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Mullin Testifies at His Senate Confirmation Hearing for Homeland Security Secretary, Mar. 18, 2026

March 18, 2026 · NBC News · 3:11:49

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What happened

Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on March 18, 2026, at the confirmation hearing on his nomination to succeed Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security, in NBC News’s live coverage of the hearing.

Mullin told the committee, as he stated his goal, that in six months he wanted the department out of the lead story every day — “we’re not in the lead story every single day” — with the public understanding that DHS is out protecting them and working with them, and that he would work every day to restore confidence in the agency, as he put it. He also pressed the committee, as he stated it, that the department had to be funded and the partisan fight set down, arguing the shutdown fights were putting the homeland and the public’s peace of mind at risk.

The hearing was genuinely contested. Chairman Rand Paul confronted Mullin over Mullin’s past remarks about the 2017 assault on Paul, telling him, as Paul stated it for the record, that the hearing showed “a lack of contrition, no apology and no regrets” for what Paul characterized as support for the attack; Mullin held, as he stated it in the hearing and in reporting on it, that he had said he understood the attack, not that he supported it. Senators also pressed Mullin on whether ICE entries into homes require judicial warrants, a line of questioning that ran through the hearing. The committee later advanced the nomination 8–7, with Paul the lone Republican no and Senator John Fetterman the Democrat voting yes, as reported after the hearing, and the full Senate advanced the nomination 54–37 on March 22, 2026, as reported at the time; Mullin was sworn in on March 24, 2026.

Why it matters

The confirmation hearing is the founding document of the Mullin secretaryship: the nominee’s own stated test — a department out of the daily lead story, confidence restored, funding settled — is the standard his paged record since March is chronicled against, and the Paul confrontation and the warrant questioning mark the contested ground his tenure opened with.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the confirmation-hearing commitments Secretary Mullin stated on March 18, 2026 — the department out of the lead story within six months and confidence restored, as he stated them — flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: NBC News, “LIVE: Markwayne Mullin testifies at Senate confirmation hearing for DHS secretary” (live coverage, Mar. 18, 2026, embedded above; remarks as delivered by Senator Mullin, Chairman Paul, and committee members); committee and floor votes as reported by Project Patriot and Reuters-pool reporting on the March 19 committee vote and the March 22, 2026 Senate procedural vote.