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estate tax
Adios Kristi! Noem’s Long History of Lying to Protect the Powerful
Nearly a decade before she was the public face of DHS, Noem’s tall tales about the estate tax helped gut one of the few remaining checks on elite fortunes.
Mar 05, 2026
Kristi Noem will no longer be the face of the Department of Homeland Security, labeling peaceful citizens defending liberty as “domestic terrorists.” President Donald Trump is now appointing her to a new position of “special envoy in the Western Hemisphere.”
Wherever she goes next, we should remember her DHS debacle wasn’t her first deception rodeo. It turns out that Noem has a long history of twisting the truth to serve the powerful.
In 2017, nearly a decade ago, we caught then-Rep. Kristi Noem (R-SD) telling a whopper fib about her family’s experience with the estate tax—or what Noem called the “death tax.”
The estate tax, our nation’s only levy on the inherited wealth of multimillionaires and billionaires, has been in place since 1916. In its first half century, it helped put a brake on the build-up of concentrated wealth and power, discouraging dynastic fortunes that threatened democracy.
It’s strangely fitting that Noem, who now slanders law-abiding immigrants and the citizens defending them as “domestic terrorists,” played a big role in gutting those taxes on the rich.
But for the last 30 years, the estate tax has been under right-wing assault, including a steady drumbeat for its repeal. And one tactic they’ve used is to claim the tax applies to small farmers and other working Americans, rather than the tiny percentage of extremely wealthy estates it actually targets—exclusively multimillionaires and billionaires, the top 0.01%
Noem’s personal political narrative, repeated at town hall meetings during her 2010 campaign for Congress, is a yarn about a rapacious and greedy federal government imposing an estate tax on her struggling family.
In a 2015 speech on the House Floor and in a 2016 op-ed for Fox News, Noem repeated the estate tax story. After her father died, Noem claimed, “We got a bill in the mail from the IRS that said we owed them money because we had a tragedy that happened to our family.”
“We could either sell land that had been in our family for generations or we could take out a loan,” Noem said, adding that “it took us 10 years to pay off that loan to pay the federal government those death taxes.” Noem says the episode was “one of the main reasons I got involved in government and politics.”
In December 2017, Noem was appointed by then-House Majority Leader Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to the joint committee working to reconcile the 2017 Trump tax bill—which at the time included a proposal to eliminate the federal estate tax altogether.
That month, I published a widely circulated op-ed about Noem in USA Today arguing that “her sad family saga doesn’t add up.”
My commentary surfaced several simple facts: The federal estate tax has a 100% exemption for spouses. In other words, if a spouse dies, the estate’s assets go to the surviving spouse without any estate tax. Corinne Arnold, Kristi Noem’s mother, was alive during these years. (In fact, she is still alive now at 78 years and was active in Kristi’s second campaign for South Dakota governor in 2022.)
Estate tax attorney Bob Lord noted at the time: “It’s hard to believe the estate of a farmer who died in 1994 and was survived by his spouse was subject to the tax. It easily could have been deferred. That would have been a no-brainer.”
Moreover, the process of filing a return can be extended for years, especially for operating farms.
The combination of family tragedy and populist outrage makes for a potent partisan story, but veers from the truth. In the years she campaigned as a victim of the estate tax, Noem’s family actually cashed millions in government farm subsidies. Between 1995 and 2024, her family’s Racota Valley Ranch in Hazel, South Dakota deposited $4.9 million in government subsidy checks.
A few days after my USA Today article, the Argus Leader, South Dakota’s biggest statewide newspaper, wrote an editorial: “Time for Kristi Noem to Get Her Tax Story Straight.” In her now well-known deflective fashion, Noem fired back that it was “fake news.”
If Noem’s estate tax story is true, she could easily put our doubts to rest. She could explain why her family didn’t use a spousal exemption, share a redacted “bill” from the IRS, or disclose who provided the loan she allegedly received. But she hasn’t.
In the meantime, Noem has helped gut the estate tax, contributing to the growing concentration of wealth that threatens our economy and democracy.
Under the Trump tax bill Noem worked on, the federal estate tax now exempts the first $15 million of wealth for an individual and $30 million for a couple. And as governor of South Dakota, Noem fortified the state’s role as a trust haven, attracting billionaires interested in forming dynasty trusts to hide wealth and use loopholes to avoid federal taxes.
The Trump administration and its allies have blamed immigrants for all manner of social ills—including struggling schools, expensive housing and healthcare, and more. In reality, the blame more often lies with extremely wealthy people who won’t pay their fair share of taxes to support public programs.
So it’s strangely fitting that Noem, who now slanders law-abiding immigrants and the citizens defending them as “domestic terrorists,” played a big role in gutting those taxes on the rich.
These lies—about the estate tax, about immigrants, about protesters—have something in common: They protect the powerful. As lawmakers attempt to hold Noem accountable for the reckless activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and consider her for future jobs—they should keep this early story in mind.
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GOP 'Doubling Down on a Failed Agenda' With New Reconciliation Framework, Says Key Dem
"Americans will pay a steep price if Republicans move forward with this disastrous agenda," said Sen. Ron Wyden.
Jan 13, 2026
The House Republican Study Committee on Tuesday released a blueprint for a new budget reconciliation package with the purported goal of making "life more affordable for working families."
However, according to an analysis by Washington Post economic policy reporter Jacob Bogage, two of the three most expensive items in the GOP budget blueprint would be the elimination of the federal estate tax, which would provide a massive windfall to the richest US households, and indexing capital gains to inflation, which even the conservative American Enterprise Institute contends "would further distort taxpayer decisions and increase the ability to shelter income from taxation."
Other items in the GOP blueprint include refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve with oil seized from Venezuela, blocking federal funds for abortion providers, and a new "excise tax on colleges that allow trans women in sports."
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, wasted no time ripping the proposal from the largest right-wing House caucus to pieces.
"After passing the largest health care cut in American history, Republicans are doubling down on a failed agenda that benefits billionaires and giant corporations while ripping away food, healthcare and other basic necessities,” Wyden said. “This legislation will eliminate protections for Americans with preexisting conditions, place more red tape between families and their healthcare, and seize ideological trophies instead of focusing on making life more affordable. Americans will pay a steep price if Republicans move forward with this disastrous agenda.”
Richard Phillips, pensions and tax policy director for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), marveled at the GOP loading up a bill supposedly focused on working families with massive giveaways to the wealthiest Americans.
"As part of it's new affordability agenda for the American people the Republican Study Committee reveals its plan to give the wealthiest 0.2% of estates a $281 billion tax break?" he wrote in a post on X.
Chuck Marr, vice president of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, similarly called the GOP blueprint "tone deaf."
"Nothing says attack the affordability crisis working-class people face than Rs calling for eliminating the estate tax for the wealthiest heirs in the country—just months after giving them a $30 million tax free exemption," he wrote.
The GOP's second attempt at a budget reconciliation package comes months after it passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a reconciliation package that gave more tax breaks to the rich, but cut Medicaid spending by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, while also slashing spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by nearly $200 billion over the same period.
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Dynastic Wealth of Ultra-Rich American Families Wins Again With GOP Tax Bill
The Republican's policy will continue a decades-long effort to weaken a critical tool to prevent the hoarding of wealth from one generation to the next.
May 18, 2025
The sprawling tax and spending bill before the House of Representatives would cut more than $200 billion from food assistance, potentially affecting 4 million children and 7 million adults, while providing an estate tax cut costing roughly the same amount to a few thousand people who will leave behind more than $7 million to their heirs.
The bill would increase the estate tax exemption to $15 million for single people and $30 million for couples in 2026 and allow it to rise with inflation moving forward. In other words, a couple could leave $29.99 million to their heirs in 2026 without paying a cent of estate tax.
This would continue a decades-long effort to weaken a critical tool to prevent the hoarding of wealth from one generation to the next.
Less than a generation ago, the estate tax was much more robust, with an individual exemption of $675,000 in 2001. Adjusted for inflation, that would amount to an exemption of $1.2 million per individual today. Even so, the tax was paid by just a tiny fraction of Americans; just 2.14 percent of all estates were subject to the tax in 2001.
But since then, lawmakers have weakened the estate tax four times, most significantly via the 2017 Trump tax law. That law doubled the estate tax exemption, bringing it to about $14 million today ($28 million for couples). This would revert to roughly $7 million if the Trump tax provisions expire at the end of this year as scheduled.
As we explained in a 2023 report, these cuts have taken the tax to historic lows. The most recent data from the IRS, from 2019, show that just 0.08 percent of all deaths resulted in estate tax liability that year, when the estate tax had an exemption of $11.4 million per person.
People across the country, including many Republicans, are expressing concern about the breadth and depth of proposed cuts to food assistance, health care, and other public services that are part of the reconciliation package the House is currently moving forward. At the same time, overwhelming majorities of Americans think that wealth inequality is a problem that leaders need to solve.
Given this, the least that lawmakers can do is allow the estate tax to drop slightly back down in 2026 instead of cutting it for the wealthiest families yet again.
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