more in the following months, prompting a lawsuit against DHS. Noem temporarily suspended her mass layoff plan amid a brutal winter storm, but she resumed cuts in February. Around the same time, the backlog of federal disaster relief reached $17 billion due to Noem’s $100,000 grant approval rule.
Noem’s Partner in Grift
Lewandowski’s Court: Noem’s alleged romantic partner Corey Lewandowski has served as her de facto chief of staff for the past year, despite his official designation as a Special Government Employee. In this role, Lewandowski has wielded vast influence over the administration’s deportation drive, elevating ignoble figures such as Gregory Bovino, who led the militarized deportation raids across the country.
Lewandowski was also empowered to review government contract awards and manage department personnel. The New York Times reported that “there were also mounting concerns among homeland security officials that Mr. Lewandowski was trying to enrich himself through his role.” Lewandowski received no salary as a Special Government Employee, but it’s likely that no federal salary could compete with potential earnings from firms he awarded government contracts to. NBC News reported that “one marketing firm abandoned plans to pursue two lucrative DHS contracts after it received requests to indirectly pay Lewandowski.”
A few firms benefited from DHS’ lucrative contracts, namely Strategy Group, which played a key role in Noem’s 2022 gubernatorial campaign. The firm, which is closely tied to Lewandowski and other Noem aides such as Tricia Mclaughlin, benefited significantly from the department’s exorbitant $200 million spending spree on anti-immigrant ads. As ProPublica reported last November, DHS “invoked the ‘national emergency’ at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.”
Noem’s Legacy Is Ongoing
During her reign atop DHS, Noem made people around the United States less safe. The material impacts of her short-lived tenure will continue to be felt for years to come.
Below are a few ongoing or potential problems that can be attributed to Noem even though she’s no longer running DHS.
- When ICE agents run roughshod over communities and kill U.S. citizens and other residents, that’s Noem’s legacy.
- When immigrants, including children, are warehoused in squalid camps, that’s Noem’s legacy.
- If the U.S. gets hit by a cyberattack, it’s likely that Noem’s gutting of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will have played a role.
- When communities, ill-prepared due to Noem’s actions, are hit harder than they would have been by hurricanes, flooding, and other bouts of extreme weather, that’s Noem’s legacy.
- When communities are effectively abandoned in the wake of climate disasters, that’s Noem’s legacy.
For more of RDP’s work on Noem’s deadly legacy, read:
- DOGE: From Meme to Government Erosion Machine – RDP report, January 20, 2026
- The Trump Regime Is Making Disasters Worse – The American Prospect, January 9, 2026
- Trump Has Already Shattered FEMA Without Eliminating It – RDP blog post, December 11, 2025
- Trump’s Katrina Is Coming – The American Prospect, December 5, 2025
- Trump’s Homicidal Hurricane Policy – RDP report, August 29, 2025
- Map: Trump Has Often Delayed or Denied Disaster Aid – RDP tracker
- Timeline: Trump’s Attacks on Disaster Preparedness and Response – RDP tracker
The above photo, a work of the federal government, is in the public domain.