The Squatter on the Anacostia

Out on the Anacostia at midnight, the river runs black against the seawall and the porch lights of the Coast Guard houses throw long yellow tongues across the lawn. Somewhere behind one of those windows, the former Secretary of Homeland Security is, presumably, making toast. She was fired on March 5. It is now May. The toast is hers. The kitchen is the federal government’s. The toaster, statistically speaking, is also the federal government’s, though I would not put money on it.

Reader, I want to break the fourth wall for a moment, because the fourth wall has already been kicked down, dragged out into the yard, and set on fire by the actual events of this story. I have been staring at the Garcia letter for forty minutes and the longer I stare the more it resembles a dream sequence in a film I cannot afford to keep watching. A cabinet secretary was relieved of her duties. The administration that relieved her cannot explain why she has not moved out. The Department she used to run is being asked, in writing, by a sitting Congressman with a pen and a deadline, to please clarify whether the woman is paying rent.

Anyone. Anyone at all. Hello?

That paragraph contained no jokes. That was just the news.

The Wall Street Journal broke this last week and the rest of the press, in its usual posture — supine, glazed, mid-blink — let it land with the soft thud of a forgotten newspaper hitting a wet driveway. Then on Friday, Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the ranking member on House Oversight, sat down at his desk and wrote a letter to the new DHS Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, asking the questions everyone else seems too embarrassed to ask. The letter is a thing of formal restraint. The kind of restraint that begins to vibrate after the third reading.

Garcia wants “any lease agreement, contractual arrangement, or special dispensation permitting former Secretary Noem to continue to reside in Coast Guard housing on Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling or any other DHS property.” He wants “all evidence of rental payments or reimbursements paid to the federal government by Kristi Noem.” He wants the memos. He wants the policy. He wants it by May 15. The whole document reads like a man asking, very politely, to be shown the receipts of a haunted house he was never allowed inside.

The setting is what gets me. Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. A military installation with razor wire and a guardhouse and the kind of access protocols that turn a delivery driver into a federal case. Inside that perimeter, on the waterfront, sits a Coast Guard residence — not the Commandant’s house, the former Secretary insists, but a Coast Guard house, distinct from the Commandant’s, and this is a distinction she went out of her way to draw before the House Judiciary Committee in early March, on what would turn out to be the day before she was fired. Let me clarify a couple things, she told the committee. I’m not in the Commandant’s house. I’m in a Coast Guard House, but not the Commandant’s house. The Commandant is in his house.

You read that sentence twice. So did I. The narrator pauses, here, to note that we have entered a kind of architectural fan fiction in which the precise floor plan of who lives in which government-issued bungalow has been elevated to a national security matter. The Commandant is in his house. She is in a different house. The houses are next to each other. The houses belong to the same federal government that fires her one day later. The federal government cannot, two months on, find anyone willing to walk over with a clipboard and ask her to vacate.

She also told that committee, on the record, “I rent that facility. I rent where I stay, and pay personal dollars to do that.” Personal dollars. A phrase you only ever hear from people who have never had to write a personal check. The check, like the toaster, has not yet been produced.

The original justification was death threats. This is true. The Department issued a statement back in August explaining that after some outlet published the location of her D.C. apartment, she faced “vicious doxing on the dark web” and threats from terrorist organizations, cartels, and criminal gangs — the kind of language that does, I’ll grant, sound serious if you read it standing up. But she is not the Secretary anymore. The cartels, presumably, have updated their org charts. The threats, if they were ever the actual reason, are now threats against a private citizen who happens to live, free of charge, on a military base because nobody at the federal level has the institutional energy to send her a thirty-day notice.

And here is where the swine come in. Madam former Secretary, I regret to inform you that everyone can see the house. It has windows. We know the address now. We know the boat dock. We know the lawn. Sir, this is a federal facility. Allegedly. The very fact of this dispatch is the doxing. The fact of last week’s WSJ piece was the doxing. The cartels have been updated. The cartels have a research budget. The cartels read newspapers. If the housing was security cover, the security cover has now been shot to pieces by the same press cycle that briefly considered, and rejected, the idea of caring.

Garcia, in his statement, did the only thing left to do. He named the thing. “Kristi Noem got fired in March and she is still living rent-free in a government home that belongs to the Coast Guard. The Trump Administration can’t explain why, nor do they seem to care.” And then the line that should be carved into a stone over the gate at Anacostia-Bolling: Noem must pack her bags and go.

She will not. That is the dark prophecy. She will not pack her bags and go because the entire animating principle of this administration, top to bottom, scullery to throne room, is that the rules apply to the small and the new and the wrong and never to the inner ring. She was fired and given a new title — special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, a job description that sounds like it was generated by a man falling asleep in a leather chair — and the fired person and the special envoy live, as it happens, in the same waterfront house, and the lights in that house will keep burning, on a federal meter, until somebody with the authority to do so takes the key out of her hand. The narrator suspects that no such person exists in this particular government. The narrator has been wrong before. The narrator would like, very much, to be wrong again.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. Of course it didn’t. The Department of Homeland Security is, at this hour, exactly as accountable to the public as the toaster.