The Homeland Security Department will have a new secretary after the Senate confirmed Markwayne Mullin in a 54-45 vote to the role Monday evening, paving the way for a new chapter in the tumultuous period for the agency that has spearheaded President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Mullin, who will soon resign his seat as a Republican senator from Oklahoma, will replace Kristi Noem at DHS, who drew bipartisan condemnation for her handling of Trump’s mass deportation effort and appeared to lose the president’s trust when she recently told Congress he was aware of a controversial ad campaign touting the department’s efforts. Mullin will inherit a department that is currently shut down after its funding lapsed last month, though more than 90% of its employees are still working. More than 100,000 of those are doing so without immediate pay.
Mullin said during his confirmation hearing he would seek to rebuild staffing areas that previously implemented cuts, though he lamented that the shutdown is exacerbating staffing losses. The new secretary, who began serving in the House in 2013 and in the Senate in 2023, highlighted to lawmakers during his confirmation hearing last week several additional areas in which he would differentiate himself from his predecessor.
He said the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be restructured but not eliminated, as Noem called for last year. He also vowed to end the controversial policy Noem instituted that required secretarial approval for any spending of more than $100,000. Detractors of the policy noted it bogged down critical funding efforts, including during disaster response.
“I’m not a micro manager,” Mullin said. “We put people in, we empower them to make decisions.”
Noem has faced criticism for allegedly interfering with ongoing investigations by the DHS inspector general. Mullin vowed not to stand in the way of the IG’s work and said he would not seek retribution against employees who have publicly criticized the department. He also apologized for calling Alex Pretti a “deranged individual” after DHS personnel fatally shot him in January.
Mullin won approval along largely partisan lines, though Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., voted against his former colleague while Sens. John Fetterman, D-Pa., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., voted for him.
While Mullin has vowed to institute some changes at DHS, he did not make any promises to alleviate Democrats’ concerns regarding the practices of its law enforcement personnel.
Congressional Democrats are holding out on funding DHS until the White House agrees to reforms at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. They have repeatedly sought to fund the Transportation Security Administration and other non-immigration components of DHS—including on Saturday in a rare weekend session—but Republicans have blocked all of those efforts.
Trump has since deployed ICE personnel into airports to help reduce the long lines that have resulted from TSA employees calling out during the shutdown, though their impact is expected to be minimal.
Lawmakers have met with Tom Homan, the White House border czar, in recent days in hopes of reaching an agreement on reforms that Democrats would accept in exchange for funding all of DHS, but they have yet to strike such a deal.
