What Does Kristi Noem’s Firing Mean for a Hobbled FEMA?

Her tenure coincided with unprecedented upheaval in disaster preparedness grants and staffing. Experts would like to see her successor, Markwayne Mullin, indicate where he stands on all that.

In the days since President Trump announced that he was firing Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary and replacing her with Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, much of the focus has understandably been on what this means for the brutal, chaotic, and lawless immigration policy that Noem has spearheaded. But there’s another area within DHS where Noem’s departure raises rather urgent questions about a possible change in policies. And that’s at FEMA.

Noem was in the middle of a project to shrink the Federal Emergency Management Agency significantly, having announced large staffing cuts in January. She’d also floated the idea of dismantling it entirely.

Her firing last Thursday came only a day after Senate Democrats released a report showing that Noem’s policy of requiring sign-off on any expenditure over $100,000 had resulted in “at least 1,034 FEMA contracts, grants, or disaster assistance awards” being held up—among them, disaster aid for survivors of Hurricane Helene and Texas’s deadly floods last summer (which killed at least 135 people, including 27 at a girls’ summer camp). And the day after Noem’s firing was announced, a judge gave FEMA 14 days to inform states about the status of their Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grants, a multibillion-dollar program that a court in December ordered reinstated—with no sign of compliance from FEMA.

Meanwhile, FEMA remains largely shuttered due to the DHS shutdown. And the administration recently spent “more than half of the balance in the nation’s disaster relief fund,” according to Politico, “pointing to that dwindling aid as [a] means to pressure Democrats into yielding in Department of Homeland Security funding negotiations.”

What exactly does Markwayne Mullin intend to do about all this? I asked two experts what they would be watching for in the coming weeks to determine whether Mullin would represent a serious shift from Noem’s policies, and whether FEMA would be able to handle disasters this year.

“Shutdowns come and go,” said Bryan Koon, president and chief executive officer at global emergency management consulting firm IEM and former director of the Florida Division of Emergency. “We tend to find ways to work around whatever issues are associated with that.” But he pointed to the FEMA Review Council report that the president ordered last year to determine policy changes at the agency. “It’s been now a year of uncertainty,” Koon said. “We’ve heard ideas about what might be in it, but frankly I would like to have some certainty, some insight into what the council’s going to recommend.” He noted that Trump already extended the timeline through the end of March. “I’m concerned that the transition between Noem and Mullin as secretary, combined with the shutdown, is going to delay that even further or even potentially render it moot,” he said.

Koon would consider the release of the report as one indicator of FEMA’s overall health at present. “A second would be an actual emergency or disaster that required FEMA to be all in. We were remarkably, as a nation, pretty lucky in 2025, and thus far in 2026—I mean, we had no landfalling hurricanes.”

Tim Manning, a former deputy administrator at FEMA, agreed. “I think they dodged a bullet,” he said, regarding last year’s hurricane season. “I and most of the emergency management community have great concerns for FEMA’s readiness. It is a collection of the most selfless, dedicated people in the government,” he said, “but there’s no getting around that they’ve been decimated over the past year and a half.” He pointed to layoffs, the firing of most senior leadership, the “onerous level of review” for grants, and more. “At every turn, the Noem administration has made decisions that dramatically degrade FEMA’s readiness and capabilities.”

If Markwayne Mullin is formally nominated and sits for confirmation—a big if, given that Trump’s first administration was marked by an unprecedented number of acting Cabinet secretaries working without Senate confirmation—Manning suggested that senators ask him about that directly. “I think the question I would ask Mullin during his confirmation hearing would be a question that I’ve tried to get people to ask Noem for the last year: The law explicitly says that the secretary does not have the authority to degrade FEMA’s mission or move resources,” he said. “I would be curious to get any nominee on the record: Will you follow the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act and restrict yourself from impacting the FEMA budget?” And as a secondary question: “Will you rescind any of the policies that have prevented the deployment and travel of FEMA’s employees to disaster sites?”

In the meantime, the current readiness of state and federal emergency agencies has people worried. “I went through at least one shutdown as a state director,” Manning said. And state directors need to know of FEMA, “Will they be on the other end of the phone when I need them?”

This is also hurricane preparation season. “Most states are going to do a state-wide hurricane exercise,” said Koon. “They’re going to do a large-scale event that allows them to test their plans and processes and coordinations and look at who their partners are and contracts are and who’s going to do what in what scenarios.” In Florida, where he has experience, it’s “a weeklong event sometime in May,” which requires some advance planning.

Perhaps it’s better, Koon said, for the impact of the shutdown to be felt now, in March, rather than in May or when a hurricane hits. But there’s never an ideal time. Wildfire season isn’t a season anymore. Earthquakes and other disasters can happen at any time, Manning noted. “There’s no seasonality to disasters,” he said. “Preparedness is a year-round thing.”

Stat of the Week0.35 degrees per decade

That’s the rate of warming we’ve been experiencing since 2015, according to a new paper. It’s almost twice the previous rate—0.2 degrees per decade. In other words, as several scientists have warned, climate change is accelerating—although exactly how much is the subject of some debate.

How Trump’s EPA rollbacks give states new tools in climate suits

The Guardian’s Dharna Noor reports on a fascinating implication of the administration’s decision to kill the so-called “endangerment finding”—it may actually help state-based climate laws in court:

Trump’s justice department has asked a judge to kill a first-of-its-kind 2024 Vermont “climate superfund” policy requiring major polluters to pay for damages caused by their past planet-heating pollution, partly on the grounds that federal law, not state law, governs greenhouse gas emissions. But last month, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) repealed the endangerment finding, the scientific determination giving federal officials the authority to control those very pollutants.“They’re trying to talk out of both sides of their mouths,” said Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice-president for law and policy at the environmental legal non-profit Conservation Law Foundation (CLF).

“They’re trying to talk out of both sides of their mouths,” said Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice-president for law and policy at the environmental legal non-profit Conservation Law Foundation (CLF).

Read Dharna Noor’s full report at The Guardian.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Ken Paxton Is the Face of a Sea Change in the Republican Party

Most Republicans oppose environmental regulation. But Texas’s attorney general has attacked the energy transition in a way that upends a generation of conservative consensus.

As some see it, the Texas Republican primary for U.S. Senate is a battle for the future of the party: Longtime incumbent John Cornyn represents the conservative establishment, while Attorney General Ken Paxton is a rising MAGA firebrand. After Tuesday’s election, that battle will continue, as neither candidate broke 50 percent, and therefore they will face each other in a runoff in May. While Cornyn is a staunch fossil fuel ally—no one would mistake him for an environmentalist—Paxton has gone a step further, pioneering an unorthodox attack on renewable energy that upends a long-standing conservative principle.

Paxton’s ascent is notable for a few reasons. Coverage of the race typically notes his impressive array of scandals and legal imbroglios, such as being indicted for securities fraud in 2015; being successfully sued by four of his own deputies in 2020 after he allegedly fired them for reporting him to the FBI for abusing his office to help a wealthy donor; dropping $2.3 million in campaign money on private lawyers to defend him in his impeachment trial; and being accused of infidelity by his wife, state Senator Angela Paxton, who filed for divorce shortly after the launch of his Senate campaign. Paxton has also made headlines for his hard-line positions as attorney general, such as declaring in 2022 that his office would consider gender-affirming health care for trans kids to be a form of “child abuse” and threatening multiple Texas hospitals with legal consequences if they were to provide a court-approved abortion to a Texas mother of two with elevated medical risks.

But it’s arguably in his environmental actions that Paxton most clearly exemplifies the growing battle over what the Republican Party stands for. And it’s not because of the industries his work has typically championed (coal) or demonized (renewable energy, particularly wind power). It’s because of the way he’s pursued his goals.

Paxton has been one of the foremost crusaders in recent years in the growing conservative war on ESG—short for “environmental, social, and governance” principles, which may be adopted by companies or used in investing decisions. In this camp’s view, ESG is part of a “woke agenda” to discriminate against fossil fuels.

In late 2024, Paxton and 10 other Republican state attorneys general sued three large asset managers—Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street—alleging a “conspiracy” to “artificially constrict the market for coal through anticompetitive trade practices.” As TNR’s Kate Aronoff noted at the time, this was a striking argument, given that coal use was declining for purely economic reasons and “the three financial firms Paxton is suing, moreover, have never given the impression of being all that committed to environmental goals.”

But the suit also indicated a move away from the Republican Party’s typical championing of free-market ideology. “Traditionally the conservative legal movement has been very in favor of investor choice,” said Yale law professor Joshua Macey. The “typical” conservative position on ESG investing might be to say that if corporate and personal investors “don’t like Vanguard’s approach to ESG they can go to a different fund. But Paxton decided to work with the power of the state to be incredibly prescriptive about what mutual funds and index funds can do.”

Last week, Vanguard settled the suit for $29.5 million. BlackRock and State Street continue to fight it.

Vanguard’s settlement was more likely driven by political strategy than a belief that it would lose the case, two experts I spoke to said. The suit in general “did not make strong legal arguments,” said Macey, although he noted that the case raised an “intellectually interesting problem” that academics have previously identified about when investor ownership of publicly traded corporations could potentially start to raise antitrust concerns. “To my knowledge, there has never been evidence brought that would satisfy the Sherman or Clayton acts that this is occurring,” Macey said, “but it’s the one legal argument that was both interesting and would not have been dismissed out of hand.”

This lawsuit is one of a few ways that Texas and Paxton have helped lead the conservative fight against ESG investing and the energy transition more broadly. Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel of As You Sow, a group focused on social and environmental change via shareholder advocacy, pointed to Senate Bill 13, the state’s 2021 law banning investment and contracts with financial institutions deemed to be “boycotting” various energy companies, i.e., fossil fuels. Paxton in 2023 announced that his office would be investigating 21 financial institutions to see whether they were boycotting fossil fuels—a remarkable declaration given that the banks listed included Bank of America, JP Morgan, and Wells Fargo, all of which consistently top the lists of fossil fuel financers. A federal judge ruled last month that S.B. 13 was unconstitutional.

To Fugere, the actions of Paxton and his allies here aren’t just anti-environmental but “anti-capitalist,” in that they go against investors’ financial incentives. “As an investor,” she said, “if you care about your client’s ability to make money on the market, you’re concerned about climate change. If you’re investing in automakers that are behind in electric vehicle technology, you have to ask the question, Is this company going to be in business for the long term if it’s missing out on new technology?”

Both Fugere and Macey noted that coal is hard to defend from a free-market standpoint. “In some ways,” Macey said, “Republicans could be celebrating the Texas electricity market, which has consistently driven down costs in what appears to be the most aggressive free-market approach, and also has the most installed renewable capacity of any market in the country.”

The conservative antipathy to renewable energy isn’t new, of course, but Macey noted that the explicit rejection of free-market ideology is. “Paxton signals a shift in not even the Republican Party or conservative legal movement’s views about environmental protection,” he said, “but how they understand regulation of the corporation and the corporate form—to a more highly prescriptive approach that limits shareholder discretion.” It’s “a 180-degree shift from what they have done for the previous thirty years.”

Paxton’s face-off with Cornyn, then, will be more than merely a conflict between a scandal-ridden hard-liner and a more traditional conservative. It’s also a contest about how far the Republican Party is willing to go, overturning decades of free-market conservatism in its crusade against renewable energy.

Stat of the Week$43.6 billion

That’s the amount of tax money estimated to be spent on tax credits for carbon sequestration. The number figures prominently in a letter recently signed by over 125 environmental groups, calling for Congress to stop extending these tax credits given to oil and gas companies that capture carbon only to use it in “enhanced oil recovery.” Read South Dakota Searchlight’s coverage of the topic here.

Noem’s spending limits have frozen millions in disaster aid, Democratic report charges

Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem’s policy of requiring her personal approval for expenditures over $100,000 is holding up huge quantities of disaster aid, according to a new report from Senate Democrats. The Trump administration disputes the claim, but The Washington Post notes that the report, compiled with the help of whistleblowers, “corroborate[s]” accounts the Post has independently received from “numerous current and former Federal Emergency Management Agency officials” about the funding delays:

The report identifies what it says are “at least 1,034 FEMA contracts, grants, or disaster assistance awards” that have been delayed or remain pending, including for victims of July’s deadly flooding in Texas and the catastrophic Hurricane Helene, which hit swaths of the Southeast in the fall of 2024.… It identifies a range of programs it says were affected, including leasing of rental units for Hurricane Helene survivors; urban search and rescue in North Carolina; technical assistance task orders for multiple disasters in Florida; unemployment assistance for Texas, Oklahoma and Kentucky; housing inspections for storm-battered homes; and crisis counseling.

Read Brianna Sacks’s and Brady Dennis’s full report at The Washington Post.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Trump Is on the Wrong Side of the Water Wars

The president’s efforts to pin a sewage spill on Democrats point to a broader vulnerability.

Why is water so different from air? It sounds like the start of a joke. But it’s a fair thing to wonder after the Trump administration last week officially revoked the so-called endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific conclusion that climate change threatens human health and that greenhouse gases were therefore an appropriate subject for federal regulation under the Clean Air Act.

This move paves the way for the elimination of all federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. These rollbacks may kill a lot of people long before the associated climate effects kick in, though, because the emissions that the government has been regulating also reduce general pollution. The Environmental Defense Fund projects that the rollbacks could trigger an extra 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055.

The Trump administration is not at all concerned about blowback, though, and in fact was making victory laps much of last week, with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum saying that all the extra carbon dioxide in the air would be good for plants.

Contrast that with how eagerly President Trump is trying to blame Democrats for a recent large sewage spill into the Potomac River.

“Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., who are responsible for the massive sewage spill in the Potomac River, must get to work, IMMEDIATELY,” the president posted Tuesday on Truth Social. “If they can’t do the job, they have to call me and ask, politely, to get it fixed. The Federal Government is not at all involved with what has taken place, but we can fix it,” he added. “This is a Radical Left caused Environmental Hazard.”

None of this is true, of course—as Maryland Governor Wes Moore pointed out, the federal government is actually responsible for overseeing the segment of sewer line that failed. And maybe that’s why Trump decided to weigh in.

But this is also an odd issue for Trump to highlight. Although the spill of over 200 million gallons of raw sewage is widely being referred to as the largest in the nation’s history, it hasn’t resulted in any boil-water advisories yet—and water quality is not exactly a signature Trump issue anyway. In his first administration, he scrapped the Clean Water Rule, significantly narrowing the scope of federal water protections. This time around, his administration is also attempting to roll back federal protections.

This isn’t the only story recently suggesting that clean water may have political significance that clean air doesn’t. Last week, Charlie Hope-D’Anieri wrote about the wild-card candidacy........

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