Kristi Noem won’t say if she would withhold disaster aid if Trump asks: ‘Leadership has consequences’

Donald Trump’s nominee for Homeland Security would not explicitly commit to refusing his “hypothetical” command to withhold disaster aid when pressed during her Senate confirmation hearing on Friday.

If confirmed, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem will lead the third-largest cabinet-level department, which includes immigration authorities and emergency response agencies like FEMA.

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal repeatedly asked whether she would ever withhold aid approved by Congress from states led by his political opponents, pointing to his recent statements about California officials while a series of fires across Los Angeles County torched thousands of acres and killed at least 27 people.

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“The specter is there of potential discrimination based on politics withholding money from California or other states. It’s not an unfounded fear,” Blumenthal said. “I assume you will agree with me that withholding disaster relief, by President Trump or any other chief executive of the United States, is a violation of his duty and of law.”

“Well, senator, leadership has consequences,” Noem replied.

Blumenthal cut her off.

“I want to ask you: yes or no, with all due respect,” he said.

“What’s happening in California is the ramifications of many decisions over many years,” she continued. “But under my leadership at the Department of Homeland Security, there will be no political bias to how disaster relief is delivered.”

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Pressing again, Blumenthal asked: “If President Trump were to say to you, ‘we’re going to withhold money from Connecticut or Michigan or any of the states, Iowa, because we don’t like the governor or we don’t like the politics of the state,’ you would stand up to him and say, ‘Mr. President, we need to allocate that money’?”

Noem said Trump will take an oath to defend the Constitution, and that she will “be glad to have him back.”

She said “every American” deserves disaster relief “the same as their neighbors.”

In the wake of California’s fires, congressional Republicans have argued that disaster aid for the state should come with strings attached while criticizing Democratic lawmakers over unrelated policy disagreements, echoing Trump’s threats that rely on misinformation and misleading arguments about fire management.

In 2020, as wildfires ripped through Washington state, Trump refused to act on Governor Jay Inslee’s request for $37 million in federal disaster aid over a personal dispute, and then sat on the request for the final four months of his presidency. Trump had attacked Inslee as a “snake” and “failed” candidate for the presidency in the months leading up to September 2020 fires.

Last year, Trump threatened to withhold aid to California unless the state changed its policies on water management.

“We won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said about Governor Gavin Newsom in September. “And, if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires. He’s got problems. He’s a lousy governor.”