(DCNF)—Sen. Markwayne Mullin is stepping in to direct America’s national security at a tumultuous time for the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump on Thursday confirmed he is giving Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem the boot, capping off mounting controversy for the beleaguered secretary that reached a fever pitch when immigration agents killed two Americans in Minneapolis and ended after she was subject to two days of bipartisan grilling in Congress. Mullin, the president revealed, would be taking her place by the end of the month.
While never a central figure on major immigration legislation, the Oklahoma Republican has amassed a hawkish record on border security during his time on Capitol Hill. Republicans and pro-enforcement activists have mostly hailed the president’s decision.
A number of Democrat senators have praised the upcoming DHS chief, with Vermont Sen. Peter Welch calling him “competent and honest” and Pennsylvania Sen. Jon Fetterman already declaring he will vote in favor of his nomination. The burgeoning bipartisan support could prove monumental at a time when opposition against immigration enforcement is at record highs, particularly among Democrats.
“He’s been a reliable vote and not infrequent co-sponsor for bills that strengthen our enforcement system, both at the border and in the interior of the United States,” Jeremy Beck, co-president of NumbersUSA, a Washington, D.C.,-based group that advocates for stricter immigration policies, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
A spokesperson for Mullin did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
‘Change Is Long Overdue’
Beck praised Mullin’s support of H.R. 2 during the last legislative session, a bill he argues would’ve stemmed illegal immigration when former President Joe Biden was overseeing an unprecedented border crisis.
“Our hope is that he continues to understand that Congress has a role to play here and beyond that, to continue to be diligent, to protect the enforcement agencies and the men and women who are in there,” the NumbersUSA chief continued. “And at the same time, re-establish some of the credibility with the public that’s taken a hit in recent months.”
Administration insiders aren’t complaining about Noem’s exit, either.
“The Department needed a leader who executed the president’s agenda, not their own,” a senior administration official told the DCNF, speaking under the condition of anonymity in order to talk freely about internal matters. “This leadership change is long overdue and brings real relief to a hell of a lot of people at DHS.”
“She [Noem] had it coming — and she blew every opportunity to correct course,” the official continued. “It wasn’t a question of if. It was only a matter of when.”
First elected to Congress in 2012, Mullin represented Oklahoma’s 2nd Congressional District for a decade before winning a special election in 2022 to replace the late GOP Sen. Jim Inhofe.
While serving as a congressman during the first Trump administration, Mullin openly supported the president’s use of the military to bolster border security and his effort to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
The Republican quickly became an ardent critic of Biden’s immigration agenda.
“Joe Biden’s decision to end [Title 42]is reckless and unforgivable,” Mullin stated on X in April 2022, referring to a COVID-era policy introduced under Trump to cut down border activity. “Eliminating what little security measures we had in place without a plan will put American lives in jeopardy. Once Title 42 expires, Joe Biden will have even more blood on his hands.”
During the current legislative session, the Oklahoma senator voted to boost interior and border enforcement resources and voted to reduce amnesty entitlements, supporting the One Big Beautiful Bill and the Laken Riley Act. The Immigration Accountability Project, another group that advocates for tighter border enforcement, highlighted his recent cosponsorship of the SAVE America Act, ICE Protection Act and the SAVE Act.
Mullin’s enforcement record on Capitol Hill isn’t without some blemishes, with the NumbersUSA official scorecard faulting the lawmaker for not co-sponsoring legislation that would reduce chain migration, require employers to use E-Verify, or limit the importation of foreign workers. Other immigration hardliners are adopting a wait and see mentality and declined to comment.
The Oklahoma lawmaker defended the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in early January, arguing that the Minneapolis agitator gave the agent no other option after she drove into him.
“At the same time, we don’t know what she has in that vehicle,” Mullin told News Nation after the incident. “We don’t know if she has weapons. We don’t know what the situation is, but she clearly pulled in front of the ICE agents to block their path.” The ICE agent involved ultimately suffered internal bleeding from being hit by Good’s vehicle.
Other border hawk groups embraced Mullin’s nomination, with the Federation for American Immigration Reform issuing a congratulations and the newly-formed Mass Deportation Coalition encouraging him to take a look at their soon-to-be released plan to remove one million illegal immigrants from the country.
‘Restoring Law And Order’
The president’s decision to nominate Mullin follows an incredibly turbulent two months for Noem.
The outgoing secretary’s problems began in earnest during Operation Metro Surge, a joint ICE and Border Patrol operation in Minneapolis where scuffles with anti-law enforcement agitators led to the deaths of Good and Alex Pretti in January. The killing of two Americans at the hands of immigration agents led to incredible public backlash and gave Democrats an opening to demand reforms for ICE agents, leaving key DHS agencies without pay as funding negotiations continue to stall.
Noem spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, where she faced tough questioning from both Democrats and Republicans. The DHS chief was not only asked about the handling of the Minneapolis operation, but was also grilled on an alleged affair between her and top advisor Corey Lewandowski, who is expected to exit DHS along with her.
What appeared to be the nail in the coffin for Noem was her claim to Congress that Trump personally approved a DHS advertisement campaign that cost $220 million in taxpayer funds. Trump publicly stated he did not approve of the ad buy and was reportedly enraged at Noem’s claim.
Lousiana GOP Sen. John Kennedy — who was notably among the Republican lawmakers who grilled Noem — later told reporters that Trump was “mad as a murder hornet” after Noem’s testimony.
While announcing the end of her tenure atop DHS, Trump added that Noem would be shifted to Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, a coalition of Latin American countries working together on policy initiatives to help secure the Western Hemisphere, according to the administration.
A member of the Cherokee Nation and a former mixed martial arts fighter before entering politics, Mullin is expected to begin leading DHS on March 31.
“President Trump ran on restoring law and order, and he quickly delivered the most secure U.S. border in American history,” Mullin said in a statement Thursday. “I look forward to supporting [Trump’s] mission to safeguard the American people and defend the homeland.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.