Incompetence kills.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem (aka ICE Barbie) has been on a rainbow tour since she was confirmed, along with a social media team that costs taxpayers millions of dollars. Noem has taken trips to places far away from her home in South Dakota, like El Salvador, Alaska and California. The trips usually include photo ops of Noem in cosplay outfits, wearing an ICE vest, shooting a big firehose or carrying a gun (which she was photographed pointing toward an employee's head).
Noem is usually accompanied by her "chief of staff" Corey Lewandowski,
who is rumored to be Noem's lover (both Noem and Lewandowski are married to other people). After a press investigation about the claims that Lewandowski was the chief of staff, DHS clarified that Lewandowski is not "officially" Noem's chief of staff; instead, Lewandowski was said to be a "consultant" and "special government employee" which is why he accompanies Noem on her junkets.
While Noem has been out and about doing cosplay and press events, her department which includes FEMA, is failing.
NY Times reports that Texas flood victims have been trying to call the FEMA call centers but, because of staff layoffs at FEMA, there is no one to answer the calls. Noem terminated contractors at FEMA
on July 5th-
the day after the massive floods in Texas.
Two days after deadly Texas floods, the agency struggled to answer calls from survivors because of call center contracts that weren’t extended.
www.nytimes.com
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.
CNN reporting shows that it was 72 hours after the flood before Noem approved sending FEMA rescue personnel to Texas. By then, hundreds of people were long dead after being swept away by the floods. You can't "rescue" corpses.
Why did this happen? Because Noem instituted a policy that any expenditure over $100,000 in all of DHS, including FEMA, must be personally approved by Noem. This policy delayed FEMA's response to the floods.
...almost instantly, FEMA ran into bureaucratic obstacles, four officials inside the agency told CNN.
As CNN has previously reported, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — whose department oversees FEMA — recently enacted a sweeping rule aimed at cutting spending: Every contract and grant over $100,000 now requires her personal sign-off before any funds can be released.
For FEMA, where disaster response costs routinely soar into the billions as the agency contracts with on-the-ground crews, officials say that threshold is essentially “pennies,” requiring sign-off for relatively small expenditures.
In essence, they say the order has stripped the agency of much of its autonomy at the very moment its help is needed most.
Noem has not hired a FEMA director for Region 4 which covers Florida.
The FEMA Administrator in Washington, David Richardson, has no emergency management experience.
