Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s policy of personally approving every DHS expenditure of more than $100,000 has delayed more than 1,000 Federal Emergency Management Agency contracts, grants or disaster assistance awards, according to a new report from Senate Democrats.
Noem issued a widely questioned directive in June 2025 that said that any grant or contract award that topped $100,000 would require her sign-off. The contracting process involves other steps, too. “Before the contracts reach Noem, they must be approved by a series of political appointees, who each sign or initial a checklist sometimes referred to internally as a routing sheet,” ProPublica reports.
The new report from Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee is based on an analysis of 1,062 spending requests from June to early September of last year using data from an internal DHS tracker created in response to Noem’s policy. It found that 1,034 contracts, grants or disaster assistance awards had been delayed or left pending as of September 8, 2025. The data was provided to the committee by whistleblowers.
The report says that Noem’s order “has created extraordinary bureaucratic gridlock, significant operational challenges, and has hampered critical missions, including disaster response. The real-world impacts of the new approval directive are extensive and have delayed support to survivors, including those of the fatal July 2025 flash floods in Texas and Hurricane Helene.”
The report adds that Noem had verbally authorized about 13% of all requests, with the average request taking three weeks to approve. It also charges that Noem’s directive violates a law enacted after Hurricane Katrina by “significantly and substantially” reducing FEMA’s “missions, authorities, responsibilities.”
The senators behind the report called on Noem to immediately rescind her directive.
“Secretary Noem’s policy of personally approving certain contracts is putting the safety of communities in need at risk,” said Sen. Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security committee. “When disaster strikes, communities need critical assistance from FEMA as quickly as possible. These delays created by Secretary Noem’s directive are not only failing to make government more efficient, they are causing serious harm. The policy must end immediately.”
The Democratic report is not the first to cite a backlog at DHS due to Noem’s policy. But Noem and DHS have defended the policy as successful in preventing waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer money. DHS claimed last September that Noem’s review process had saved taxpayers about $50 million a day since she took office.
A DHS spokesperson also disputed the findings of the Senate Democrats’ report. “Contrary to claims in the forthcoming report, there are no systemic delays. There is no evidence of a three-week average wait for aid decisions,” the spokesperson said in a statement to The Hill. “In fact, Secretary Noem’s review process was specifically designed to break through bureaucratic red tape and expedite funding requests that had previously languished for years under prior administrations.”