The administration announced in early April that the fiscal 2022 budget request asks for $753 billion in national security funding, including $715 billion for the Defense Department. Further details were omitted during the release of the so-called skinny budget, a process common for new administrations who need extra time to build out their first budget request.

The budget request is not expected to include reliable numbers for Future Years Defense Program projections. It is expected the budget request will feature attempts to divest existing systems, something Congress often moves to reverse during the markup process.

Republican lawmakers have hit back at the $715 billion figure, saying it does not match a need — articulated under the previous administration — for annual 3-5 percent growth in defense spending. Progressive Democrats, meanwhile, are looking for ways to cut spending further.

The request, rolled out Friday, amounts to a slight decrease for the Pentagon when adjusted for inflation, and it’s well shy of the Trump administration’s projected $722 billion request for FY22. The proposal would also end the off-budget funding pool known the overseas contingency operations, or OCO, account.

The first installment of Biden’s budget plan contained only top-line discretionary spending numbers. A more detailed budget is expected in May or June, although that is not expected to include reliable numbers for the Future Years Defense Program, or FYDP, projections.

Lawmakers, for years under the Budget Control Act caps, have carved spending deals with rough parity between defense and nondefense spending. With the BCA expired, Biden wants to boost nondefense by 16 percent, to $769 billion. (Administration officials tout the number as 3.3 percent of gross domestic product, which is roughly equal to a 30-year average.)

“A chunk of this budget request, on the defense side in particular, is to pay for the pay raise for men and women in uniform, and then the civilians that support them; I think that’s something we could find support for on both sides of the aisle” an administration official told reporters Friday. “The focus will be on investments on nondefense, but also ensuring the Defense Department he can continue its strategic goals as we outcompete China, and as we ensure that the men and women in uniform have everything that they need.”

The overall national security top line of $753 billion includes $38 billion not earmarked for the Pentagon. While the budget document does not spell out where that money is going, a large chunk of that is traditionally tied up in the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous agency within the Energy Department that handles nuclear warheads.

For the defense industry, budget documents teased an emphasis on shipbuilding, which dovetails with the Pentagon’s focus on China and Indo-Pacific. It comes amid a push from seapower advocates and after Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said he would advocate for “heavy investment” in sea-, air- and space-centric platforms, with “bloodletting” in other areas of the budget.

The defense top line is unlikely to satisfy key Republicans, who have claimed the Department of Defense needs a 3-5 percent annual increase to stay ahead of China and other evolving threats, nor progressives, who have asked for cuts of as much as 10 percent.

That’s not a bad thing, said Roman Schweizer, a defense industry analyst with Cowen.

“As we’ve said before, a flattish number would be positive because the Biden Admin will be signaling to Congress that it doesn’t want big cuts in defense,” Schweizer wrote in a note sent to investors Friday. “In Washington, when both sides are angry, that’s called a compromise. There will be a lot of griping along the way, but it’s the kind of outcome that probably makes sense.”

There will be no separate OCO request, the administration official said. Though intended as a wartime account, OCO became a tool to skirt congressionally mandated budget caps, with critics in both parties.

“Both sides of the aisle considered [OCO] a budgetary gimmick given that many of the overseas operations that they supported had been around for many, many years,” the administration official said. “So we had bipartisan interest in ensuring that those things were accomplished in the base defense budget. That’s what you’ll see presented from us today.”

Skinny on details

The document broadly discusses defense issues, with almost no dollar figures appended to any priorities. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks issued a memo in February outlining her biggest programmatic focus areas. While several of those areas are highlighted, dollar figures are currently missing.

Statements about global security are heavily weighed toward the State Department having the lead — a trend since the start of the Biden administration. For instance, the document pledges a “significant increase in resources to strengthen and defend democracies throughout the world, advance human rights, fight corruption, and counter authoritarianism.”

The only place where specific funding streams are called out comes when broadly discussing the need to update information and cybersecurity systems, which will include “$500 million for the Technology Modernization Fund, an additional $110 million for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and $750 million as a reserve for Federal agency information technology enhancements.”

However, there are some hints as to the administration’s defense-budget thinking:

• China as the top challenge. The budget identifies China as the “top challenge,” and calls out the need to “leverage” the Pacific Deterrence Initiative. That would seem to imply that most, if not all, of what U.S. Indo-Pacific Command head Adm. Phil Davidson has sought will be included in the budget request.
• R&D focus. Throughout the document, there is a focus on research and development for new technologies across the government, and the DoD is no exception. The budget request “prioritizes defense research, development, test, and evaluation funding to invest in breakthrough technologies that would drive innovation and underpin the development of next-generation defense capabilities.”
• Cuts are coming. Paying for R&D and new capabilities requires cuts elsewhere, something previewed in the Biden administration’s early strategic guidance. The budget request supports the “DOD’s plan to divest legacy systems and programs to redirect resources from low- to high-priority programs, platforms, and systems. Some legacy force structure is too costly to maintain and operate, and no longer provides the capabilities needed to address national security challenges. The discretionary request enables DOD to reinvest savings associated with divestitures and other efficiencies to higher priority investments.”
• Shipbuilding as a priority. Figuring out the right balance of shipbuilding was a major focus for President Donald Trump’s national security team, and it remains so for the Biden administration. Although details are thin, the budget document proposes “executable and responsible investments” in the fleet, including “the recapitalization of the Nation’s strategic ballistic missile submarine fleet, and invests in remotely operated and autonomous systems and the next generation attack submarine program.” Speaking to reporters Friday afternoon, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said “certainly shipbuilding is something the secretary is going to be focused on, with a mind towards making sure we have the right mix of capabilities now and into the future.”
• Nuclear on track for now? One of the biggest questions facing the defense budget is about nuclear spending, particularly around the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, America’s replacement for its intercontinental ballistic missiles. Opponents have pushed for GBSD to be paused while alternatives are studied, but advocates say the program must stay on track or risk total derailment. An early sign of what the Biden administration has decided to do: “While the Administration is reviewing the U.S. nuclear posture, the discretionary request supports ongoing nuclear modernization programs while ensuring that these efforts are sustainable.”
• Long-range fires wins out. “The safety and security of the Nation requires a strong, sustainable, and responsive mix of long-range strike capabilities,” according to the document, echoing a major focus from the Pentagon as it moves toward its new joint war-fighting plan. The budget invests in “the development and testing of hypersonic strike capabilities while enhancing existing long-range strike capabilities to bolster deterrence and improve survivability and response timelines.”
• Climate and energy. Discussions about climate change as a security issue were a sensitive subject during the Trump administration, but Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made it clear early in his tenure that the issue will be front and center for him. The budget request includes money to “plan for and mitigate impacts of climate change and improve the resilience of DOD facilities and operations. The discretionary request also invests in power and energy research and development in order to improve installation and platform energy performance and optimize military capability.”
• Biological threats. In the post-pandemic world, the DoD may play a major part in gearing the U.S. up for another biological threat. At a time when a think tank is calling for tripling the biological threat R&D funding, Biden’s budget will fund “programs that support biological threat reduction in cooperation with global partners, emerging infectious disease surveillance, biosafety and biosecurity, and medical countermeasure research and development.”

Budgets traditionally are released in February, but a delay is common for the first budget request of a new administration. Budget planning takes most of the previous year, and a new team can only change so much without an extended timeline.

The Pentagon’s budget planning has been particularly difficult this transition, according to officials who point blame at Trump appointees they say blocked Biden’s landing team from seeing the budget documents until just before the inauguration.

The budget, initially set to be rolled out last week, was reportedly delayed in a disagreement about the size of the defense budget.

During her Feb. 8 confirmation hearing, Hicks told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that she was concerned about the budget schedule.

“I think the biggest challenge that I will face, if confirmed, because of this is around budget transparency,” she said then. “Typically that information is shared with the transition team because the administration will owe to Congress a president’s budget submission in the spring.

“So the inability to look at that information … I think it will cause some delay in the timeline by which we can give budget quality information back to Congress. So that would be the area [where] I would ask for a little relief or understanding.”

Michael Brown, the head of the Defense Innovation Unit, was announced as the nominee for undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment (A&S), the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer. Biden tapped Ronald Moultrie, who has had a long career in the intelligence world, for the job of undersecretary for intelligence and security, the top civilian intelligence role at DoD.

Biden’s other nominee, Mike McCord, would serve his second stint as undersecretary-comptroller, the department’s top financial official. McCord’s nomination was first reported by Defense News.

The three men represent the first DoD nominations announced since Dec. 30, a span of over three months.

Brown, a former CEO of Symantec, joined the DoD in September 2018 to lead DIU, a small office dedicated to increasing ties between the department and commercial technology firms. He has gained a reputation in Congress as a China hawk thanks to his co-authorship of a departmental report about Chinese influence in American tech companies.

While Brown does not have experience running major defense programs, sources say the Biden team wanted to bring in someone with experience from outside DoD for the A&S job and pointed to his software background as useful at a time when the department is increasingly leaning on digital tools. He will also have to manage the department’s procurement response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed weaknesses in the global defense supply chain.

Moultrie has held roles with the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and as a Russian linguist in the U.S. military. He retired in 2015 as the National Security Agency’s director of operations, joining a number of boards in the years since.

He published an article in 2020 on Worth.com outlining challenges he faced because of race throughout his career. Moultrie, who is Black, would join the department at a time when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is putting increasing focus on racial tensions within the military. “Writing this story has been cathartic,” he concluded in the article last year. “My reluctance has been overtaken by a sense of moral obligation to embolden others to come forward.”

If confirmed McCord would return to the job he held in the comptroller’s office from June 2014 until the end of the Obama administration in 2017.

The comptroller serves as the chief financial officer for the Department of Defense, with oversight of the more than $700 billion defense budget. The position also comes with the responsibility of managing the department’s annual audit, an effort that began under McCord’s successor, David Norquist.

McCord, who also spent time as the deputy comptroller, was part of Biden’s transition landing team at the department. Since leaving government, he has held a number of different roles, including as director for civil-military programs at the Stennis Center for Public Service and on the board of trustees for the Aerospace Corp.

The Biden team has decided that Norquist, the current deputy secretary of defense, is the best choice to keep the day-to-day operations of the Defense Department running while Lloyd Austin, the retired Army general who is President-elect Joe Biden’s choice to lead the department, awaits his confirmation from Congress.

Meanwhile, three current service officials will join Norquist in staying in the building; those officials serve in fiscal roles with their respective services:

• Thomas Harker, the Navy comptroller, will become acting Navy secretary.

• John Roth, the Air Force comptroller who has been serving as acting undersecretary for the service, will be acting Air Force secretary.

• John Whitley, the Army comptroller, will serve as acting Army secretary.

• Defense News previously reported that Stacy Cummings will become acting undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment (A&S), replacing Ellen Lord, the politically appointed A&S head.

It’s commonplace for incoming administrations not to retain the previous administration’s service secretaries or undersecretaries, and retaining financial management leaders appears to be a move to help Biden complete a revised Defense Department budget for fiscal 2022. Norquist himself started as comptroller in the Pentagon, before being tapped in 2019 as deputy secretary of defense.

Under Title 10 (the federal law governing the armed forces), a confirmed deputy secretary automatically assumes the duties, responsibilities and authorities of the defense secretary during a defense secretary’s absence; however, there was speculation that the Biden team may be uncomfortable keeping a Trump political appointee in place given the pressures surrounding the military since the Jan. 6 attack on Congress.

Asked directly on Monday whether he would stay on if asked, Norquist declined to comment. But he described his view of the transition as one in which his job is to set up the next administration for success, something he said the Obama team did for him when he came in as comptroller, particularly with regard to planning for the Defense Department’s first-ever audit.

“For those of us who are political, we’re stepping onto a relay track, and when we’re part of a team, and somebody runs behind you and hands you the baton and then you get on the track and you run. But you know, at the end of the day you’re going to hand it to somebody else,” Norquist said. “And you need to hand it off in a way that is effective and coherent.

“What I want to do is to do for them what they did for me, which was to leave in place all the tools necessary in a sensible structure.”

A Pentagon spokesperson referred all questions to the Biden transition team; a spokesperson for the transition team declined comment.

While the CMO team “attempted to make the best use of the structure that Congress gave them,” ultimately Congress concluded a new approach was needed, Norquist told a small group of reporters in a Monday call. As a result, the CMO’s office was officially disestablished with the Jan. 1 passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, which charged Norquist to handle the logistics.

Two offices that previously existed separate from the CMO are being taken wholesale and placed back as standalone organizations. The bulk of CMO-affiliated personnel work for the director of administration and management, who oversees the operations of the Pentagon building. The other is the office of the assistant to the secretary of defense for intelligence oversight.

Both organizations have appointed leaders — Thomas Muir and Mark Dupont, respectively — and can be replaced by the Biden administration.

While pulling those two offices wholesale out of CMO was “relatively straightforward,” Norquist said, other offices will take a few weeks to sort out. Three landing spots have been identified: the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office, the comptroller’s office, and the chief information officer.

He said Pentagon officials are in contact with impacted personnel to ensure they know where they might land. He also wants to take the time to ensure all the human resources aspects are covered. However, no one currently at the CMO’s office will lose their employment.

In early 2020, then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper charged CMO Lisa Hershman with serving as the lead on developing the budget for the so-called fourth estate offices, a role she described as basically a service secretary for that group. Norquist, however, indicated there were challenges with that setup, particularly when it came to making fiscal trade-offs between offices that operate in very different worlds.

Now, instead of all fourth estate offices submitting a combined budget request, the offices will be divided by portfolio. The director of the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office will serve as the portfolio lead for policy-related organizations, such as the Missile Defense Agency. The comptroller’s office will oversee support groups such as the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service.

“So I think what we did is we built off of Secretary Esper’s concept and said: ‘How do we do it so that those trades can be made prior to the [program objective memorandums] being submitted the way a service does, between those things within the service?’ ” Norquist said. “We picked up on the idea and then tried to figure out how to make it more functional going forward.”

Norquist acknowledged that moving offices around in the week leading up to a White House transition may not be ideal, but he said he briefed President-elect Joe Biden’s team on his thinking and noted that the NDAA’s language requiring an immediate closure of the office left the Pentagon no choice but to act quickly.

“This is not a surprise to them. I’ve talked to them about that, they understand the timing, it’s very clear to them,” Norquist said of the transition team. “I want to leave them something that’s working and functional, but it’s only a memo. And if they decide to adjust it, it is well within their powers to do so.”

Asked directly about whether he would stay on if asked, Norquist declined to comment. There is speculation in defense circles that Norquist — largely seen as more of a wonk than a political actor — could be kept on as acting defense secretary until Lloyd Austin, Biden’s nominee for the role, can be confirmed.

But more broadly, Norquist described his view of the transition as one in which his job is to set up the next administration for success, something he said the Obama team did for him when he came in as comptroller, particularly with regard to planning for the Defense Department’s first-ever audit.

“For those of us who are political, we’re stepping onto a relay track, and when we’re part of a team, and somebody runs behind you and hands you the baton and then you get on the track and you run. But you know, at the end of the day you’re going to hand it to somebody else,” Norquist said. “And you need to hand it off in a way that is effective and coherent.

“What I want to do is to do for them what they did for me, which was to leave in place all the tools necessary in a sensible structure.”

WASHINGTON ― U.S. President-elect Joe Biden is pressuring Congress to quickly confirm his nominees for national security roles, but it appears the congressional calendar won’t permit his pick for defense secretary to be in place on Day One of the Biden administration.

The Senate traditionally confirms a new president’s defense secretary right away for the sake of national security. But for retired Gen. Lloyd Austin to serve in the position, Congress must pass a waiver of the seven-year cooling-off period between military service and becoming defense secretary — a complication that Congress doesn’t have the time to resolve by Jan. 20.

To consider the waiver, the House Armed Services Committee must organize for the new Congress and, per Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., hold a hearing. However, there’s no time because the House will be in recess until Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, a Democratic spokesperson for the committee wrote in an email to Defense News.

“The House Armed Services Committee is planning for a hearing, but given that the House is in recess next week, the hearing is likely to happen on January 21st or later,” the spokesperson said. “As a reminder, the House rules stipulate that committees cannot hold hearings until after committee members have been identified and holds a formal organizing meeting.

“Bottom line, we are following regular order until something else happens, and we are very confident that the waiver will pass the House.”

Under regular order, the hearing would precede the waiver.

The news comes as Biden has been naming picks for senior roles at the State Department and National Security Council. He said Wednesday he intends to work with congressional leaders in both parties to advance them.

“My nominees for critical national security positions at State, Defense, Treasury, and Homeland Security have bipartisan support and have been confirmed by the Senate before. They need to be in their jobs as soon as possible after January 20th,” Biden said Wednesday in a statement ahead of the day’s violence.

It’s unclear who would immediately fill the role after Biden is sworn in, and the incoming administration hasn’t announced plans for that.

According to former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director Arnold Punaro, an expert on the confirmation process for Pentagon nominees, Biden could seek the confirmation of his nominee for deputy defense secretary, Kathleen Hicks ― an Obama-era undersecretary of defense. Hicks led Biden’s Pentagon landing team until she handed management of it to former Obama-era undersecretary of defense for policy Christine Wormuth to focus on the looming confirmation process, but Hicks remains involved in the landing team’s discussions.

Biden could instead ask President Donald Trump’s deputy defense secretary, David Norquist, or another current official to fill the role on an acting basis.

“Ever since President [Dwight D.] Eisenhower, in the first 200 days of an administration, there has been a crisis. The individual that needs to be there is an individual the commander in chief trusts to basically carry out his order to the war-fighting combatant commanders,” Punaro said.

Absent Hicks, “David Norquist would certainly be the right person to do that because everybody knows him and you won’t have to get somebody up to speed,” Punaro added.

Beyond the logistics of the House holding a waiver hearing and floor vote, there are logistics to settle in the Senate, which Democrats are on track to control after winning both seats in Georgia’s U.S. Senate elections this week. That narrow majority means Democrats will have a major role in controlling the confirmation process, but Senate Republicans would still have enough leverage to delay Biden’s nominees.

Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, who is poised to chair the Senate Armed Services Committee, announced Austin’s confirmation would be held Jan. 19, the say the Senate returns from its recess. He told reporters earlier in the week he and the panel’s top Republican, Sen. Jim Inhofe, aimed to follow the confirmation path of Trump’s first defense secretary, retired Gen. Jim Mattis.

The committee on Thursday announced a separate hearing Jan. 12 on civilian control of the armed forces that’s expected to cover the waiver. Set to testify are Lindsay Cohn of the U.S. Naval War College and Kathleen McInnis, a Congressional Research Service expert in international security.

It’s an open question how many of Biden’s nominees Republicans will allow to be confirmed on Inauguration Day, if any. Before Trump was sworn in four years ago, there was a partisan fight over the number of his Cabinet picks.

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told MSNBC last month that any newly elected president deserves to have his team confirmed.

“We have an obligation, I think, personally and politically, to give him a team in place, particularly in the critical departments like the Department of Defense,” Durbin said of Biden. “So I certainly hope that the same courtesy will be extended to President Biden that we extended President Trump.”

In 2017, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., allowed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., only two picks for rapid confirmation ― Mattis to lead the Pentagon and John Kelly to become secretary of the Department of Homeland Security ― and sought floor debates for even the noncontroversial nominees.

At the time, Republicans groused that President Barack Obama got seven of his Cabinet picks installed on his first day as president and that Democrats were endangering national security for holding up Mike Pompeo, then the pick for CIA director and a key member of Trump’s national security team.

Punaro recommended the Senate Armed Services Committee hold both the waiver hearing and a confirmation hearing next week to speed the process.

“My position is they should pull out all the stops to get Austin waived and confirmed by the 20th. He should be there on Day One when the president takes over,” Punaro said. “The secretary of defense is the only other civilian in the war-fighting chain of command, and you need to have someone that the president has confidence in, has nominated, and is his secretary of defense.”

With an eye on the previous administration’s time crunch, which may be exacerbated by Republican resistance, the Biden team has focused on lining up lower-level political appointees who do not need Senate confirmation in order to ensure a strong national security team is in place on Day One. That essentially covers anyone at the deputy assistant secretary of defense level or lower.

In total, Biden has 62 Defense Department jobs to fill that require Senate confirmation, including Austin, Hicks and Colin Kahl, who has been nominated for undersecretary of defense for policy. (While not technically third in the line of succession, that job is often referred to as the third-most important civilian role at the department, given the breadth of its responsibilities.)

It took the Obama administration an average of five months to nominate and just over two months to confirm its so-called PAS officials (presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed) — an average of a seventh-month process, according to data compiled by Punaro.

Top-tier officials with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, such as the undersecretary of defense for policy, took just under four months to confirm.

In contrast, the Trump administration was plagued by a slow process for identifying, nominating and confirming individuals for top spots, even though the president’s party controlled the Senate for his entire term.

It took about seven and a half months to nominate and almost three and a half months to confirm — about a total of 11 months to confirm such individuals. When it comes to those top-tier officials, it took the Trump team six months to nominate and an additional three months to confirm — over twice as long as it took the Obama team for those same roles.

It’s a move the department is categorizing as a temporary delay rather than a wholesale blockade of the incoming administration. But a spokesman for the Biden team said the transition officials are “concerned” about “an abrupt halt to the already limited cooperation” in the Department of Defense, and he accused the Pentagon of issuing a false statement about an agreed upon pause in work.

The halt comes days after a major hack of government agencies, including the Pentagon, has left the department scrambling to understand the potential damage, much of which will be dealt with by the incoming administration.

Axios first reported Friday morning that acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, who was installed at the Pentagon days after the Nov. 3 election, had ordered scheduled meetings to be canceled. After the initial report, the Pentagon pushed back, saying the pause was a rescheduling of meetings for Friday due to “competing priorities” for officials, and that meetings would open up again in the new year, following what was described as a planned two-week Christmas break.

“The Department of Defense will continue to provide all required support to the Agency Review Team (ART) to keep our nation and her citizens safe,” Miller said in a statement, which noted that the 20 interviews that were scheduled for Friday are being rescheduled for after Jan. 1. “At no time has the Department cancelled or declined any interview.”

“After the mutually-agreed upon holiday pause, which begins tomorrow, we will continue with the transition and rescheduled meetings from today,” the statement added. “Again, I remain committed to a full and transparent transition — this is what our nation expects and the DoD will deliver AS IT ALWAYS HAS.”

However, at a Friday briefing, Biden transition spokespeople Yohannes Abraham and Jen Psaki denied there was an agreed upon holiday pause and called for the Pentagon to immediately restart the discussions.

Asked if the Biden team was accusing Miller of lying, Psaki said: “I don’t think we need to communicate that. I think you can make your own judgment about the information we provided.”

“It’s not in our interest to provide inaccurate information about the status of our engagements,” she added. “Our preference is certainly for things to proceed as usual. That is our hope.”

Abraham added that political appointees at the department have been particularly “recalcitrant” in sharing information when compared to other government agencies, and that the “abrupt halt to the already limited cooperation” needed to be reversed immediately — particularly in the aftermath of the SolarWinds hack that is believed to have exposed America’s national security agencies for months.

Pentagon observers have been carefully watching the transition process at the department following a wave of firings of top officials — including Defense Secretary Mark Esper — that was followed by a group of Trump loyalists installed in the department.

Miller’s move was met with criticism from outside experts, who noted that an orderly transition at the Pentagon is vital for American security interests.

Kori Schake, the head of defense studies for the American Enterprise Institute, called the delay in meetings “both disgraceful and actually dangerous, especially given the ongoing cyber incursions by a hostile foreign power — something the Trump administration’s decimation of cyber talent within civilian agencies of the government enabled.

“This decision is what the acting secretary is going to be remembered for, and it’s a terrible legacy for a short tenure,” said Schake, a former national security official in the Bush administration.

Loren DeJonge Schulman, an adjunct senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security, said the reports are “very concerning and not at all consistent with the way transitions should be run.”

“I helped coordinate the 2008 transition inside the Department of Defense, and understand how the intensity and number of requests from transition teams can be overwhelming, particularly over the holiday season,” she said. “But facilitating the new administration’s stewardship of the Department of Defense isn’t optional. National security does not take a break.”

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden has reportedly selected Lloyd Austin III, a retired four-star Army general who most recently led the fights in Afghanistan and Iraq, as his nominee for defense secretary.

Austin would become the first Black leader of the department if confirmed, but likely faces a steep path because he will require a waiver from Congress due to his recent service, an exception granted to only two secretary nominees in the last century.

News of the pick was first reported by Politico, and confirmed by CNN.

Austin joined the Army in 1975, but his career is defined by post-9/11 conflicts. He was on the ground early in Iraq, where he was assistant division commander for the 3rd Infantry Division, and Afghanistan, where he commanded the 10th Mountain Division (Light). In 2008, he was named commander of Multi-National Corps-Iraq. Austin also served as director of the Joint Staff, and in 2012 became vice chief of staff of the Army.

His career culminated as the head of U.S. Central Command, which he led from 2013-2016. His time at CENTCOM coincided with the rise of the Islamic State group, better known as ISIS, as well as the effort to grow an anti-ISIS military force in Syria. That train-and-equip mission led to an explosive congressional hearing, where Austin was ripped by members of Congress after he admitted the effort, underway for five months, had produced only “four or five” fighters.

Since leaving the Pentagon, Austin has joined the corporate boards of Raytheon Technologies, one of the largest defense firms in the world, as well as steel company Nucor, and Tenet Healthcare.

Waiver requirements

According to Title 10 of the United States Code, the defense secretary is among nine Senate-confirmed roles at the Pentagon that would require a waiver if the nominee has been a military officer in the last seven years. Austin retired from the Army in May 2016.

The waiver requires approval by Senate and House majorities, and the president’s signature. Given ongoing concerns about civil-military relations following the Trump administration, which relied significantly on former military officers in civilian roles, Biden may struggle to get enough votes to pass Austin through.

When the Senate in 2017 approved a waiver for retired Gen. Jim Mattis to serve, 17 Democrats voted against it, including four on the Senate Armed Services Committee today: Sens. Richard Blumenthal, Tammy Duckworth, Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren.

Citing a commitment to civilian leadership of the Pentagon, SASC ranking member Jack Reed, D-R.I., said then that “waiving the law should happen no more than once in a generation. Therefore I will not support a waiver for future nominees. Nor will I support any effort to water down or repeal the statute in the future.”

Austin could also lose votes from Republicans who may not be looking to give Biden any help politically, and concerns from both the left and right about ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, all of which were overseen by Austin from 2013-2016.

But the choice will likely have support among Black lawmakers, who helped propel Biden to the White House — and whom in recent weeks have expressed a desire to see more Black Cabinet members named.

Biden had been under pressure from competing factions within his own party as he finalized his choice for secretary of defense. Black leaders have encouraged the incoming president to select an African American to diversify what has so far been a largely white prospective Cabinet, while others are pushing him to appoint a woman to lead the Department of Defense for the first time.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., a close Biden ally, expressed disappointment last month that African Americans — a voting bloc crucial to Biden’s presidential victory — have not featured more prominently among the early picks to fill out senior administration posts next year.

On Sunday, Congressional Black Caucus Chair Karen Bass said that Biden needed to choose a Black defense secretary or attorney general nominee.

“Yes, I think it would be great if he did,” Bass, D-Calif., told CNN. “And for defense secretary, there’s two individuals that the Congressional Black Caucus would like to put forward, Lloyd Austin and Jeh Johnson.”

Historic first

Not only will Austin become the first Black secretary, he becomes one of the few top-level, Black Senate-confirmed civilians in the Pentagon’s history.

Of the top civilian jobs in the department, there has never been a Black secretary or deputy secretary. Clifford Alexander was tapped as Army secretary in 1977, and Togo West held the same job starting in 1993. John Shannon served as acting Army secretary for eight months at the start of the Clinton administration, and B.J. Penn served as acting Navy secretary for two months at the start of the Obama administration.

Two Black men served at the undersecretary level: Edwin Dorn was confirmed as undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness at the start of the Clinton administration, while Clifford Stanley was confirmed for the same role in 2010.

More broadly, Austin comes into the department at a time when leaders are acknowledging a racial divide within the military. Over the summer, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, since removed by President Donald Trump, launched a series of diversity and inclusion initiatives, saying “We must do better.”

In a July Military Times poll of service members, almost one-third of all active-duty respondents said they saw signs of white supremacist or racist ideology in the ranks. About 57 percent of minority troops polled said they have personally experienced some form of racist or white supremacist behavior.

Those issues extend to the top leadership of the department. U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff CQ Brown became the first Black uniformed office to lead a service in Pentagon history when he was confirmed earlier this year; aside from Brown, none of the members of the Joint Chiefs, nor any of the current combatant command heads, are Black.

“It’s hard to understand how the most successful reform effort in history is essentially being eliminated,” Lisa Hershman, the Pentagon’s CMO, told Defense News shortly after the NDAA language was released Thursday. “It’s disappointing. I’m not exactly sure what or who [defense committee leaders] were listening to.”

Representatives from the House and Senate Armed Services Committees agreed to a conference report of the NDAA this week, with a vote likely to come next week. Despite a veto threat from President Donald Trump, the NDAA is expected to pass comfortably in both chambers.

That means Congress has all-but-decided to eliminate the CMO’s office, roughly four years after lawmakers created the role and made it third-in-line at the department, with the goal of having a single point person for reform efforts inside the world’s largest bureaucracy.

Members have said the office has not moved fast enough to deliver reforms, with Rep. Mac Thornberry, the retiring top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, saying in June that “Congress is largely responsible for making this an impossible job, and we need to figure out something different.”

“We are starting to see some real payoff from what [reform legislation] we’ve done in recent years. No they’re not moving fast enough. No, it’s not enough,” Thornberry said then, of DoD reform efforts writ large. “We’re trying to hold their feet to the fire on some of the things we’ve already told them to do in recent years.”

Instead, the CMO’s office will be dismantled no later than one year after the passage of the NDAA, with all duties and responsibilities dispersed among different officials as directed by the Secretary of Defense. In addition, the secretary must submit a report to Congress including “any legislative proposals necessary to effectuate the changes to law made by this section. “

The office experienced turbulence from the start, with the first confirmed CMO, Jay Gibson, was forced out of office after just nine months. He was replaced by Hershman, the deputy CMO, who served as acting CMO for over a year before receiving a confirmation vote herself.

On Thursday, Hershman was careful to note that a bipartisan group of lawmakers had backed the CMO’s office, but expressed frustration with how the process ultimately ended up.

“It’s really hard to understand their justification,” she said. “Every dollar saved through reform went to the warfighter directly. Every dime of what we saved made them safer and more lethal. This was a big win for the taxpayers, freeing up $37 billion of budgeted funds through reform and increased efficiency.”

“Congress has given no justification for eliminating the CMO. Since 2018 when the role was created we have validated $37 billion in savings, eliminated hundreds of unnecessary regulations, and created the first unified Fourth Estate budget in history.

“Despite all that success, I’ve never been asked to testify — on the accomplishments, visions, next steps, none of it. I’ve never been asked by either the House or the Senate, any subcommittee to make any kind of testimony on the facts. They need to answer to this.”

Delivering results?

In November, Hershman spoke with Defense News about the savings claimed by her office, as well as a recent report by the Government Accounting Office (GAO), a government watchdog, that concluded the Pentagon had achieved $37 billion in savings since the start of FY17.

Not all of that is directly the result of the CMO’s office; in addition, the Nov. 5 GAO report raised concerns that the figures “were not always well documented or consistent with the department’s definitions of reform,” and may have some overstating in savings, the oversight agency largely supported the claim that $37 billion had been saved, and re-applied to defense priorities, during the reform process.

But Hershman pointed to that finding as a victory lap for her team, with $7.7 billion found in FY20 and $12.1 billion found in FY21.

“To have an independent body such as GAO actually put their stamp on those savings, and also acknowledge the great trajectory that we’re on with continued improvement — we’re doing something right,” she said in November, noting that the savings found by her office in a few years has already lapped what was found by the history of the deputy CMO office that proceeded the CMO’s creation.

More savings are expected to result in the upcoming budget as well, thanks to a new set of authorities given to the CMO’s office at the start of the year when then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper put Hershman in charge of assembling the budgets for the so-called “Fourth Estate” — the various Pentagon offices that do not fall under a military service branch. In essence, the CMO team now would act as a service secretary for budgetary purposes over those offices.

Hershman was given a target by Esper of finding $5 billion in savings over the next five years. That’s a number she says her office is on track to break, significantly, with an estimated $6.205 billion total in savings found in just the FY22 budget effort.

Perhaps most notably, she said, $4.9 billion of that came from actual reforms, while the rest was the result of cuts or clean sheet improvements; in other words, the money wasn’t primarily found by cutting people or technology, but by making substantive changes, with roughly $77 million in investments to achieve that return.

In one case, she said, there was a spare parts contract that was expected to cost about $80 million but better inventory management inside the department due to reforms meant planners found they had plenty of equipment as is, and reduced that buy to under $30 million.

In another case, an IT service contract was set to a highest level of service, which wasn’t actually needed; that contract, which cost around $217 million annually, was reduced by $67 million for the current fiscal year.

“One of the things that we’ve been trying to do, from a cultural standpoint, is get away from across the board cuts. Those are detrimental, and it lends itself to a process that drives bad behaviors,” she said in November. While noting that occasionally cutting a program is appropriate, on the whole, Hershman argued “You can’t cut your way to prosperity.”

Now, with the short history of the CMO’s office apparently coming to an end, Hershman insists she isn’t bitter about the offices’ fate.

“I came from the private sector. I’m happy to go back to the private sector,” she said Thursday. “I’m worried about the warfighter and taxpayers. Things aren’t getting easier in either of those camps, money is tight and we have to be prudent with how we spend … [We are] in just the beginning stages of adoption but has already proven itself out to be working. It’s just a shame that we won’t be able to scale it.”

Among those who signed the pledge, organized by the Leadership Council for Women in National Security: former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris of California.

Now, with the Biden-Harris team preparing to take over the White House in January, that pledge could provide a historic flow of women into key national security leadership roles.

“It’s a huge step forward for women in the national security field,” said Lindsay Rodman, LCWINS’ executive director. “It’s a big deal because it will immediately increase representation, and it’s a signal to women that the historic underrepresentation may finally be over.”

The definition of a “national security” appointment is, by Rodman’s own admission, somewhat arbitrary. For instance, the group decided not to include ambassador roles, nor jobs at the Department of Veterans Affairs — the former because of the role of career foreign service officers in filling those, and the latter because those jobs require more experience in hospital management or medicine, as opposed to defense-related backgrounds. Positions on the National Security Council were also excluded, given the propensity toward career officials serving there.

But the group created a list of 190 spots across the departments of Defense, Energy, Homeland Security and State, among other offices that fit the bill — including all political appointee roles at the Pentagon. (The list was culled from a 2016 compilation, so some jobs have changed; however, Rodman said the talent pool would slip easily into whatever newly defined roles there may be.)

Once the 190 jobs were identified, the group set about contacting its network and creating a database of potential candidates for those roles. The goal was to have about 500 women in the database; they ended up with 850. Those names have now been passed to the Biden-Harris transition team, which is also conducting its own solicitation of interest for jobs in the forthcoming administration.

Pentagon impact

There is no specific goal of having the Pentagon be a perfect split; the numbers are divided across the new administration. But if the Biden team were to go for a 50-50 split of political appointees at the Department of Defense, it would mean 30 women in top jobs. Only 79 women have been political appointees over the department’s existence.

For comparison, the Trump administration confirmed nine women to top DoD spots, with a 10th nominated. Currently, three of those women remain in office. (Women also occupied top national security spots at the departments of State and Energy during various points in the administration.)

The Obama administration saw a record 31 women in appointed positions over its eight-year term — 40 percent of all female appointees in the Defense Department’s history — 18 of which came in the first term.

There may be significant crossover between the nonprofit’s recommendations and the eventual Biden administration appointments, but LCWINS hopes its database can expand beyond the traditional names with which everyone in the D.C. national security community is familiar.

“The Biden administration, and any leader who takes the LCWINS pledge, has the chance to show that it’s not only best for the country to appoint an equal number of women in national security roles — it’s remarkably easy,” said Loren DeJonge Schulman, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who has held a number of national security roles and serves on the LCWINS steering committee.

“Seeing talented, diverse appointments up and down the national security organizational charts can help eliminate the myth that it’s somehow tough, or even a chore, to put in place a team with diverse perspectives and backgrounds,” she added. “It’s not only easy and natural — it’s the most promising outcome.”

A spokesman for the Biden-Harris transition team, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the team is “committed” to upholding the LCWINS pledge, but would not comment further about whether there is a point person for tracking gender parity, or if the goal is a 50-50 split at the Pentagon.

Obviously, Harris will serve as the highest-ranking woman in U.S. political history. But Democrats have a “deep bench” when it comes to women with national security and foreign policy experience, and the incoming Democratic administration should have no problem filling out as many jobs as possible, said Ray DuBois, a former “mayor” of the Pentagon and acting undersecretary of the Army who has tracked the number of women appointed to top DoD jobs over the years.

But he noted that the LCWINS pledge includes the phrase “committed to striving for gender parity,” which gives some leeway in how the Biden team approaches the effort.

“I would commit to striving for gender parity, but that doesn’t mean they are going to actually get it in Year One,” DuBois said. “I would not hold Biden to a 50-50 split of the first people announced out of the box, but I would probably hold him accountable over the next several years. That’s important to understand.”

For her part, Rodman said the group’s goal is “not to play ‘gotcha’ and get into an accountability game.”

“We will certainly be tracking it, but our goal is to be cheering on their successes, not to be pointing out their failures,” she said. “From my limited interaction with the transition team, I know the commitment is there. so now it’s a question of the intentionality, and making sure that stays a priority and they continue to be mindful of it.”

Notable names

There is significant speculation that Biden will look to appoint the first female defense secretary, with Michèle Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense for policy, most often the name mentioned.

Rodman noted there is a longstanding issue of placing a woman in a top job and then declaring mission accomplished.

“I would be concerned about the signal it sends to say: ‘There’s one women in the top spot, but we still think it’s OK for these jobs to be male-dominated throughout,’ ” Rodman said. “If we end up there, that will be indicative that there are other structural issues we have not yet identified because the historic claim is always: You need to grow the pipeline of women. And the case we are making with the database is that the pipeline exists. That’s no longer the excuse.”

LCWINS may be small in terms of full staff, but it has direct ties to a number of figures circling the Biden administration.

Four individuals with ties to LCWINS have already been announced for high-ranking positions. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, part of the group’s steering committee, is Biden’s pick to be ambassador to the United Nations. Avril Haines, on the advisory committee, has become the first woman nominated to be Director of National Intelligence.

Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state pick, and Jake Sullivan, Biden’s pick for National Security Advisor, also serve as advisors for the group — a good sign that the gender balance pledge could find its way to State and the NSC.

Closer to the Pentagon, ties exist as well. The LCWINS steering committee includes Kathleen Hicks, who served as both principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy as well as deputy undersecretary of defense for strategy, plans and forces during the Obama administration. Now the director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ International Security Program, Hicks recently added another job: head of the Biden-Harris landing team for the Pentagon.

Other notables among the advisory committee membership are Flournoy; Christine Wormuth, undersecretary of defense for policy from 2014-2016; and Michelle Howard, a retired four-star admiral who became the first woman to serve as vice chief of staff for any military branch. Both Wormuth and Howard are part of the Pentagon landing team.

Given those ties, it is notable that 15 of the 23 members of the Pentagon landing team are women, and 52 percent of the transition team members across all the teams are women — a fact Rodman called a “very strong signal” that the pledge may be fulfilled.

Many of the 850 names in the LCWINS database will be unfamiliar to the D.C. national security community, but there are plenty of high-profile defense experts in there who are expected to find homes inside the new administration.

Both Hicks and Wormuth are believed to be in line for top jobs at the Pentagon or elsewhere, perhaps including deputy defense secretary. Madelyn Creedon, a former deputy administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration, is likely to be on any shortlist to lead the nuclear warhead agency. Juliane Smith, a LCWINS co-founder, has been reported by Axios as a potential ambassador to NATO.

Notably, the Biden team has signaled it would be open to bringing some Republicans into the administration. If so, DuBois said, the national security realm might be a logical place to house them.

“I think it would serve President-elect Biden to look at diversity not just through the lens of gender or color but also at diversity through the eyes of bipartisanship, especially in the national security arena. When we have bipartisan appointments in the national security team, the country benefits,” he said.

Of the LCWINS list, more than 100 respondents said they would work in either a Democratic or Republican administration.