After Noem Gets Shitcanned, Responses Across What's Left Of FEMA Range From "Relieved To Celebratory" [View all]

Donald Trump made his first cabinet-level firing last week when he expelled Kristi Noem. In her one year leading the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Noem sparked widespread criticism for overseeing inhumane immigration policies and avoiding questions about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers’ shooting of protesters in Minneapolis. She even earned the nickname Ice Barbie. “Good riddance,” Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey wrote on social media about her ousting.

But immigration advocates were not the only critics celebrating her departure. Current and former US disaster response workers, who fell under Noem’s homeland security brief, had also long warned her leadership was undermining the country’s ability to respond to the climate crisis. “Am I relieved she is gone? Yes,” one longtime official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), the main US disaster response agency, told me hours after Noem’s firing. “You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in FEMA who isn’t on that spectrum from relieved to celebratory.”

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Immediately after Noem’s expulsion, I spoke with several current and former Fema staffers who had long been critical of her leadership. “We as a nation are in a more dangerous place because of her tenure,” the longtime official told me. “She was such a singularly destructive force and we will be feeling the extent of her incompetence for years.” A second manager told me that once news of Noem’s dismissal spread through the agency office, “people gathered [and] shared high fives”.

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Noem also insisted on personally controlling spending at Fema. As deadly floods overwhelmed Texas last summer, first responders were reportedly unable to pre-position rescue crews or attend to emergency calls because Noem said she had to personally approve all agency spending over $100,000. That moment “probably was really the first time we all realised how bad it was going to be”, one official told me. Noem said the policy boosted “accountability”, but the Fema manager told me it did anything but that.“All staff watched in horror while Urban Search and Rescue resources were delayed and call centre contracts lapsed,” the manager said, “knowing these decisions affect whether people can reach help in a timely fashion and, in some cases, whether people live or die.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/12/a-singularly-destructive-force-us-disaster-response-workers-on-the-legacy-of-kristi-noem