Trump Shouldn’t Hire Kristi Noem For DHS. He Should Abolish It

News broke Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump picked South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, a key cabinet post for the incoming administration.

Conservatives are unhappy about the possibility — and rightly so. Noem is a terrible choice for any post in the Trump administration.

Trump won in part because he stood against the transgender agenda and pushed back against gender-confused boys competing in girls’ sports. Noem backed down from protecting girls in her state when the trans lobby came calling, then lied about it, then whined about conservative “cancel culture” when she was called out. She’s a coward and liar, and should be the last in line for a big cabinet post.

Noem was also one of the first governors in 2020 to accept Somali and other refugees without proper vetting, hardly a choice that recommends her to head up DHS. And, for what it’s worth, she awkwardly lied about having met North Korean dictator King Jong Un and about canceling a scheduled meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.

All that said, the debate over whether Noem or someone else should run DHS is missing the forest for the trees. No one should run DHS because the entire department should be abolished. Trump rightly pledged to abolish the Department of Education in part because it’s been a failure. Well, not only has the Department of Homeland Security been a failure, it’s been worse than a failure. DHS was created after 9/11 for the explicit purpose of making Americans safe from foreign terrorist attacks, but it has turned out to be an instrument of domestic tyranny, a giant panopticon of surveillance trained on American citizens that serves no purpose except to censor, spy, and propagandize the very people it was meant to protect. 

In hindsight, it should have been obvious that the wrong response to 9/11 was the creation of a vast surveillance and security apparatus, for the simple reason that it would eventually be turned on American citizens, as indeed it has been. All the technology, programs, and personnel dedicated to detecting and interdicting jihadist terror plots would instead go toward policing speech and surveilling law-abiding Americans.

Take for example the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA), which is housed within DHS and has been called the “nerve center” of government censorship — with good reason. It was originally created in 2007 during the second George W. Bush administration as the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), charged with reducing and eliminating threats to critical physical and cyber infrastructure. In 2018 under Trump, CISA was created as the successor agency to the NPPD, and its mission was expanded to assist other government agencies and private sector organizations in addressing cybersecurity threats.

It didn’t take long for CISA to start meddling in elections and suppressing free speech. In 2020, it was the foremost government agency attacking “disinformation” and “misinformation,” which turned out to mean anything the government happened to disagree with. The Twitter Files revealed just how extensive CISA and other federal agencies were involved in censorship efforts ahead of the 2020 election, deputizing Twitter and other social media platforms to police online speech in what amounted to a workaround of the First Amendment.

Here at the Federalist, we’ve reported extensively on how CISA has pressured Big Tech to censor Americans, worked with states to throttle election speech, and essentially served as the lynchpin of the censorship industrial complex over the past five years. It was at the heart of a federal censorship operation during the 2020 election cycle, together with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), that targeted our own Mollie Hemingway and Sean Davis, colluding with Stanford University to pressure Big Tech firms to censor prominent conservative voices it deemed were spreading “disinformation.”

For the abuses of CISA alone, DHS deserves to die. But abolishing DHS wouldn’t mean that we would no longer have Border Patrol or ICE or Customs and Border Protection anymore. We had immigration and border security agencies before DHS (as part of the Immigration and Naturalization Service), and we could have them after it’s gone. Arguably, immigration and border security deserve their own department, whose head reports directly to the president. Protecting against foreign terrorist attacks can go back to being the job of the Pentagon.

It doesn’t matter what the agency or office’s name is, so long as it doesn’t have the power to surveil and censor Americans, meddle in our elections, and co-opt Big Tech into trampling the First Amendment. DHS has proven incapable of that, and it needs to be abolished.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.