from the fuck-em-for-being-flooded-I-guess dept
That an agency overseen by former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem would fail to handle flooding capably shouldn’t come as a surprise. That sort of thing is directly on brand for Noem, who did this to her own state because she was trying to score points with (then) ex-president Donald Trump.
Severe weather brought a deluge to southeast South Dakota recently and exposed Gov. Kristi Noem’s faults.
While the rain fell, she abandoned the state for a political conference and television interview.
When catastrophic floodwaters surged toward McCook Lake, her cursory appearance there — along with her lackluster crisis communications and departure for an out-of-state political fundraiser — left people without adequate warning about the danger they faced.
And after declining to use the National Guard for the flood preparations or response, Noem said activating the Guard would be “extremely expensive” and asserted troops should only be used in a “very crisis situation.” This from a governor who has ordered troops to the Texas-Mexico border three times, and paid for it with money from the state’s Emergency and Disaster Fund.
Yep, that’s how things went in my home state last year. Noem blew money sending the state’s National Guard to an imaginary “border crisis” while ignoring constituents with very real problems.
Nothing has changed now that Noem’s been given permission to treat an entire nation as poorly as she’s treated South Dakotans who aren’t rich and/or MAGA enough to deserve her attention. This wasn’t something Noem did just because she hoped to get the VP nomination. She did this even when it didn’t matter, making performative visits to the Texas border while Joe Biden was still president.
Her desire to “protect” a border located a few thousand miles away from her home state is likely one of the reasons Trump put her in charge of the Department of Homeland Security. Now that she’s there, she’s just another useful idiot, prioritizing performative behavior over actual performance while ignoring the important details of the job… like renewing contracts to ensure citizens needing emergency assistance can actually get the help they not only need, but have been promised by the federal government.
A deadly flash flood in Texas somehow failed to gain Noem’s attention, despite the flooding being much closer to the southern border than her home state of South Dakota. The flood, which has killed at least 120 Texans, has barely been mentioned by Kristi Noem, despite the DHS being the agency that oversees FEMA.
Here’s how things went down in Texas now that Noem is busying herself with gulag photo ops and undermining ICE operational security. As the death toll mounted, phones went unanswered, as Maxine Joselow reports for the New York Times.
Two days after catastrophic floods roared through Central Texas, the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The lack of responsiveness happened because the agency had fired hundreds of contractors at call centers, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal matters.
The agency laid off the contractors on July 5 after their contracts expired and were not extended, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who has instituted a new requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000, did not renew the contracts until Thursday, five days after the contracts expired. FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
FEMA is also an agency President Trump seems to feel the nation would be better off without, probably because it’s sole purpose is helping less fortunate constituents. Presumably, Trump feels victims of natural disasters are losers on par with citizens who get killed, injured, or imprisoned while serving the US military.
As the flood began, FEMA handled nearly 100 percent of the calls it received. The next day, that percentage dropped to less than 40%. The day after that, as calls increased from 2,300 to over 16,000, less than 16 percent were answered by FEMA. Why? Well, the contract for call center staffers expired at the end of the first day of flooding (July 5). The DHS let it expire, resulting in the mass layoff of contractors, which then led to thousands of unanswered calls.
As was noted above, this failure belongs to Kristi Noem herself, who apparently decided to do her own DOGE (not to be confused with doing in her own dog) by insisting on micromanaging contracts. Mismanagement ensued, presumably because of Noem’s general “fuck victims of natural disasters” attitude that has followed her from her state job to the national stage.
It’s not that FEMA has never struggled to keep up with calls. And while Noem may try to seize on past failures to cover up her own, the numbers aren’t comparable.
The agency did publish similar data on Oct. 29, 2024, days after Hurricane Helene barreled across the South and nearly three weeks after Hurricane Milton hit Florida. That information showed that the agency did not answer nearly half of the 507,766 incoming calls over the course of a week, E & E News reported.
Even a fully-staffed FEMA call center would struggle to handle a half-million calls. But this is different. Noem’s FEMA call center — now emptied of contract workers — answered fewer than 30% of calls placed (6,477 of 21,809 calls)… and that’s despite being given a head start on the first day of flooding, where only nine of 3,027 calls went unanswered.
Of course, Noem has an answer for this, and it’s every bit as stupid as you think it is:
Noem called CNN’s report “fake news” and said the network was “absolute trash.”
If non-consecutive Trump administrations have taught us anything, it’s that any time a report is substantially true, it will be called “fake news.” It’s the classic Trump “tell,” to use a poker term. There’s never a rebuttal with substance or evidence to the contrary. There’s only the declaration that the negative reporting — whatever it is — is “fake news” and then administration officials move on as though that’s all that ever needs to be said.
It’s safe to assume Kristi screwed the pooch here (as opposed to literally shot her family’s dog AND THEN ANOTHER ANIMAL SHE OWNED to make a point about discipline) with her “fuck the less fortunate” penny pinching. And if anyone thinks Noem or anyone else in this administration is going to learn something from this experience, those people should be very specific about what lesson they think Trump 2.0 will learn.
Filed Under: dhs, failure, fema, kristi noem, trump administration
