Super Bowl Crawling With Feds

National security state takes out the biggest super bowl ad ever. Where's DOGE?

Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem at the NFL stadium in New Orleans

The biggest Super Bowl commercial this year will be for the Department of Homeland Security. Trump’s new Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, will be in attendance, in addition to over 690 federal agents and personnel spanning a dozen different Homeland Security sub-agencies alone to provide “situational awareness,” among other things.

That number doesn’t even include federal agents from outside Homeland Security like the FBI, as well as the 350 National Guard troops and local law enforcement officers. The orgy of national security spending happens every Super Bowl and would seem like the ideal target for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. But DOGE, as it’s called, hasn’t said a word about what is doubtless a spending bonanza for the national security state. In fact, DOGE has had little to say about national security waste at all.

Apologists will say the massive footprint is necessary because of President Trump’s attendance — which, to be fair, is a first — but that’s bullshit. The truth is that ever since 9/11 in particular, Super Bowls are a recurring favorite for national security state overkill.

Below is a story I did on the fed presence at the Super Bowl last year, when no president was in attendance, to give you a sense of how reflexive this has become. Then as now, the sprawling intelligence apparatus our taxes pay for did not anticipate any specific threat to the event: clearly these are just national security state parades. In that sense, the winner of Super Bowl LIX isn’t the Eagles or the Chiefs.

The winner is the Department of Homeland Security.