Who the Hell Thought It Was a Good Idea to Let Kristi Noem’s Lapdog Control Billions in Government Funds?

4 min readThe Wall Street Journal is having itself a time rummaging through the guts of the administration's various corruptions. The latest is a whopper of a tale regarding former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and her Very Close Adviser Corey Lewandowski and their vast attempts to monetize government services. Lewandowski apparently did everything except sell the FBI for parts.When Corey Lewandowski was at the Department of Homeland Security, he approached senior Qatari officials with a proposal.Hire me on the side, the longtime Trump aide who was effectively the shadow secretary at the department last year, told them, according to people familiar with his pitch. He said he could help the tiny, wealthy Gulf state with any issues that fell under the department’s purview, such as visas, the people said. He approached representatives of the United Arab Emirates with a similar offer, people familiar with the outreach said.The alleged moneymaking efforts, which appeared to be offers by Lewandowski to sell government services for personal gain, came while he had an expansive portfolio at one of the most powerful agencies in the federal government. The role gave him de facto decision-making authority over large amounts of recently appropriated billions of dollars, the president’s border and immigration enforcement agenda and the collection of tariffs, which have been vastly expanded under President Trump. Lewandowski held the status of a “special government employee,” or SGE, which allowed him to carry out private business. He also was in a close personal relationship with the actual DHS secretary at the time, Kristi Noem.SGEs are advisers who usually have specific expertise and are brought in for short-term stints. Only a sliver of SGEs must publicly disclose clients or potential conflicts of interest, but government officials are generally prohibited from using their roles for private gain.If there's a better gig than Special Government Employee, I can't think of one offhand. You draw a government salary while peddling your private business—and, most important, your influence—all over the world. This strikes me as a policy that needs a serious rethink. As does the administration's general concept of government service as primarily a license to steal.Soon after taking office, Noem consolidated under the secretary’s control decision-making that had been delegated to sub-agencies. Essentially all department spending over $100,000 was put under the secretary’s purview, with the stated goal of reducing fraud and waste. Officials said it created a massive bottleneck. The move was widely seen within the administration as giving Lewandowski—as Noem’s right hand—the power to closely monitor and ultimately decide which companies could receive government contracts. According to the WSJ, Lewandowski even tried to monkey around with Palantir, the international information gobbler that already knows more about you than you think it does. If, just to speculate, you are carrying on with the boss, it's not wise to get tough with a company that wants to know everything in the world. Nonetheless, Lewandowski reportedly soldiered on.Executives at data-analysis company Palantir worked with DHS officials for weeks in fall 2025 to negotiate a sprawling $2.7 billion contract, known as a blanket purchase agreement. They came to a deal for a wide swath of work that included an immigration and Secret Service portfolio. DHS officials wanted to move quickly and have it signed before Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, Palantir officials were told, according to people familiar with the matter. But the contract then sat for weeks on Noem’s desk without a signature, and Palantir officials struggled to get answers from DHS on why the contract wasn’t signed.Then in November, Palantir received scheduling requests from Lewandowski, who wanted a meeting with Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Over the course of several weeks, DHS officials repeatedly asked for the meeting, saying it needed to be a one-on-one meeting between Karp and Lewandowski, the people said. Palantir officials, who thought the terms of the deal were settled, weren’t given an agenda for the meeting. The previous negotiations had followed the usual practice for government contracts, in which teams negotiate following standardized procedures, to provide some oversight over the disbursement of taxpayer dollars.Palantir executives set up a meeting but then canceled it. Karp and others at Palantir felt uncomfortable and concerned about the circumstances of the meeting and didn’t want to take it, given the large contract on the table, the people said. They had never previously had a contract held up for so long. The meeting never happened, and the $2.7 billion blanket purchase agreement wasn’t signed. Lewandowski told associates at the department that he was going to consolidate Palantir’s work across the agency so the company would receive less money. Eventually, in early 2026, Palantir scheduled a larger meeting with Lewandowski, Noem and a number of Palantir officials including Karp. At that meeting, Palantir was told the blanket purchase agreement would be revised to $1 billion instead of $2.7 billion. That deal was signed in February.There's also a hair-raising tale about Lewandowski's attempt to shake dow ... er ... negotiate with private prison behemoth Geo Group. This is not draining the swamp. It's inundating the country.