Adios Kristi Noem

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To say that Kristi Noem will be remembered as the worst, most corrupt secretary of homeland security is hardly worth writing down — perhaps the best thing that can be said is that history’s sad conclusion about the tenure of the dog-killing, cos-playing, taxpayer-fleecing, wallet-losing, blanket-losing, house-stealing Noem will likely so focus on her comic-book-villain levels of personal corruption and high-life living escapades with alleged paramour Corey Lewandowski that it will forget the sheer vile evil of her crimes against humanity.

We’ve spent so much of the last six months focused on the lived American experience of the supercharged secret police regime of ICE and CBP that we’ve mostly overlooked how much money is flooding into all aspects of border security. Just before Noem stepped down, I wrote a new piece for the New Yorker about the giant procurement budget of Customs and Border Protection. Even as someone who follows all of this closely, I was astounded by what I found digging through the government contracting databases:

There’s no way that a government agency can responsibly scale from spending three-billion a year to spending twenty times that — and there’s plenty of reason to doubt that CBP is currently spending that money wisely or in any that will deliver real value for the taxpayer. As much as it feels like we’re already seeing the force of the giant immigration spending in the OBBA come into effect, we’re just a tiny fraction of the way.

It seems that Kristi Noem’s ultimate sin in the end was embarrassing Donald Trump over a $220 million ad spend that went to a company run by her close political advisors — a corporate entity that apparently was created just eight days before landing a nine-figure government contract. But there’s every reason to believe there’s plenty more sketchy spending underway. Billions of dollars, in particular, are heading out the door to companies with equally-thin paper trails.

Chief among those eye-raising contracts is the $1.2 billion contract that went to a Richmond company to run Camp East Montana, the largest ICE detention facility. As I wrote:

Now, Camp East Montana has been such a disaster — it has an active measles outbreak — that word leaked last week that ICE is already moving to close the facility years earlier than anticipated.

But even a lot more straightforward spending appears to be happening with almost no public knowledge. For instance, I tried to dig into the largest contracts for the Trump’s border wall, which total about $3 billion — again, a figure so enormous that it would represent roughly the entire annual construction budget for CBP prior to last year — which went to something called “BCCG A Joint Venture,” and as I far as I can tell no journalist in the country has even figured out what companies are involved in the project at all.

The mailing address for the contract award shares an office-suite address with a large-scale general contractor called Caddell Construction in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, just across the street from the church where Martin Luther King, Jr., once served as pastor.

Now Caddell has long been one of the government’s larger-construction-and-engineering contractors-of-choice, and its website touts work building the $800+ million-dollar U.S. Embassy in Kabul and the new headquarters for the National Nuclear Security Administration, in Washington D.C., among other projects. But its longstanding work involvement in constructing Trump’s border wall is nowhere to be found on its website, and Caddell’s president of governmental work, Stephen Strickland, did not respond to emails or phone calls about the company’s role in “BCCG Joint Venture.”

Other industry news releases appear to hint at the involvement at two other companies: a subsidiary of the Tennessee-based civil engineering company AIS Infrastructure known as BCSS, and a Texas-based contractor known as Gibraltar — and some combination of “Caddell” “BCSS” and “Gibralter” would apparently account for the initials of BCCG — but nowhere in CBP’s public contracting documents does it definitively list who the “joint venture” actually includes.

And again, this is one of the more straightforward giant new CBP contracts. There’s so much more spending to go. As I wrote in the New Yorker piece, “C.B.P., for instance, has so far ‘obligated’ just ten per cent of its supersized construction-and-procurement budget—leaving, as of late February, $47,592,145,788 still to go, a sum slightly larger than the G.D.P. of Estonia.”

All of this is about the problem slash opportunity of Oklahoma GOP senator Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s new choice to head DHS after kicking Noem out the door to the most-invented-job-of-all-invented-jobs, Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas.

Noem was so terrible that the entire country seems to be breathing a quiet sigh of relief that Mullin is taking over — but I want to offer a bit of a cautionary note.

Here’s something that almost no one has bothered to even mention: Markwayne Mullin isn’t in any way qualified to be the leader of the nation’s third-largest Cabinet department, with a scope that stretches from FEMA and the Coast Guard to the entire border and immigration apparatus.

In fact, he has no meaningful government service experience at all. Moreover, he has no meaningful national security experience, law enforcement experience, intelligence experience, nor homeland security experience. He has no meaningful work experience at all, in fact, in companies that don’t include his own name.

This is how an Oklahoma newspaper summarized his background during his congressional race: “Markwayne Mullin, 34, of Westville took over the family plumbing business, Mullin Plumbing, 15 years ago with six employees and has expanded it into one of the largest service companies in Oklahoma with more than 100 employees. He also owns Mullin Environmental, Mullin Services and Mullin Properties along with ranching operations in Adair and Wagoner counties. Mullin is known across a good portion of the district because of his business ads and his employees who travel the state in red vans. Mullin also hosts a Saturday morning radio program, House Talk, on conservative Talk Radio 1170 KFAQ in Tulsa.”

Now to point out that a second-term Trump appointee is unqualified is almost such a given that it’s barely worth pointing out — yet for two specific aspects it’s worth dwelling upon here: First, it should matter whether we have government leaders, especially in a time of war, who have any ability to do the job. Second, it’s worth noting that Markwayne Mullin is under-qualified and un-qualified EVEN in comparison to Kristi Noem, which again, turns out to be the lowest possible bar.

Across the quarter center of the department’s existence, secretaries of Homeland Security have been almost always been former governors (Tom Ridge, Janet Napolitano, even Noem) or had deep and significant government experience (Michael Chertoff, Ali Mayorkas, Jeh Johnson, Gen. John Kelly). They have mostly, but not always, been lawyers — Noem here is a rare exception.

Mullin is none of the above. Contrary to a weird video re-circulating online where he talks about how unforgettable war is and how anyone who has been to combat will never forget the smell, he never served in the military, nor in law enforcement.

Elected to Congress in 2012, he promised he would only serve three terms, before spending five terms in the House and then being elected to the Senate in 2022. In Congress, while he has long served on the Armed Services Committee in the House and Senate, he doesn’t even serve on the Homeland Security Committee!

In all of that sense, Markwayne Mullin is actually even less relatively qualified than the clownishly unqualified Pete Hegseth, who at least had served as an officer in the National Guard before taking over the entire Pentagon.

Now it is entirely possible that Mullin will turn out to be a better DHS secretary than Kristi Noem — I mean the bar is so low! — and maybe, just maybe, as a former construction executive, he’s the perfect person to manage this giant $53 billion construction spending spree. Maybe Mullin is an organizational genius and management guru, but there’s a huge chasm between managing a 100-person family company and managing a $115-billion Cabinet department. And let’s remember that the most memorable recent public appearance by the senator prior to being tapped for DHS was getting himself tripped by calling the war with Iran a “war” and then promptly denying it was a war.

It’s worth considering that the most immutable role of Donald Trump’s presidency, across both terms, has always been this: His first appointee to any position is always the best and most competent — and it only goes downhill from there.

GMG

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