Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) gave opening remarks on Wednesday during a House Judiciary Committee hearing with an expansive attack on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s spending, management decisions, and stewardship of the department’s national security responsibilities.
Raskin accused Noem of treating Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appropriations as a “personal slush fund,” pointing to the $220 million in media consulting contracts used to produce self-promotional advertising and staged photo opportunities, including a horseback appearance at Mount Rushmore during last year’s government shutdown. He also criticized her for residing in tax-free housing reserved for the Commandant of the United States Coast Guard.
Raskin then focused on the secretary’s gratuitous aviation expenditures. He said the department spent $172 million on two luxury jets and is now leasing a third aircraft—a $70 million Boeing 737 Max outfitted, he claimed, with high-end amenities. Raskin mocked Noem’s testimony from the previous day in the Senate, in which she said the aircraft would be refurbished for deportation operations to save taxpayer money. He questioned why DHS would purchase a luxury jet only to retrofit it for enforcement purposes, comparing the move to “buying a Rolls-Royce to turn into a metro bus.”
Raskin then recounted what he described as an “airborne episode of entitlement,” stating that a Coast Guard pilot was fired mid-flight after failing to transfer Noem’s personal blanket—her precious blankie—to a different government jet. According to Raskin, the pilot—a Coast Guard Academy graduate and commander stationed in Washington—was later rehired because no other qualified pilot was available to complete the flight. He identified Corey Lewandowski, serving in a top advisory role at the DHS, as the knight in shining armor who fired the pilot for offending the secretary.
Raskin Exposes The Incompetence Of Noem’s DHS
From there, Raskin pivoted to what he characterized as a broader hollowing out of DHS’s core mission. The department, he noted, oversees agencies including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Raskin stated that Noem had reassigned personnel away from counterterrorism, terror financing investigations, and cybersecurity efforts in order to prioritize large-scale immigration enforcement operations. Among those reassignments, he claimed, were agents working on a sensitive probe into Iran’s terror financing networks.
He further criticized the leadership of the department’s terrorism prevention office, revealing that a 22-year-old intern had been placed in charge despite minimal qualifications.
Raskin concluded this portion of his remarks by turning to disaster response. He accused DHS, through FEMA, of withholding critical search and rescue support for 72 hours during catastrophic flooding in central Texas last summer that killed 135 people, including children and counselors at a Christian summer camp. Those three days, he argued, were decisive and deadly.
Taken together, Raskin portrayed a department diverted from its core homeland security mission by spending controversies, leadership decisions, and an aggressive immigration agenda he said has come at the expense of national security and disaster preparedness.
