As governor of South Dakota, one of the least populated states in the U.S., Kristi Noem still made an outsize name for herself nationally using public service announcement campaigns designed to capture attention. The topics of her PSAs have changed dramatically since then.
Before assuming her current Cabinet post as secretary of Homeland Security, the former state lawmaker and member of the U.S. House of Representatives served as South Dakota’s governor from 2019 to 2025. In her first year as governor, the state ran a widely mocked anti-drug campaign called “Meth. We’re On It,” followed by “Freedom Works Here,” a workforce recruitment campaign in which she was featured prominently.
Once elevated to DHS secretary, Noem continued to utilize public funds for commercials promoting her particular brand of political communication, including a 2025 campaign in service of President Trump and his border and immigration policies.
The nearly $1.4 million “Meth. We’re On It.” campaign ran on TV, billboards, and online (via the now defunct website onmeth.com), and it caught plenty of grief for its ambiguous tagline. Noem defended it at the time, writing on social media, “Hey Twitter, the whole point of this ad campaign is to raise awareness. So I think that’s working.”
“Meth. We’re On It.” was made to combat a real problem in the state, as South Dakota ninth graders tried meth at twice the national average, according to the creative brief for the campaign. Ultimately, it saw some success. By 2020, 1,072 people had clicked the “find treatment” link on the campaign’s website, 184 people called or texted the campaign’s help line, and 44 were referred to treatment. “Meth. We’re On It.” would become a finalist in the public health category for the Shorty Awards, a social media and digital advertising industry awards ceremony.
In spots for “Freedom Works Here,” a South Dakota workforce recruitment campaign that aired nationally in 2023 and 2024, Noem dressed as a law enforcement officer, welder, and dentist as a play on the fact that there weren’t enough people to fill the state’s job openings, so she was doing them herself. As of July 2023, more than 3,500 people had applied to the program, Noem’s office said at the time. Yet the campaign was criticized as self-serving by some Republican state lawmakers.
At DHS, Noem was the face of the biggest political ad of 2025. The agency spent upwards of $50 million of taxpayer funds to air the spot, in which Noem both thanked Trump “for securing our border, deporting criminal illegal immigrants, and putting America first” and called directly for people in the U.S. illegally to leave. Though DHS denied it was a political ad, it sure looked and sounded like one, with B-roll pulled straight from the tropes of Republican attack ads about border security, like shots evoking crime, drugs, trafficking, and chaos at the border.
Through her political career, Noem has appeared in PSAs for vaccines and storm preparedness, though they didn’t receive the same multimillion-dollar budgets as her more controversial ads. She also starred in a video during last year’s government shutdown intended to be shown at airport security checkpoints that blamed Democrats for related closures and service slowdowns (although many airports did not air it).
There is growing bipartisan pressure for Noem to step down or be removed from her DHS post following the fatal shootings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration and border protection officers. Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina have called for her to resign, and House Democrats have threatened to begin impeachment proceedings against her if Trump doesn’t fire her.
Noem built a national profile in part by using her public office as a platform, but from her time in Sioux City to her days in Trump’s administration, that platform became less civic and more brazenly partisan.
The anti-drug campaign Noem once defended caused eyerolls and snickers, but at least it was also the catalyst for more than a few calls to a hotline set up to help people facing addiction. Contrast that to 2025’s “The Law,” in which she made herself the face of an immigration and border enforcement agenda that’s growing increasingly unpopular with the American public.
Noem’s recent PSA appearances indicate the value the Trump administration places on government as showbiz, and that for Noem, public office is theater.
