Three staffers who followed Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security to her new State Department post were swiftly placed on paid leave and effectively shown the door, a government insider told the New York Post. The former aides, Troup Hemenway, Josh King, and Octavian Miller, were among ten staffers who made the move with Noem after she was removed as DHS secretary and appointed special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, a newly created role focused on drug trafficking, organized crime, and illegal immigration in the Western Hemisphere.
The remaining seven lower-level staffers were allowed to keep their jobs. But Hemenway, King, and Miller were told, in the words of one source, "We're going to help you for a little bit, but you're obviously not welcome."
The reason, the insider said, had nothing to do with the three aides' own performance. Officials at Foggy Bottom reportedly did not want "people that would be tentacles for Lewandowski", a reference to Corey Lewandowski, the top DHS aide who served as an unpaid special government employee and who, by multiple accounts, wielded outsize influence inside the department.
Lewandowski's role at DHS drew persistent scrutiny. He reportedly introduced himself as Noem's chief of staff and exercised major power within the agency. The New York Post reported that the three ousted aides were removed specifically because of their perceived ties to him, though at least one source disputed that Hemenway was particularly close to Lewandowski.
The broader personnel turmoil at DHS has been well documented. The Washington Times reported that DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin resigned amid political battles over mass deportations and criticism of Noem's management, following ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan's earlier departure. Trump administration officials privately criticized Noem to the Wall Street Journal, citing "constant chaos" within DHS.
None of that chaos was created by Hemenway, King, or Miller, at least not according to any public accounting. They appear to have been caught in a dragnet aimed at someone else's influence.
Noem's removal from DHS came after months of mounting pressure, including from within the president's own party. Just The News reported that Republican Sens. Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski publicly called for Noem to resign following fatal immigration-enforcement shootings in Minneapolis. "I think she should go," Tillis said. Murkowski agreed: "Yes, she should go."
The administration's response to the Minneapolis unrest included sending border czar Tom Homan to meet directly with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, with Trump himself laying out demands for state and local cooperation in turning over criminal illegal immigrants. Newsmax reported that Walz agreed to an "ongoing dialogue" with Homan, though the broader enforcement push remained contentious.
Against that backdrop, Noem's move to the State Department was supposed to offer a fresh start. The Shield of the Americas program targets drug trafficking and illegal immigration across the Western Hemisphere, a mission that aligns with the administration's enforcement priorities. But the baggage followed her.
The controversial $220 million DHS ad campaign that drew intense criticism during Noem's tenure remained a sore point. Senior State Department officials told the Daily Mail that Noem's days in her new position "might be numbered," a remarkable assessment for someone who had barely settled into the role.
The professional upheaval has been compounded by tabloid-grade personal revelations. Noem has been dogged by rumors of an affair with Lewandowski. And two weeks before the New York Post's report on the aide purge, the Daily Mail published what it described as messages and selfies showing Noem's husband, Byron Noem, an insurance executive, "wearing gigantic balloon breasts" as part of what the outlet called a "bimbofication" fetish scene. Some images reportedly showed his face.
The fallout for Noem's family has been significant, adding a layer of personal crisis to what was already a difficult political season for the former South Dakota governor.
None of that, of course, is the fault of three mid-level staffers who chose to follow their boss to a new assignment. Yet they are the ones on paid leave.
The treatment of Noem's aides fits a familiar pattern in Washington: when a political figure falls from favor, the people closest to them become collateral damage. The stated concern, that the three staffers might serve as "tentacles" for Lewandowski, amounts to guilt by association. No one has publicly accused Hemenway, King, or Miller of misconduct, incompetence, or disloyalty to the administration's mission.
This kind of institutional maneuvering is not unique to the State Department. Across the federal government, internal conflicts and alleged sabotage have complicated the administration's ability to install and retain loyal personnel. The bureaucracy has its own immune system, and it does not always distinguish between genuine threats and convenient targets.
The State Department did not immediately respond to the New York Post's request for comment on the paid-leave decisions. That silence is itself telling. If the department had a defensible personnel rationale, one might expect it to say so.
Meanwhile, the broader question of institutional resistance to administration personnel choices continues to play out across multiple agencies and courtrooms.
Several basic questions remain unresolved. Were Hemenway, King, and Miller formally terminated, or are they still technically on the payroll? What office within the State Department made the leave decision, and under what authority? And if the concern was truly about Lewandowski's influence, why not simply bar him from involvement in State Department operations rather than punish staffers for having once worked in the same building?
The administration has every right to make personnel decisions. Political appointees serve at the pleasure of the president and his deputies. But when loyal staffers are pushed out not for anything they did, but for who they might have known, it sends a message to every other government employee thinking about following a principal to a new assignment: your loyalty may be the very thing that costs you.
Washington has a long memory for scandals and a short one for the people ground up by them. Hemenway, King, and Miller are learning that lesson the hard way, and the taxpayers are footing the bill for their paid leave in the meantime.
