Bulwark Takes - Why Kristi Noem’s Incompetence Matters

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

JVL and Sarah discuss the tragic flash flooding in Texas and break down CNN's reporting about how Kristi Noem’s cost-cutting directive slowed FEMA’s ability to deploy rescue teams, paralyzed relief efforts, and what this disaster reveals about the Trump administration’s broader failures.

I'm gonna put you on, nephew. I don't. Welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order? Miss, I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.

Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my best friend, Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark. Sarah, last Friday, we had a flash flood in Texas, absolutely horrifying. The waters rose 23 feet in an hour in the early morning hours. As of right now, when we're sitting down to talk, 120 people dead, 173 still missing, unbelievable tragedy. Many of them are children attending camp. And I think for us with like,

camp age kids, like the thought of as a parent of sending your kids to camp and this happening, it's just like, it's too gut wrenching for words. It's bad. I want to try to not be super political, but to talk really about government functioning because the thing which has happened in the aftermath of this, and this is always like, look, the government can't stop floodwaters from rising. The government's job is then to come in and try to save as many people as possible when something like this happens, to render assistance, etc. And the response from FEMA has been quite inadequate. And the reason I want to talk about that with you is because FEMA seems to have done a very bad job

here and then has insisted that actually it did a great job, but also it shouldn't be doing any jobs and that the long-term goal is to get rid of FEMA totally. And this is the sort of insane backwards logic that has gotten us to like no longer having USAID, you know, and so that's why I want to talk about, again, unbelievable tragedy. This isn't really about scoring political points, but talking about what is the proper rule of government. So what happened is that early in her tenure, Kristi Noem issued a directive that anything costing more than $100,000 can't be executed by anybody further down the food chain within DHS than her. And anything at a $100,000 price point and over, she has to personally sign off on. $100,000 is nothing when it comes to something like

disaster relief. Because you're talking about renting equipment You're talking about moving in personnel you know $100,000 is like table stakes for anything you need to do and The way things happened By Monday night again, this all happened Friday morning Monday night only 86 FEMA staffers had been deployed to the area and CNN has a big story with a bunch of people from FEMA talking to them on background, enumerating the things which didn't get done in a timely manner, because they were waiting on sending the proposal up the bureaucratic chain,

getting it before Kristi Noem, getting her to sign off on it and then executing. And I don't know, man. I mean, this does not seem like any way to run a railroad. Well, so let me just let me add a couple of other details that I think has been in the reporting, which is so and I think in the if you were listening to DHS make their excuses, one of the things they would say is, no, we were contracting with lots of people on the ground. It's not just FEMA, like the federal. It's not just the feds that come in. There's all these people on the ground.

And there was already sort of a pre-approved bucket of money that was allowing for things to happen on the ground. There was a response. I don't think anybody's saying that like it was a disaster in terms of the responsiveness. What happened was there was pre-approved money and so things were actually, people were getting in there, the local people were doing their job. The problem was that once the initial kind of trunch that was already approved was depleted, then they were starting to be like, and now we've got to keep doing more, right? It's not just what happens in

the first 48 hours, like so many people are still missing, we're trying to get our arms around it. And that's when they started to have to get approvals for a lot more things that then ground to a halt. And this is where you can sort of see how this happens with these Trump folks, because it's not unlike Doge. It's a bunch of people who say, boy, I have no idea how government works, but I have been railing against government for so long that I'm sure I know how to fix it. You know how we're going to stop waste, fraud and abuse? I, Kristi Noem, in between sending people erroneously to languish

in foreign prisons and doing photo ops where I cosplay different law enforcement types, in between that I need to sign off on every hundred thousand dollars that's deployed. Well, of course that grinds things to a halt, right? But you can see how in their own minds what they tell themselves is like, well, this is, this is good. This is what fiscal stewardship looks like. And there's actually a reason why nobody does it this way. Like there were reasons why the government operated the way that it did. And I'm sure you guys who love being an opposition party and have no idea how to be a governing party, or, you know, love to throw rocks from the outside, but when it's on you,

when you're in charge and you're making these kinds of decisions, they have real life consequences. And so I watched Christine Ohm, she went on Fox News to be like, this is fake news. And she said something that really jumped out at me. She said, it's a real disservice to the country because people start to mistrust anything that comes out then over the news. And you're like, oh, oh, are we all supposed to trust government now? Are we supposed to trust the news now? I'm sorry. Who was it that told us all that everything was fake news? Who told us that the government couldn't do anything, shouldn't do anything? And so this idea of there's politicizing tragedies, and then there's the political side of the tragedies, which is how do we govern? How

do we get better? How do we make sure we're taking care of people properly? How are we deploying resources? And it's not political to say, or it's not politicizing the tragedy. Like, I think it was widely believed that George W. Bush and the Bush administration messed up when it came to Katrina. They did not get things going fast enough. It was a massive failure of federal help. There were also a lot of failures on the ground. A big part of the criticism was Bush rather than saying, this is going wrong.

He did like heck of a job Brownie. And, and I think that it is not politicizing a tragedy to evaluate and look for accountability in how the American government handles tragedy, which is what this is. Yeah, I want to put some meat on the bone here. I'm just going to read from the CNN story. As central Texas towns were submerged in rising waters, FEMA officials realized they couldn't pre-position urban search and rescue crews from a network of teams stationed regionally across the country. In the past, FEMA would have swiftly staged these teams, which are specifically trained for situations including catastrophic floods, closer to a disaster zone in anticipation

of urgent requests, multiple agency sources told CNN. But even as Texas rescue crews raced to save lives, FEMA officials realized that they needed Nome's approval before sending those additional assets. Nome didn't authorize FEMA's deployment of urban search and rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, multiple sources told CNN. Texas did request aerial imagery from FEMA to aid search and rescue operations, a source told CNN, but that was delayed as it awaited Nome's approval for the necessary contract. FEMA staff have also been answering phones at a disaster call center where,

according to one agency official, callers have faced longer wait times as the agency awaited Gnome's approval for a contract to bring in additional support staff. And so this is what it gets to. And all of this then, we've been in this bizarre place where Kristi Gnome is at once saying, everything went great. We did exactly what we should have. And then on Wednesday, she was saying that we as the federal government don't manage these disasters, the state does,

and she's calling on FEMA to be phased out. And so this is again, it's like they walk up with a hammer, and they break the thing. And then they say, see, it doesn't work. We have to get rid of it. Again, disasters like this are acts of God. What we're talking about is not causing it, but responding to it in a way that helps save lives. I don't know, Sarah, like, are people gonna look at this and say, hold on, the government didn't do its job. And it says the answer is that the government shouldn't have to do that job. Like that doesn't make any that is fully Elon Musk thinking that is we'll just turn everything off and see what breaks.

Um, this is a tough one. You know, I was thinking about it in relationship to Katrina and, uh, and how the thing that happened for Katrina was the images, the ability to sort of visually see the pain that people are in. Like I, I can remember the actual, like probably the AP photo, but what are the Getty image, but I remember the image of when they were all in the stadium, when all the people- In the Superdome. Yep, in the Superdome, yep. 100%.

Cause remember people jumped. And like it was this horrible failure of government for everybody to see. And you could see the people and the kids and the people packed in and they're not having enough bathrooms. And it was just, it was, you wanted to physically go down there yourself, right? I do think that, and this is just a stupid function of the medium or like the way we interpret things

now is this isn't having quite that same, it's you. The victims are missing, and it's not that we're seeing. The constant evidence of where the failure is, and so it requires the reports on the ground. And I think until we get something that absorbs the public right right? Where you're sitting there saying, what are we doing about people who are trapped? I mean, I remember people sitting on roofs and like the like that that that was just it conjured a different sense of and also it was like, why isn't someone helping them? Like, what are people doing? We did had COVID. And, you know, people cared sort of, but not not all that much. They didn't they didn't blame the Trump administration all that much. I just I don't know. I guess I am if if you want to make the case that

people have to be able to see something to understand that it's bad. Maybe that's the reality. I don't know. I don't know. It's not like I think more measles cases in America than ever since the failure in that case was just so you could. It was easy to see who was failing and how. Whereas like you said, most people saw this act of God. And now I think the question is, is will people on the ground, and this is maybe the first sense that we've had of this, the CNN report, will they start saying, the federal government is leaving us behind? Like, that is what it will take. It will take people who are there telling their stories and saying, where is everybody and having that be something that gets out there? Well, we need that to happen because right now, I mean, what's going on is a fundamental reorganization

of American government. And that fundamental reorganization is away from doing things like promoting vaccines, which is why we have more measles cases this year than in history since the disease was eradicated. It's why we have disasters like this followed by the Secretary of Homeland Security calling on FEMA to be phased out and disappeared and why we then have vast new powers and huge budgetary infusions into ICE and CPB. Right. I mean, the government is being reimagined as a thing which needs a vast

national secret police force to arrest and detain people, but shouldn't be responding to floods. And if, if voters can't look at that and understand what's having on what's going on in the abstract, like they need to see pictures of it, then like, I don't know, man, like, what are you doing? Hold on, I think, you know, you're just I think you're looking for a reason to like blame voters, which I can. And I am not yet. I think I think what the bigger thing the bigger story here is that there is a crisis of competency in the Trump administration.

There's an overall crisis of competency. We're seeing this with Pete Hegseth not telling the White House that they're stopping, they're pausing aid to Ukraine. We see it with the Justice Department. And part of it is, and this is where, like, I think you can make this matter, but what you have to really help people understand is this is not America first. You are spending more time and more money and more focus, specifically you, Kristi Noem, on deporting people who don't need to be deported, who

like not the gang members, right? You are erroneously falsely sending people where, where is Andre? Where is the gay makeup artist you guys sent? They are incompetent across the board. And it extends then, to their ability to respond to crises. And so it is like what's happening effectively. And so I think it's hard for, look, it's hard for us to know

how much failure is happening as a result of their incompetence right now. What I do know is I do not need to give them the benefit of the doubt. And if people on background from FEMA are telling reporters, we're not getting what we need, they're doing that as a cry for help. They're actually not doing it because they want to make Kristi Noem look bad.

They're not doing it to politicize things. They're doing it because they're trying to get movement to happen. And so I think that our job is to amplify that cry for help and to put pressure on Kristi Noem to do her real job, which is to keep Americans safe. All very well said, best friend. It'd be nice if we could have fun shows where we talk about like neo-Nazi AIs and stuff. This stuff is tough. We can do that too. We can do that too. We can walk and chew gum. Good luck America. I'm gonna put you on nephew.

I don't... Welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order? Miss, I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.