During the 14 months of Kristi Noem’s tenure at the Department of Homeland Security, I regularly heard from staffers—career law-enforcement officers and political appointees alike—who were desperate for a return to institutional normalcy. Their concerns weren’t ideological. They felt, instead, that Noem was running the department and its law-enforcement agencies as an attention-grabbing spectacle, undermining their mission.Consider Noem’s appearance at a Salvadoran megaprison. Or the creepy white-nationalist messaging of her public-affairs team. Or the daily social-media clips of Greg Bovino’s masked border agents. Never mind the dubious media contracts, the luxury jet, and the presence of Corey Lewandowski, a shadow secretary rumored to be in a romance with Noem that both deny. These employees seemed to long for the steady hand of a veteran bureaucrat. Now Donald Trump has finally ousted Noem, but in her place, he is sending them Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. Mullin is a former mixed-martial-arts fighter, a current fighter for Trump, and a guy who once tried to throw down against the president of the Teamsters union in the middle of a committee hearing, shouting, “Stand your butt up!” before Bernie Sanders had to rein him in. And whatever else he may be, he is not a veteran bureaucrat.Mullin is scheduled to appear before a Senate committee Wednesday for a confirmation hearing, and his approval appears all but certain. Republicans need a simple majority, and Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania has indicated that he’ll vote for Mullin. “John already texted me,” Mullin told reporters on the U.S. Capitol steps after Trump nominated him. “You guys know John and I are friends.” Trump has said March 31 will be Noem’s last day.She leaves DHS, and its more than 260,000 employees across 23 agencies and subagencies, in a state of crisis. The department has been caught in a funding shutdown since February 14, and nearly half the DHS workforce is going without a paycheck. The TSA, one of its agencies, is unable to compensate its agents, so they’ve been quitting and calling out sick, creating havoc at airports. Democrats are dug in on their demand for changes to the hard-line immigration-enforcement tactics that Noem—and the White House—have implemented. Republicans are blocking Democrats’ proposals to separately fund the DHS agencies that aren’t leading Trump’s mass-deportation campaign.In some ways, Mullin doesn’t appear to offer much of a departure from the Noem era. He has been a staunch… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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