CNN broke the story that Homeland Security Secretary Kristie Noem’s insistence that she personally sign off on any expenditure greater than $100,000 is the reason that FEMA could not respond to the Texas tragedy until Monday – more than 48 hours after 20 children were reported missing in a flood at Camp Mystic.

 Noem was on Fox News today rather angry at whomever leaked the information about her careful watch on waste, fraud and abuse, to the expense of the lives of fellow Americans. The former North Dakota governor is heading the department that finds it significantly more necessary to deport restaurant workers and strawberry pickers than to make sure there are enough funds and personnel to save the lives of Americans caught in a natural disaster.

 There is no contrition, not a shred. Instead, she’s doubling down, claiming that it’s not FEMA’s job to take care of natural disasters, that the state should do it. It’s not the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s job to respond to an emergency that’s caused more than 100 deaths, with more than one hundred fifty people still missing.

Noem is effectively saying: I failed to do my job, so it shouldn’t be my job anymore. That’s apparently how the federal government now works. People in high places do jobs that are not constitutionally theirs to do, take jobs that are not constitutionally theirs to take, and then shirk jobs they are literally sworn to do to the best of their ability. This would be hilarious were it not so chillingly dangerous and sad.

It will take the surviving family members in Texas to hold these people accountable, to choose not to chalk it up to some act of God. Texans have to make MAGA world pay attention to the exact nature of “America first,” how it doesn’t add up in a growing succession of astonishing ways. Trump’s loyal followers are publicly more outraged over the broken promise to reveal all of Jeffrey Epstein’s secrets than the failure to show, for even a single moment, that they can govern better than the so-called incompetent party they replaced.

Wake up faster, Trump supporters. Jeffrey Epstein transparency is far from the only broken promise.