Political tensions and questions swirling around the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) promise to be a key test for South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) as she takes over the department that houses the agency. Noem, President Trump’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is on track for Senate confirmation after the chamber's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee advanced her nomination in a 13-2 vote Monday.  While much of her immediate itinerary will likely focus on immigration, her confirmation process is also taking place amid the ongoing wildfire crisis in California and recovery from devastating hurricanes in the Southeast. If Noem is confirmed as head of DHS, she will be tasked with overseeing FEMA as it navigates a response to those disasters that Trump has thus far been sharply critical of, and as the president and his administration's push for a federal government shake-up raise questions about the broader future of the agency. Both FEMA and the wildfires that have burned about 40,000 acres in Southern California in recent weeks, killing more than two dozen people and causing an estimated $250 billion-$275 billion in damage, have been the subject of political tensions as Trump has entered his second term. The president has criticized the agency, saying in a Wednesday interview with Fox News's Sean Hannity that FEMA's future is "gonna be a whole big discussion very shortly, because I’d rather see the states take care of their own problems."  In the same interview, he doubled down on threats to withhold federal aid to help California to help fight and recover from the fires unless the state changes its approach to water management. GOP lawmakers including Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have called for conditions to be attached to any aid. Democratic lawmakers and California officials have raised concerns about the prospect of Trump politicizing aid to the state amid Noem's nomination and confirmation process. Noem said in her confirmation hearing last week that she would follow the law and not politicize any distribution of disaster aid as DHS secretary, but she sidestepped whether she would disregard an order from Trump to do so. Asked by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) about what she would do if faced with such an order, Noem said she would not entertain “hypotheticals,” to which Blumenthal responded with reports that Trump disregarded wildfire aid requests from then-Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) in his first term.  The Trump administration has also signaled a desire for broad shake-ups in apolitical career staff at federal agencies. However, the expertise of such staffers at agencies like FEMA can be particularly useful in easing the transition between administrations, as can looking to the agency’s history, said Tricia Wachtendorf, a professor at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center. As a potential model, Wachtendorf cited Project Impact, a 1990s-era FEMA program that worked to develop community-level disaster resilience. The program was terminated in 2004, by which point FEMA had been absorbed into the then-2-year-old DHS. “It was something that both Republican and Democratic states really found valuable that they embraced, and there were a lot of meaningful outcomes that came from that,” she said. “Thinking about the current programs that are in place related to disaster mitigation, response and recovery, thinking about the issues in Los Angeles right now, as well as the other kinds of events here in North Carolina, where recovery [from Hurricane Helene] is still ongoing, those kinds of topics have the potential to build bridges.” “Keeping that at the forefront of the new secretary's thinking — investing in rather than eliminating some of the good strategies that are in place — is going to be really essential,” she said. Wachtendorf also pointed to Noem’s experience as governor of South Dakota. Noem, who would be the third former governor to lead DHS, is likely “in a strong position to know that disaster response really requires a whole community approach, so outside of FEMA or DHS, that's taking into account those needs and capacities and perspectives of local and state entities,” she said. Noem hit on a similar note in her testimony, telling the committee “emergencies and disasters are always locally led” and that “one of the things FEMA’s not doing that I think we should be doing is streamlining communications.” Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, said that amid conversations about shake-ups in the federal government, a recurring debate over whether FEMA belongs in DHS is likely to crop up again under Noem as well.  That debate reached its height in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when then-Administrator Michael Brown’s handling of the storm was widely excoriated. But there have been concerns that removing one agency from the department’s aegis could set a precedent that leads to further exits and DHS’s eventual collapse, he noted. In the meantime, he added, Noem can hit the ground running on disaster management by respecting the agency’s history of relative autonomy within DHS. “It can be very tempting to declare an emergency and bring in FEMA” in various circumstances, he added, such as immigration, a major topic during Noem’s confirmation hearing.  “When FEMA gets pulled into nontraditional missions it can be detrimental” to broader disaster preparedness, he said.  Noem’s DHS is also likely to be caught up in a wider debate over whether FEMA is stretched too thin as natural disasters increase in both number and intensity, with climate change a primary factor. Trump has a history of minimizing or denying climate change, but Schlegelmilch said that to be effective, the next DHS secretary must “cut the bulls---” on climate change. “These are all things that need to be discussed and need to be debated,” he said. “At the same time we can’t stop what we’re doing to have that debate, we need the career professionals in place.” “There’s a lot in the details,” he added, and “we need to be careful our ideology doesn’t get ahead of us.”