Hot Mess at the DHS

Plus: boat subsidies, metaphor alerts, and more Epstein fallout...

Noem on thin ice? Few would claim that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem was hired for her position because of her administrative acumen.

Even so, a Wall Street Journal exposé on Noem's DHS reveals a shocking level of infighting, dysfunction, and obsessive self-promotion at the top of a department responsible for implementing President Donald Trump's mass deportation vision.

The Journal reports that Noem carefully tracks the television appearances of border czar Tom Homan, with whom she rarely speaks, to make sure she's getting more airtime. Career immigration enforcement staff have been let go or demoted for questioning or objecting to the secretary's decisions.

Noem and Corey Lewendowski, her advisor and rumored romantic partner, have also centralized control over contracting, leading to delays, higher prices, and potential conflicts of interest.

The secretary has raised eyebrows even within the Trump administration for spending on media campaigns that seem to do more to promote Noem's image than to fulfill the DHS' mission.

There are also several "lol" moments in the article. For instance, this bit about the DHS' public communications during January's winter storm:

Staff were also told not to use the word "ice" in any public messaging about the winter storm because they didn't want any connection to the increasingly unpopular immigration operation in Minnesota, [Federal Emergency Management Agency] staff said.

Then there's the petty bad boss behavior:

In the blanket incident, Noem had to switch planes after a maintenance issue was discovered, but her blanket wasn't moved to the second plane, according to the people familiar with the incident. The Coast Guard pilot was initially fired and told to take a commercial flight home when they reached their destination. They eventually reinstated the pilot because no one else was available to fly them home.

The DHS spokeswoman didn't address the episode but said the secretary has "made personnel decisions to deliver excellence."

One could maybe argue there's a libertarian silver lining in all this. As Reason has argued many times, the DHS should be abolished and its few necessary functions spun off into other departments. It would therefore be odd to root for more effective administration of a department largely tasked with doing bad and/or unnecessary things.

Still, one can see a through line between the DHS' dysfunction under Noem and some of the department's worst abuses. The secretary's focus on showy, promotional immigration enforcement and her feuding with career Immigration and Customs Enforcement leadership precipitated the department's disastrous operation in Minneapolis, which resulted in two American citizens being shot by federal agents. That operation is now being ended.

There's really no upside to a federal department becoming more dysfunctional and more deadly.

Boat tax break. In an effort to right the sinking ship of her South Carolina gubernatorial campaign, Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) has proposed one of the more ridiculous government subsidies to date.

On X, Mace touted her introduction of a federal bill last month that would allow taxpayers to deduct the interest they pay on loans used to purchase new, American-made recreational boats from their federal taxes.

South Carolina's boating industry generates $6.5 BILLION in annual economic impact and supports 27,100+ jobs statewide.

We introduced the No Tax on Boat Loan Interest Act of 2026. If you can deduct interest on your car loan, you should be able to deduct interest on your boat… pic.twitter.com/W4EQHUqpnN

— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) February 11, 2026

To be sure, tax cuts are all well and good, especially if they are paid for by spending cuts. Targeted tax deductions merely shift the burden of taxation from some small favored group onto taxpayers as a whole or onto future taxpayers via increased borrowing.

That's certainly the case with Mace's boat loan interest deduction. It should be opposed on those grounds alone. And unlike other targeted tax breaks, for health care spending or education, there's no arguable public interest in letting people deduct boat loan interest from their taxes.

By the Mace proposal's own definition, the deduction could only be used for recreational boats, which, nice as they might be to own, are hardly a necessity.

If it works like the mortgage interest deduction, one would expect the boat loan tax break to merely encourage wealthier people who were already going to purchase a boat to take out more debt to buy a bigger boat. If you're hunting sharks, maybe you do need a bigger boat, but the tax code doesn't need to subsidize it.

Additionally, the distributional consequences of Mace's proposed deduction make it patently offensive. The tax burden is being shifted from rich to poor, old to young, and crusty sea dogs to salt-of-the-earth landlubbers.

Mace's political career, as detailed in a recent New York Magazine profile, is at a low ebb right now. It's hardly surprising, then, that a politician suffering flagging popularity would try to revive their appeal with a schlocky, pandering tax break.

It is revealing about our politics that her pandering tax break would take the specific form of a subsidy for boomers' recreation at the expense of the rest of the country.

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Scenes from D.C. Metaphor alert! Washington, D.C., is now officially the site of the nation's largest-ever wastewater spill, after a section of 72-inch pipe along the district's border with Maryland failed, releasing hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into the Potomac River.

The failure in a section of a 72-inch sewer pipe in MD, has release of close to a billion gallons of raw sewage into the Potomac river just inside the Beltway

It's now considered the LARGEST spill of wastewater in U.S. history

MD & VA Dems haven't said a word. https://t.co/2WKcgDMUWi pic.twitter.com/xZME5lBira

— NOVA Campaigns (@NoVA_Campaigns) February 12, 2026

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QUICK LINKS

• President Donald Trump pardoned five NFL players, whose convictions ranged from drug trafficking to counterfeiting, on Thursday. Pardoning ex-players should be the real Super Bowl halftime show.
• Goldman Sachs' top lawyer has been fired following revelations that she had a close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
• A county in Northern Virginia, the world's headquarters for data centers, is revolting against new facilities opening up in town.
• Watch the latest episode of Freed Up, the podcast I cohost with Robby Soave. We discuss Epstein, AI, and, of course, Mad Men.

• That really is an expensive chicken.

They're shopping at Rigor Hill Market in Tribeca and buying $48 rotisserie chickens pic.twitter.com/gJ6eTHfzi6

— Ryan Radia (@RyanRadia) February 12, 2026