DOGE in Reverse

The Department of Homeland Security is Hiding Your Money from You

The most important thing that DHS has done in Trump 2 happened on Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s first day and nobody really covered it.

On April 1, 2026, Mullin rescinded the contract review threshold his predecessor Kristi Noem had imposed in June 2025. That threshold required her personal sign-off on any DHS contract exceeding $100,000. DHS told reporters Mullin had “re-evaluated the contract processes to make sure DHS is serving the American taxpayer efficiently.” Contracts above $25 million would still require the Secretary’s review. Everything below that is now signed at the component level.

The coverage framed this as a correction. Noem’s threshold was, by any honest assessment, a disaster for the agencies that needed it least. FEMA saw over a thousand contracts delayed, with approval backlogs averaging three weeks, while Texas flood victims and hurricane survivors waited for disaster relief that was already funded. At his Senate confirmation hearing, Mullin told lawmakers he wasn’t “a micro manager” and would “empower” his people “to make decisions.” In this light, the new threshold sounded like an adult taking over from a bureaucratic arsonist.

But that doesn’t hold up. A Washington Post analysis published five days earlier found that roughly 31 percent of all DHS contracts awarded since Trump’s inauguration exceeded $100,000. Only about 1 percent exceeded $25 million.

One policy change just removed the only civilian oversight checkpoint from nearly a third of DHS’s entire contracting operation. ICE. CBP. TSA. Secret Service. All of it. And the man who did it called it efficiency.

Efficiency is both a funny and dangerous noun and verb in this administration. When they decided to gut USAID, federal workers’ job protections, the NIH, you name it, they called it efficiency. The mechanism was always the same: remove something, call it waste, and let the structural consequences do the political work that would be too ugly to legislate, and wrap it up in the ideal of effieciency. DOGE was this pattern mechanized. Efficiency-as-destruction. You remove spending to kill public capacity..

What Mullin just did at DHS - removing oversight to speed spending up and out - is the opposite: efficiency-as-acceleration. It’d be easy to just say they’re being stupid or inconsistent. But procurement thresholds are political instruments, and this administration knows how to play them in both directions at once.

On January 16, 2026, Pete Hegseth signed a memo at the Department of Defense tightening oversight on 8(a) sole-source contracts above $20 million, specifically targeting what he called “DEI and other wasteful contracts” for termination review.

So The DOD is getting more oversight while the DHS is getting less. At the same time. Under the same president.

Interesting…

Where they want to destroy, they add friction. Where they want to build, they remove it.

DOGE in reverse? I think so. Here’s why.