NEED TO KNOW

• Noem told Congress Trump approved her $220 million self-promotion ad campaign; Trump told Reuters he "never knew anything about it"
• At least one administration official privately told The Daily Caller the White House was aware of the contract and senior officials were involved in getting funds approved
• Noem is being moved to a newly created diplomatic post — Special Envoy for Shield of the Americas — not simply fired; Sen. Markwayne Mullin will replace her at DHS effective March 31

WASHINGTON, D.C. (TDR) — The departure of Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security has produced something Washington rarely generates in such clean form: a direct, on-the-record contradiction between a Cabinet secretary and the president who appointed her, with anonymous officials on both sides of the dispute and no clear account of who actually approved a $220 million advertising campaign that may have cost Noem her job.

What Noem Said Under Oath — and What Trump Said to Reuters

The sequence began at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing March 3, where Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) pressed Noem on the self-deportation ad campaign her department contracted for $220 million — a campaign that featured Noem prominently and was awarded without competitive bidding after DHS invoked a national emergency. Noem told Kennedy that President Donald Trump had been aware of and approved the campaign in advance.

"The president tasked me with getting the message out to the country and to other countries where we were seeing the invasion come from." — Kristi Noem, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, March 3

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Trump's response came the same day, in a phone interview with Reuters.

"I never knew anything about it." — President Donald Trump, Reuters interview, March 5

Kennedy told reporters the disconnect was impossible to miss.

"I heard the secretary testify that she had explained in great detail to the president what she was planning to do and how she was going to spend this quarter-million dollars. And the president was fine with it, and that's what I heard her say in the committee." — Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA)

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One of them is wrong. Both cannot be right.

The Counternarrative: Noem's Allies Push Back

Into that gap stepped sources speaking to The Daily Caller's Reagan Reese, who reported that allies of Noem are circulating a counternarrative that cuts directly against the White House's framing of her departure as a self-inflicted collapse.

One administration official told Reese that Noem had raised concerns internally as far back as late 2025, telling Trump and his White House that she was not getting the support she needed to run DHS effectively. According to that official, Trump acknowledged the concern and stepped in to help — producing a temporary improvement — before relations deteriorated again following the fatal shootings of two US citizens by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in January.

That same official directly disputed Trump's claim of ignorance on the ad campaign.

"The White House was aware of Noem's ad contract, and senior White House officials were even involved in getting the funds approved." — Administration official, The Daily Caller

A second official quoted by Reese flatly rejected Noem's framing.

"It's laughable that Kristi is trying to blame her own self-inflicted issues on someone else. The issues that led to Kristi's replacement were a result of her own wrongdoings, not a lack of support from the White House." — Administration official, The Daily Caller

The split between these two unnamed officials — both presumably inside the same administration — illustrates the degree to which Noem's exit has triggered an internal blame war rather than a clean transition.

The Campaign Itself: Contracts, Connections and No Competitive Bid

The ad campaign's procurement trail adds a layer that neither side has fully addressed publicly. The contract was initially awarded to Safe America Media LLC — a firm formed just days before receiving the award. Safe America then subcontracted work to The Strategy Group, a political firm with direct ties to Noem: The Strategy Group's CEO is married to former DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, and Corey Lewandowski — Noem's top adviser at DHS, who is also expected to leave the department — has worked with the firm previously.

DHS invoked a national emergency to bypass the standard competitive bidding process. The Strategy Group later disclosed on X that it received $226,137.17 as a subcontractor — a figure that raises its own questions about where the remaining hundreds of millions went and which firms absorbed it.

Lawmakers on both sides pressed Noem on these contracting details across two days of hearings. She did not provide a full accounting.

What the Fox News Report Added — and What It Left Open

Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich reported that Noem's removal stemmed from what administration sources described as "a combination of her many unfortunate leadership failures, from Minnesota, to the ad campaign, to the allegations of an affair" with Lewandowski. Heinrich noted specifically that Noem "never denied sexual relations" with Lewandowski during her testimony. Both Noem and Lewandowski are married and have denied the relationship.

"Secretary Noem was questioned about the $200 million in advertising that she authorized that featured her prominently on horseback at Mount Rushmore. It was an ad campaign about border security. And she told Congress that the president approved of that campaign, even though apparently he did not." — Jacqui Heinrich, Fox News

The NBC News account aligned with this framing, citing sources who said Trump's frustration escalated specifically after Noem's congressional testimony dragged his name into the ad campaign controversy — not because of the campaign itself, but because she claimed his approval under oath while he was telling reporters the opposite.

The Minneapolis Thread and the Question of Who Gets Thrown Under the Bus

Noem's allies told The Daily Caller that the Minneapolis shootings — in which federal immigration agents shot and killed two US citizens, later identified as Renee Good and Alex Pretti — marked the inflection point where she felt abandoned. Trump dispatched border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis to manage the fallout, effectively sidelining Noem publicly during one of the administration's most politically damaging moments.

"Minneapolis was just a disaster. We were supposed to be stopping fraud from Somalian illegals. But we wind up shooting two people in the middle of the street." — Trump adviser, Axios

Noem declined to apologize at her hearings for having called Good and Pretti "domestic terrorists" — a characterization she made before investigations into their deaths were complete. Two Republican senators, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, called for her resignation in January.

The Replacement and What It Signals

Trump announced that Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) will take over as DHS secretary effective March 31. Noem is being moved — not simply fired — to a newly created position: Special Envoy for Shield of the Americas, a Western Hemisphere security initiative the White House described as a significant diplomatic role.

One administration official told CNN the transition signals "the very welcome end of a totally needless, damaging petty ego civil war within DHS" — though that same characterization raises the question of how that civil war started and who was driving it.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune acknowledged conversations about Noem's future had been ongoing "for a while" — suggesting the congressional hearings were less a cause than a final trigger for a decision already in motion.

Two accounts of who approved a $220 million campaign — one given under oath, one given to a wire service — cannot both be accurate. Which version of events the relevant congressional committees choose to pursue, and whether either account is ever fully verified, may be the lasting question from Kristi Noem's tenure at DHS.

Sources

This report was compiled using information from NBC News, CNN, The Hill, Axios, Newsweek, WABE/AP, WGN-TV, and Bloomberg, with additional reporting from The Daily Caller and Fox News.

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