Joe Biden Says Donald Trump’s Administration Is Putting American National Security At Risk
President-elect Joe Biden on Monday accused Donald Trump’s administration of obstructing the White House transition procedure and putting American national security at risk, Breitbart reported.
“For some agencies, our teams received exemplary cooperation from the career staff in those agencies,” Biden said during a Wilmington, Delaware, appearance. “From others, most notably the Department of Defense, we’ve encountered obstruction from the political leadership of that department.”
Biden took particular aim at the DOD and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for allegedly refusing to give his team full access to the current budget planning. He claimed the purported obstinance of Trump’s administration could create a “window of confusion” that the United States’ adversaries could exploit to their advantage.
“Right now as our nation is in a period of transition, we need to make sure that nothing is lost in the handoff between administration [sic]. My team needs a clear picture of our forced posture around the world and our operations to deter our enemies.”
Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller released a statement in December that pushed back against the Biden transition’s previous claims of obstruction on behalf of Trump’s Defense Department. As The Inquisitr reported, Miller claimed that Biden’s transition agreed to a holiday hiatus from Pentagon meetings and pushed back on reports that the Democrat’s team was being shut out of the process.
As reported by Axios, Biden stressed that his administration is focused on “rebuilding the full set of our instruments of foreign policy and national security” and suggested that the Trump administration is acting as a roadblock to achieving these goals.
Trump was previously alleged to be sending officials to monitor discussions between Biden’s transition group and career civil servants. Some experts, including Michael E. Herz, a professor of administrative law at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, argued that the purported monitoring was an attempt to stifle the transition process. Although both George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s teams worked together in 2008, Herz argued that the dynamic between the Biden and Trump coalition is different and said that political officials are usually not involved in certain crucial parts of the transition.
According to Dana Milbank in a piece for The Washington Post, Trump’s refusal to concede is putting America on uneasy ground. He opined that Trump is actively undermining the post-9/11 recommendations designed to minimize the country’s susceptibility to danger amid transitions and claimed at the time that the delayed process was leaving the U.S. “needlessly vulnerable to security threats.”
