Kristi Noem’s Exit Interview

“What would you say you do here?”

Credit: “Office Space” (1999), 20th Century Studios

Anyone who has ever left a job is familiar with the exit interview. You sit down with your boss or HR rep, or both, and go over what went wrong and what went right. It’s one last chance to take stock of your tenure, reflect, and try to make improvements for the future.

It would be difficult for any of us to imagine leaving our jobs in quite the same way Kristi Noem is leaving hers. Today is her last official day serving as Secretary of Homeland Security, and her record has been an unmitigated disaster.

Ask yourself: If you got caught playing fast and loose with government money, led the agency responsible for the deaths of dozens of people across the country, and had a military pilot fired because you lost your blankie—would you consider your tenure a success?

Noem did all of these things, and more. Below, we’ve listed just five of the worst lowlights during her time in office. If the question that was infamously posed by “the Bobs” in the movie Office Space—“What would you say you do here?”—were posed to the outgoing secretary, an honest answer might sound like this:

“I betrayed Americans’ public trust in the office I held. I failed to keep people safe. I squandered hundreds of millions of tax dollars. And I failed to uphold my oath to ‘faithfully discharge the duties of the office.’”

1.) The Killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti

This administration flooded the city of Minneapolis with thousands of under-trained, unaccountable ICE and CBP agents acting under Noem’s purview. The world watched in horror as they killed two innocent American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and promptly smeared them for “domestic terrorism.” Noem herself refused to back down when called out for this language during a subsequent Congressional hearing. This is a shameful way for a person in a position of such immense public trust to behave, and the very antithesis of responsible leadership.

2.) The Abominable Treatment of Immigrants

One of this administration’s first actions was to expand ICE’s budget to $85 billion and hire 12,000 new agents, coaxing them on board with white nationalist-coded propaganda and huge signing bonuses. Noem then dispatched her agents to communities across the country, where they were seen snatching delivery drivers off mopeds, raiding children’s birthday parties, dragging elderly unclothed men through sub-arctic temperatures, breaking into people’s homes without warrants, brandishing guns at bystanders, and whisking people into unmarked vans—all while hiding behind masks.

Noem placed herself at the center of this particularly gruesome show, starring in ridealongs that the agency turned into slickly produced propaganda videos, which even some of this administration’s erstwhile allies have called “snuff films.” The most egregious example was when she turned up at CECOT, a prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants, in a dehumanizing display of political theater. Despite the rampant human rights violations widely known to be taking place there, Noem mugged it up for the cameras, sporting a $50,000 Rolex while prisoners appeared in cages behind her as human props.

3.) The $220 Million Ad Campaign

Noem oversaw a blockbuster ad campaign that featured, naturally, herself riding on horseback, wearing cowboy hats, very much embodying the “ICE Barbie” image that has become her trademark. Ostensibly the campaign was aimed at encouraging migrants to self-deport, but the ads were mostly in English, and seemed to the casual observer to be more of a vanity project than anything else. According to ProPublica, at least $143 million was awarded to a firm called Safe American Media, which in turn funneled some of the funds to the Strategy Group, a firm with close ties to Noem herself. All of this from an administration that claims to prioritize “government efficiency.”

4.) Corey Lewandowski and Blankie-Gate

Outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, The Atlantic, and Fox News have all reported on allegations that, during her time in office, Noem carried on an affair with special government employee Corey Lewandowski. When these issues were put to Noem at a recent Congressional hearing, she dismissed them as “tabloid garbage,” but it’s unclear which of the above outlets is supposed to be a “tabloid” publishing “garbage.”

For his own part, Lewandowski has previously fallen into disfavor inside of the MAGA-verse for allegedly groping a donor’s wife while drunk at an addiction awareness fundraiser at a Benihana in Las Vegas. In February, Lewandowski unceremoniously fired a Coast Guard pilot because Noem’s blanket had been left on another aircraft.

5.) A Laundry List of Other Corruption

It would take a much longer post than this one to document all of the norm-shattering behavior and apparent corruption that Noem has been implicated in during her time in office. To name a few:

She refused members of Congress legally required access to DHS detention facilities to fulfill their oversight duties, despite promising to let them in with proper notice. She slow-walked $100,000 in FEMA relief after Hurricane Helene, while overseeing massive cuts to that agency’s budget overall. She gutted the budget of CISA, which exists to protect the nation’s cybersecurity. She lived rent-free at the residence of the Commandant of the Coast Guard at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. She took millions of dollars worth of luxury jet flights while claiming that the planes would be used for deportations. The list goes on.

Fortunately for the nation, Noem’s tenure of office is now officially over. She was kicked aside to serve as envoy to the “Shield of the Americas,” whatever that means, and Trump seems to have rewarded her years of obsequious loyalty with low-level contempt. Unfortunately for the nation, though, her replacement—former Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.)—appears to be every bit as corrupt, incompetent, and intent on inflicting pain on the American people as his predecessor was.

Nobody can say exactly what this next chapter of DHS will hold. Probably nothing good. But we can say with confidence that, if there were an exit interview with Noem, it would be just like her tenure—a disaster.

Home of the Brave exists to show Americans the real-world consequences of this administration’s policies, and to highlight what bravery looks like in defense of American democracy.