Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, center, speaks with Mayor Teresa Heitmann of Naples, Florida, and City Manager Gary Young on the city’s damaged historic pier on Aug. 29. (Photo:DHS/Tia Dufour)
Sept. 29, 2025 by David Silverberg
Who would have thought that sleepy, obscure Southwest Florida, including Collier County and the City of Naples, would move to the forefront of national attention under the second administration of President Donald Trump?
First, there was the establishment of the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp in far eastern Collier County. Implemented by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Alligator Alcatraz has drawn national scrutiny, condemnation, lawsuits and opposition. As intended, it has been a model for a whole gulag archipelago of anti-migrant concentration camps rising throughout the nation. Its fate is uncertain.
But now there’s a new focus: the City of Naples pier, which was destroyed in 2022’s Hurricane Ian.
New developments in the restoration of the Naples pier also serve to highlight the story of the Fort Myers Beach pier—and how each one is being treated illuminates larger trends in America today and the way government now operates.
Kristi Noem and the Naples pier
The current state of the Naples pier, seen over the shoulder of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during her visit to Naples on Aug. 29. (Photo: Kristi Noem/Instagram)
For those unfamiliar with it, the City of Naples is an incorporated municipality of roughly 20,000 people. It sits on the Gulf of Mexico at the southwestern tip of Florida and is primarily a tourist and leisure destination. Always a winter haven for the wealthy, its attractiveness to the millionaire—and billionaire—class has grown in recent years.
Among its attractions, Naples has an iconic pier that extends into the Gulf. Originally used for the offloading of supplies when Naples was founded and developed starting in the 1880s, it subsequently became a tourist attraction, a place above the beach to stroll and fish.
The Naples pier in 2020. (Photo: Author)
The pier has been destroyed by hurricanes several times, most recently by Hurricane Ian in 2022.
After Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited Naples on Aug. 29, she immediately ordered $12 million in federal funds for its rebuilding, granted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that she heads.
It emerges that the grant was the result of city lobbying and the intervention of a major Naples-based Noem donor.
The entire story of the lobbying and Noem’s intervention is presented in an article titled “Kristi Noem Fast-Tracked Millions in Disaster Aid to Florida Tourist Attraction After Campaign Donor Intervened.”
The article was published last Friday, Sept. 26, by the non-profit investigative journalism newsroom, ProPublica, which, as it states, “investigates abuses of power.” ProPublica is known for its meticulous journalism. The article is based on emails and records obtained through public records requests, as well as interviews by its three authors: Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski.
The article details how Naples Mayor Theresa Heitmann, frustrated by delays in getting the pier addressed, contacted Naples cardiologist Dr. Sinan Gursoy, who had been a $25,000 donor to Noem when she was governor of South Dakota.
At Gursoy’s urging, “Noem flew to Naples on a government plane to tour the pier herself. She then stayed for the weekend and got dinner with the donor, local cardiologist Sinan Gursoy, at the French restaurant Bleu Provence,” according to the article. Noem stayed the weekend at the Naples Bay Resort & Marina.
She toured the wrecked pier with Heitmann and City Manager Gary Young.
Afterwards she posted on Instagram: “The iconic Naples Pier was destroyed in 2022, and the city is still waiting on answers from FEMA. They couldn’t even get permission to remove the old pier. I saw this failure first-hand today with Mayor Heitmann and Gary Young, and now the project is back on track.
“Americans deserve better than years of red tape and failed disaster responses. Under @POTUS Trump, this incompetency ends.”
It is important to note that the article does not allege any illegalities or criminal activity by any party.
However, it states: “Noem’s actions in Naples suggest the injection of political favoritism into an agency tasked with saving lives and rebuilding communities wiped out by disaster. It also heightens concerns about the discretion Noem has given herself by personally handling all six-figure expenses at the agency, consolidating her power over who wins and loses in the pursuit of federal relief dollars, experts said.”
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told ProPublica that the pier decision “has nothing to do with politics,” since Noem has visited the sites of other disasters. “Your criticizing the Secretary’s visit to the Pier is bizarre as she works to fix this issue for more than 1 million visitors that used to visit the pier,” she said.
A visualization of the restored Naples pier. (Rendering: City of Naples)
The Fort Myers Beach pier
The Fort Myers Beach pier before and after Hurricane Ian. (Photos: WINK News/Matt Devitt)
Noem’s treatment of Naples can be contrasted with the experience of Fort Myers Beach, just 20 miles northward, whose tourist pier was also wrecked in Hurricane Ian.
Fort Myers Beach, like Naples, is a tourist-oriented, incorporated town on the Gulf of Mexico, although appealing to much smaller and less wealthy population than Naples, both in permanent residents and visitors. Its population is about 5,300 people.
This is the town where Hurricane Ian made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane and it did horrendous damage, virtually scraping buildings from their foundations all along the sea front and well inland.
The damage included its tourist pier. (Most towns along this stretch of coastline have piers because in their early days they were supplied entirely by boat.)
Like Naples, Fort Myers Beach officials are also trying to rebuild their pier.
Also, like Naples, Fort Myers Beach officials applied for FEMA funding. They were granted funding but only for the pier’s original structure. However, the city wants to expand and lengthen the pier, adding 415 feet so that it extends 1,000 feet into the water. They also want to widen it by four feet so it spans 12 feet.
This is expected to cost the city $17.1 million and the new parts won’t be covered by FEMA. To make up the shortfall, on Sept. 16, the Lee County Commissioners voted to seek $7 million from the Gulf Consortium, which manages compensation for the British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. That money is provided under the RESTORE (Resources and Ecosystems Sustainability, Tourist Opportunities, and Revived Economies) Act of 2012, administered under Florida’s State Expenditure Plan.
“The project is proceeding as planned and designed,” Lee County spokesperson Betsy Clayton told the Fort Myers Beach Observer and Bulletin. “The plan all along was to use FEMA and Tourist Development Tax [funds].”
However, if BP funds are approved, “this would reduce the need for Tourist Development Taxes,” Clayton told the newspaper.
Meanwhile, Fort Myers Beach and Lee County officials can only sit and wait to hear.
The restored Fort Myers Beach pier as conceived. (Rendering: Fort Myers Beach)
Commentary: Winners and losers
While Fort Myers Beach officials can lobby for their hoped-for BP funds to move the application process along, it seems doubtful that they can arrange a lunch with Kristi Noem and get the full funding over a weekend, as the far richer City of Naples did.
The incident also highlights why allegations of favoritism and political interference are—or should be—a sensitive issue and why inequitable distribution of government funding can be so disruptive.
What is more, both piers are very small disasters for FEMA and Noem amidst a very large array of natural events. As of Saturday, Sept. 27, FEMA was handling 58 major disasters and seven emergency declarations all around the United States and territories.
Complaints about slow responses and bureaucracy have always plagued FEMA.
However, this is nothing new. After every disaster people demand that aid arrive instantly, which, other than help from immediate neighbors, it never does. Government at all levels takes time to work, even when a response is urgent. As for its bureaucratic and procedural slowness, FEMA is bound by laws and regulations and has always had to ensure that money is properly accounted for, monitored and distributed.
But there are new reasons for FEMA delays and bottlenecks, chiefly the result of Trump and Noem’s own actions. FEMA has been battered by layoffs and staff dismissals, cuts to funding and Trump’s repeated attacks on it to the point of calling for its disestablishment.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, FEMA was reformed and streamlined, with two Floridians taking a leading role: R. David Paulison, a former Miami fire chief, and Craig Fugate, who had been Florida’s chief emergency manager. Under their administration and that of other DHS secretaries, FEMA was reworked to provide more timely responses and be completely evenhanded and apolitical in its actions and funding. It also made a major effort to prevent future disasters through preparedness, mitigation and increased resilience.
In the first Trump administration there were fears that Trump was politicizing responses, withholding aid to Democratic states like California and reducing preventive measures that responded to climate change challenges. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for a future administration, proposed that much more of the fiscal burden for disaster recovery fall on the states. (See “Project 2025 remake of FEMA would hit communities hard after disasters.”)
On the campaign trail Trump repeatedly attacked the agency and its responses especially in the wake of Hurricane Helene and flooding in North Carolina. Among these he leveled baseless accusations of political favoritism by President Joe Biden.
Once in office Trump has maintained the drumbeat of criticism and repeatedly threatened to eliminate FEMA as an agency. The agency’s layoffs and dismissals have hampered its functioning and ability to respond to disasters.
Noem from the beginning has been an aggressive operative for the Trump agenda, implementing cuts to the FEMA workforce, verbally attacking the agency, as in her Instagram post, and echoing Trump’s lies.
As the ProPublica article pointed out, she has also insisted on personally approving all FEMA expenditures over $100,000, making her personally responsible for them—and since $100,000 is a very small expenditure in government operations, it means she has to be personally involved in every small and petty purchase.
This requirement vastly slows down the process of approving any sort of aid or expenditures—unless a community can short-circuit the entire system by going straight to the Secretary as Naples did. Other communities awaiting assistance and with far greater damage have been left hanging, also hoping for the kind of aid that was previously processed through established, rationally conceived procedures.
It needs to be emphasized, as previously, that there are no allegations of illegality or criminality here and certainly not on the part of Naples City officials. They were confronted with frustrating delays and a lack of response from FEMA. They chose to take action, as should be expected of city officials.
According to the ProPublica article, Mayor Heitmann tried a variety of different avenues to address the issue. The City already employed some expensive Washington consultants to guide the process but this was unproductive. She wrote directly to FEMA, attempted to enlist Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), a Naples resident, and finally decided to go directly to Noem through Gursoy, who had introduced Heitmann to Noem at a private party when Noem was governor.
When she contacted Gursoy, he agreed to “get on it.”
It has to be said: It was a good idea that produced results.
Interestingly, nowhere did Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.) appear to play a role in any of this even though his district encompasses both towns with their piers and he would logically be the first official to contact in pursuing the city’s interests in Washington.
However, Donalds has been notoriously lax in producing results for his district in Washington, DC and he is currently running for governor, so his attention to the district, already tepid, is now nearly non-existent.
If there is fault to be had it lies with Noem. In pre-Trump days, a secretary of Homeland Security when faced with this kind of request would have declined it. Perhaps he or she would have responded: “Thank you for this kind invitation. Due to the many requests and needs from deserving communities across the country, I have to respectfully decline. However, I will forward your request to the proper offices in FEMA.”
But that kind of rectitude and propriety is a thing of the past.
The bigger issues
Beyond problems created for FEMA aid and distribution caused by Trump, Noem and the Department of Government Efficiency when it was operating, Noem’s personal intervention in the Naples pier project illustrates much broader issues of governance, personalization and inequality among communities.
The United States has been unique in creating “a nation of laws, not men,” as President John Adams put it. Constitutionally, its institutions are intended to function according to law and objective facts, not the personal preferences of any one person.
That is not the case with Donald Trump who is openly and blatantly making governance about himself, whether that applies to prosecuting his perceived enemies, or levying tariffs, or silencing those who satirize him.
As Trump has driven toward a more authoritarian, dictatorial form of government that centers entirely on his personal decisions and predilections, his personalization of government operations is leaching down into lower levels of decisionmaking.
This is glaringly evident in the case of the Naples pier. Noem may say that she’s heroically cutting red tape and taking action—and she may actually think it—but it also sends a signal to all other distressed communities around the country that the way to get disaster aid is not to follow the law and procedure but to somehow reach her personally, with paid travel and a nice dinner (at the least). It announces that emergency management decisionmaking now officially depends on her whims and personal preferences. It also announces that the American people and their communities cannot depend on a government that previously responded to their distress as one of its primary duties.
There has always been an element of personality and lobbying in government operations, whether in the legislative or executive branches. It’s what created the vast lobbying industry that exists today at all levels of government. But lobbying and advocacy was always peripheral to the government’s essential decisionmaking. Now, with Trump’s personalization and weaponization of government, it’s central to it.
In 1655 King Louis XIV of France is reputed to have said, “L’État, c'est moi!”—“I am the state.” It has gone down in history as the ultimate expression of personal power. The American revolution was an explicit rebellion against that philosophy. The state was the Constitution, an expression of “We the people”—all Americans.
As Trump drives toward becoming the embodiment of the American state, situations like Noem’s favoring Naples, or for that matter Tom Homan, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taking cash for favors and then escaping any kind of law enforcement, are becoming more common.
The Naples pier is just one small example of the increasing personalization of government in America today. It’s also the embodiment of increasing stratification between affluent, well-connected communities and more obscure, modest and poorer communities in getting attention paid to their needs by a government originally formed to be of them, by them and for them.
So, while the focus in this instance may be on two closely-placed towns and their structures of planks and concrete jutting out into the waters of Florida, the gulf between them is actually broader, vaster, more profound—and, unfortunately, growing.
Liberty lives in light
© 2025 by David Silverberg