Demolition Asbestos Poisons Workers at DHS Headquarters (SCOOP)
Trump’s embattled DHS secretary Kristi Noem ordered historic buildings demolished. Now her workers are inhaling asbestos on the daily — and are not happy about it.
WASHINGTON — Homeland Security employees working at the department’s St. Elizabeths West Campus in Washington, D.C., say they are being forced to breathe in asbestos dust from demolition work ordered by Secretary Kristi Noem with no masks, no respirators and virtually no warning signs to protect them.
DHS staff assigned to offices near the cluster of 19th- and early 20th‑century buildings that Noem has moved to demolish under an “emergency” order describe a worksite where asbestos-abatement crews in full protective gear operate only yards away from federal employees told to carry on as normal, despite potentially cancer‑causing fibers drifting through shared hallways and ventilation systems.
“They basically just said ‘Good luck,’” said one DHS official who complained internally after noticing workers wearing hazmat-style suits moving in and out of a nearby structure while agency staff walked past in office clothes with no protective equipment at all.
“There’s one small sign in a side entrance indicating the area is a health hazard,” said a DHS aide who recently left the agency. “If you come in the main way you’d never know you’re walking into a demolition zone with asbestos in the air.”
The alleged exposure is unfolding on the same historic campus where Noem has claimed that 17 long‑vacant buildings “present a risk to life and property” and must be torn down immediately to protect federal agents. But preservationists have condemned the justification as a unilateral power grab that bypasses federal safeguards for landmark sites.
The 176‑acre West Campus, a National Historic Landmark established in the 19th century as the “Government Hospital for the Insane,” is being redeveloped into more than 5 million square feet of office space and parking for roughly 14,000 Homeland Security employees.
Yet workers say the agency charged with keeping Americans safe — and invoking “safety” to justify fast‑tracking demolition — is failing to meet basic occupational health standards for its own staff.
Asbestos, a known carcinogen, can cause mesothelioma and other deadly diseases when microscopic fibers are inhaled. Federal rules require strict containment and specialized protective gear during abatement. Recent oversight findings have already warned that federal officials have mishandled asbestos hazards on the St. Elizabeths West Campus: the General Services Administration’s inspector general concluded in 2024 that GSA failed to properly identify and mitigate asbestos there, potentially exposing employees and contractors at the site. Now DHS workers describe a strikingly similar pattern under their own roof.
According to employees, demolition and abatement crews contracted to tear down some of the historic buildings are outfitted in respirators and protective suits, while DHS personnel working in adjacent occupied structures say they have not been offered masks, air‑quality testing results, or remote‑work options, even when construction intensifies. “It’s surreal,” said the former aide. “You’ve got guys in full PPE taking out asbestos, and then DHS staff in shirts and ties walking right by, breathing the same air.”
Those accounts echo broader fears raised by public health advocates that the Trump administration is cutting corners on hazardous materials as it bulldozes historic federal architecture — from the controversial $400 million demolition of the White House East Wing for Donald Trump’s new ballroom, now the subject of asbestos‑related lawsuits and public‑records demands, to the push to raze landmark buildings at St. Elizabeths under an “emergency” security rationale.
Preservation and community groups have already accused Noem and DHS of abusing that emergency authority to sidestep environmental and historic‑preservation review at St. Elizabeths, warning that the department has not publicly shown evidence to support its claim that vacant buildings pose a dire and immediate threat. They argue that if the campus truly faces grave safety risks, the answer should be transparent planning and robust protections — not secretive demolition schedules and opaque hazard management.
Instead, employees say, they are being kept largely in the dark.
Several DHS staffers described receiving vague, after‑the‑fact notices about “construction activity” on campus that made no mention of asbestos or specific health risks. Some learned that abatement was underway only after seeing sealed doorways and workers in protective suits enter buildings they had previously used as cut‑throughs or informal meeting spaces. Others said that when they raised concerns about air quality, supervisors downplayed the issue or urged them to take it up with building management, which provided few answers.
“There’s this attitude that because this is a high‑security campus, they can do what they want and we’ll just deal with it,” said the current official. “But we’re talking about cancer‑causing dust in a federal workplace. People are scared, and they should be.”
The allegations also spotlight the bitter irony of Noem’s demolition campaign: In memos to the General Services Administration and public statements defending her emergency order, DHS officials have repeatedly framed tearing down the buildings as a matter of protecting national security and ensuring that law enforcement and first responders can operate safely, warning that vacant structures could be exploited by “malicious insiders” to stage attacks or create security blind spots.
But on the ground in Southeast Washington, DHS workers say the real and immediate danger is not hypothetical insiders but the asbestos‑laden dust they fear they’re already breathing — in the very complex that is supposed to embody the nation’s homeland security.
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Yeah, of course there's no protection for workers. And Kristi Barbi is not embattled enough in my opinion. Like her fearless orange leader, she is robbing us blind. I can't wait until her photo shoots are all behind bars.
Nightmare! Noem cares for no one.