When historic flooding ravaged southeastern South Dakota last summer, leaving homes and businesses in ruins, Gov. Kristi Noem made a controversial decision: She chose not to deploy the state’s National Guard.
Citing the high cost and arguing that the Guard should only be called for “a true crisis,” Ms. Noem left thousands of residents to cope with the aftermath without the additional support, despite widespread devastation and mounting calls for help.
“We have to be wise with how we use our soldiers,” she said during a June news conference in Yankton, S.D.
Her reasoning shocked residents and lawmakers across the political spectrum, particularly in light of Ms. Noem’s earlier decisions to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to deploy the Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border to address the immigration crisis.
That move was one reason Ms. Noem was picked by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead the Department of Homeland Security, a sprawling department that includes Customs and Border Protection and various other immigration-related agencies.
“Kristi has been very strong on border security,” Mr. Trump said in a Nov. 12 statement. “She was the first governor to send National Guard soldiers to help Texas fight the Biden border crisis, and they were sent a total of eight times.”
The Department of Homeland Security also includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Although Ms. Noem would not be running FEMA’s day-to-day operations — the agency administrator does that — she will be expected to ensure that the agency has the resources it needs to assist those hurt by calamities such as wildfires and flood.
The agency is already dealing with assisting victims from the vast swatch of damage left by Hurricane Helene in the southeastern United States last fall and the wildfires that roared through Los Angeles this month. More climate-related disasters will undoubtedly arise during her tenure if she is confirmed.
But when faced with the option to use the Guard for disaster aid in her home state as she did for border aid 1,000 miles away, Ms. Noem did not ask the state legislature for the funds to do so, even though officials there say the request would have been granted as routine.
“Gov. Kristi Noem sent troops to Texas and billed us, South Dakota taxpayers,” Lee Schoenbeck, then a Republican state lawmaker, wrote on X in June. “BUT Noem said it’s too expensive to use our Guard to help our taxpayers fight the flood. Explain this hypocrisy???”
Ms. Noem also faced criticism for being on the national circuit campaigning for Mr. Trump instead of being in South Dakota to support the flood victims and for waiting more than one month to ask for federal disaster assistance, including from FEMA.
Ms. Noem’s handling of both border security and disaster management in South Dakota is likely to be closely scrutinized during her Senate confirmation hearing, though she is expected to be confirmed. She did not respond to an interview request from The New York Times.
On Dec. 18, Chris Antonopoulos sat in his white Toyota Tundra, parked at the edge of McCook Lake in North Sioux City, S.D., his eyes fixed on the backhoes leveling the remains of his parents’ home.
Built in 2015, the house had once stood as a proud symbol of his parents’ dreams when they immigrated from Greece. Now it was just debris, swept away by a catastrophic flood that hit during the evening of June 23.
He said the last time a flood occurred in the area, the National Guard helped with sandbagging. If the National Guard had been deployed for this event to assist with mitigation and sandbagging in the area, he said he was “100 percent confident” it would have prevented the damage to his parents’ home.
Mr. Antonopoulos called the response this time a complete failure of government that started with Ms. Noem.
“How’s the governor going to lead the Department of Homeland Security and she couldn’t even help a neighborhood?” he said.
Linda Duba, a Democratic former lawmaker who served on the state House Appropriations Committee, said in an interview with The Times that Ms. Noem could have used the state’s emergency disaster relief fund to help with the flooding in McCook County, including the cost of deploying the National Guard.
Historically, the fund has covered disasters like floods, tornadoes and blizzards, rather than border missions, until Ms. Noem began using it for that purpose after taking office. Ms. Duba said the fund doesn’t have a set budget. Instead, money is spent as needed, and the state legislature backfills the account the following year, as predicting disaster expenses is difficult.
“The citizens of South Dakota trust that their public officials will support them in their time of greatest need and disaster, and I think we somewhat failed in this effort,” Ms. Duba said.
Since 2021, South Dakota has spent about $3 million to send National Guard troops to the border, according to data obtained from the state’s legislative research council. The most recent deployment, which took place between April and June, cost the state about $1 million, according to the data.
In additional to criticism over Ms. Noem’s failure to deploy the Guard at home during the flooding, she came under fire for taking a sizable private out-of-state donation to fund the Guard’s deployment to the Texas border. In 2021, she accepted a $1 million donation from Willis Johnson, a Tennessee billionaire and Republican donor, to help recoup some of the cost of the border missions.
Ms. Noem, in a January 2024 speech to the South Dakota state legislature, said she believed that deploying National Guard soldiers to the border was essential to the safety of her state’s residents.
“South Dakota is directly affected by this invasion,” Ms. Noem said. “We are affected by cartel presence on our tribal reservations; by the spread of drugs and human trafficking throughout our communities; and by the drain on our resources at the local, state, and federal level.”
The summer floods hit just after the most recent border deployment of the Guard and many local residents hoped they would then be used to assist at home. But Jeff Dooley, North Sioux City’s administrator, said in an interview that the National Guard needs a clear mission to act, which he said was not possible given the rapidly changing conditions.
“In hindsight, it’s easy to say ‘I should’ve done this or that,’ but the situation was evolving too fast to make those decisions at the time,” Mr. Dooley said.
Ms. Noem was traveling during a critical point in the disaster.
She was at the “Road to Majority” conference in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the day before the flooding began on June 22, supporting Mr. Trump, as a video of her speaking at the event shows. The next day, when the flooding began, she appeared with the emergency manager in Union County, S.D., to discuss the situation. That same day, she appeared in the studio for an interview on “Meet the Press” in Washington.
Morgan Speichinger, whose home was severely damaged in the flood, said she was disappointed that the governor left the state as she and her neighbors were living through their nightmares.
“This is your community,” Ms. Speichinger said. “This is your state. You’re supposed to support your people.”
Ms. Noem’s Republican predecessor deployed the National Guard during past floods in the region. In 2011, when the Missouri River flooded Dakota Dunes near McCook Lake, Gov. Dennis Daugaard called in the Guard, and again during flooding in 2014.
The least expensive deployment happened in the fiscal year 2023 and cost South Dakota about $800,000, according to the data from the state legislative research council. The most expensive deployment was the about $1.5 million assignment to Texas in 2021, for which she took the $1 million private donation.
Ms. Noem’s handling of last year’s floods was different from that of governors in nearby states.
She waited more than a month after the flooding, July 26, to request a disaster declaration from President Biden, which critics said delayed crucial federal aid to the struggling communities. Mr. Biden approved the declaration on August 15.
In contrast, Iowa’s governor requested expedited federal assistance on June 23, receiving approval the next day, while Minnesota sought help on June 26 and was approved two days later. The governors of Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska deployed National Guard troops to assist with flooding, leaving South Dakota as the only affected state that did not.
“Ultimately, South Dakota got the FEMA aid it was going to get,” said Janet Napolitano, the former homeland security secretary who served in the Obama administration. “The question is why did it take so long.”
Ms. Napolitano said that officials in Ms. Noem’s office should have told her about the ability to get aid quickly and that the governor should have known of the process. She added: “It is really hard to explain a delay like that.”
The governor’s office referred comment to the state’s Department of Public Safety.
Brad Reiners, a spokesman for the public safety agency, said “our flooding situation was different than Iowa’s and Minnesota’s in impact, size and scope.” He did not elaborate on why that contributed to the delay in requesting aid.
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