Good help is hard to find
A boss cannot achieve greatness if members of her team are subpar. Kristi Noem is aware of this. It takes dedication and hard work to travel the country and cosplay as ICE Barbie. The task becomes almost unmanageable when some functionary throws sand in the cogs of your self-promotion machine. Take the case of the sloppy pilot.
Things happen. Noem was on one of her look-at-me tours when her jet suffered mechanical issues. Luckily, now that her Department has a robust bank balance, the budget allowed for a backup plane. No problem. The Secretary, her lover, and the rest of her staff switched jets. And everyone lived happily ever after.
Until Kristi discovered that her blanket was AWOL.
The finger of blame pointed at her pilot. (I’m sorry, but I have no details of the offender — except that he or she was a Coast Guard employee.) Noem’s resolution to her grievous inconvenience was swift and sure. She forestalled further insults to her comfort and dignity by firing the inattentive aviator. This swift and decisive action no doubt motivated the rest of her staff to step up their efforts to ensure that no peas remained under the Secretary’s mattresses.
The offender was dispatched to fly home commercially. No doubt in a middle seat near the bathrooms.
Noem didn’t think it through
Noem’s satisfaction at a firing well executed was short-lived. In her drive to cleanse the ranks of incompetence, she failed to consider that, while there was a backup plane, there was no backup pilot.
The DHS’s brain trust looked at this unimagined wrinkle from several angles. Having exhausted all other possibilities — it didn’t take long, there were none acceptable — some HR drone was charged with rehiring the miscreant.
The Wall Street Journal reported the event thus:
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.”
Reflections
The pilot got off lightly. In fact, Noem’s defenders will likely claim she showed unusual restraint in merely taking away the malefactor’s livelihood — temporarily. She has not been so magnanimous in the past.
Kristi is normally steel-spined in dishing out punishment. She infamously shot God’s creatures for youthful exuberance and lack of hygiene. She created a task force willing to murder American citizens for breathing the same air as ICE agents.
There’s more
The WSJ’s reporters uncovered more than Blanketgate on Noem’s watch. They identified four other areas of note:
1. Despite denials from the married-to-other-people protagonists, it is an open DC secret that Noem and her supposed inamorato, Corey Lewandowski, unwind by playing doctor. Their behavior has been so egregious that Trump, a man whose marital record passes no one’s morality test, is rumored to be disquieted by the couple’s off-the-books frolicking.
2. For Noem, the workplace is a WWE steel cage match. Her opponents include border czar Tom Homan, whose public appearances she monitors to ensure he doesn’t suck up her media oxygen. And U.S. CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott, who has criticized the Secretary's cost controls that delayed the department into spending $100 million more for steel than it needed to. She doesn’t much like Greg Bovino either
3. Lewandowski, who works far from the front, requested a firearm and an official DHS badge, a request that several officials ignored. The WSJ states that those officials were later passed over for promotions. Corey got his gun and badge. Now he and Kristi can play cops and robbers — or ICE and gangbangers.
4. Noem has enacted a new approval process for contracts of over $100,000. Resulting delays in disbursements are pissing off red-state governors who are twiddling their thumbs until Noem pays attention to her day job. In Georgia, top officials in Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s office had to call top DHS aides to get money approved for disaster aid.
Florida officials have also struggled for months to secure funding for their efforts to build “Alligator Alcatraz,” a tent camp in the Florida Everglades.
In a move that should have Noem checking her six, White House officials told the WSJ that politicians from both parties have expressed frustration that Kristi hasn't been answering their calls. Trump says Noem’s job is safe. Which is often an omen that someone is about to be fired.
