The Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog has been butting heads with Kristi Noem’s agency for weeks, accusing the secretary of “systematically” obstructing its work and making “egregious” refusals to cooperate with criminal investigations.
Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General has also been looking into the contracting process behind Noem’s controversial $220 million ad spots that prominently featured the secretary herself — a campaign that has drawn fierce bipartisan scrutiny and fueled President Donald Trump’s decision to remove her from his cabinet.
The office has been investigating the ad campaign — including how three businesses with close ties to Noem won lucrative no-bid contracts to produce it — for several months, according to RealClearPolitics.
Last year, DHS awarded $77 million to a Louisiana-based firm operated by a former colleague of Noem’s top adviser Corey Lewandowski, and another $143 million to a little-known company called Safe America Media, which then subcontracted with the Strategy Group, a firm that has worked with Noem over several years.
The Strategy Group’s CEO Ben Yoho is married to now-former DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.
A spokesperson for the Office of Inspector General told The Independent that the office “does not publicly confirm or deny the existence of any particular investigation.”
During her testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican Senator John Kennedy said it was hard for him to believe that those kinds of deals would have been approved by Trump or the White House Office of Management and Budget.
“It troubles me,” he said. “A fifth to a quarter of a billion dollars in taxpayer money, when we're scratching for every penny, and we’re fighting over recision packages … I just can’t agree with it.”
Noem said the ads were “effective.”
“They were effective in your name recognition,” Kennedy shot back.
In a statement following the congressional hearings, the Strategy Group said it received only a small fraction of the millions DHS spent on the contracts.
“Safe America paid us $226,137.17 total for [five] film shoots, 45 produced video advertisements and [six] produced radio advertisements,” according to the firm.
In a letter sent to members of Congress last month and seen by The Independent, DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari outlined nearly a dozen instances in which Homeland Security has “systematically obstructed” the office’s work over the last year, including restricting access to information related to immigration arrests and detentions.
“Does anybody have any idea how bad it has to be for the OIG in this agency to come out and do this publicly?” a fired-up Republican Sen. Thom Tillis asked Noem during the Senate hearing.
“That is stonewalling,” he said. “That’s a failure of leadership. And that is why I’ve called for your resignation.”
In a letter to Cuffari in January, Homeland Security’s general counsel James Percival claimed the inspector general had refused to answer “basic questions” about what he wanted from DHS materials.
Percival also asked Cuffari about the scope of those document requests and wanted a list of all ongoing investigations, according to members of Congress.
In a letter to Noem last month, Sen. Tammy Duckworth said “tacit threats” from the agency “may have already succeeded in weakening” the watchdog’s independence, as evidenced by what she called an “unusual lack of activity and engagement” after federal officers fatally shot two people in Minnesota in January.
On its website, the inspector general says it is performing “an audit of grants and contracts awarded by any means other than full and open competition during fiscal year 2025,” which could potentially include information about the no-bid contracts behind Noem’s ad campaign.
Trump, meanwhile, has reportedly grown suspicious about Lewandowski’s role in the contract process at Homeland Security altogether, after the subject repeatedly came up during last week’s congressional oversight hearings before the president’s announcement that Noem was being removed from office.
The president said he “wasn’t thrilled” by Noem’s testimony, in which she claimed that the president had signed off on her $220 million ad campaign.
“I didn’t know anything about that,” Trump told Reuters moments before he announced Noem’s removal.
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