The White House is quietly scrambling to repair FEMA after Kristi Noem’s departure — with roughly 50 agency insiders telling CNN that the chaos she created in just 13 months will cripple the agency for years to come, with one senior official saying if you wrote this as a book nobody would believe it.

Trump fired her in March after the final straw — her admission during a Senate hearing that she spent $220 million on an ad campaign aimed at reducing illegal immigration. Now she faces a new Hatch Act complaint over using a government jet for a political trip — adding another chapter to a story that started with so much promise and ended in a way that nobody in South Dakota quite saw coming. She came in promising to protect America. The agency she left behind is now racing to be ready for hurricane season. Washington has a way of writing endings nobody planned for.