President Biden’s admission this week that he lost track of his own Secretary of Defense for several days when the Pentagon chief checked himself into a military hospital has stunned a Washington accustomed to broad failures of presidential leadership over the last three years.
Biden’s White House only recently disclosed the illness for which Secretary Lloyd Austin spent days off the grid in an intensive care unit, pointing instead for days to a two-sentence Pentagon statement issued last week that blamed unspecified “complications following a recent elective medical procedure.”
Nor does Biden plan to hold his defense chief accountable in any way for his unexplained disappearance. “There is no plan for anything other than for Secretary Austin to stay in the job,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby declaimed to reporters aboard Air Force One.
Cabinet member hospitalizations are nothing new, but in previous administrations from both Parties, they are disclosed fully, and when the secretary in question is unable to perform his or her duties, such authorities are delegated transparently to a subordinate official until the secretary returns.
When he checked into George Washington University Hospital twenty years ago, President George W. Bush’s attorney general John Ashcroft transferred the powers of his office temporarily and publicly to his deputy James Comey, who famously rushed to his boss’s bedside to prevent the White House Counsel and Chief of Staff from bypassing him to get the barely-conscious Ashcroft to sign a document preserving a controversial expiring intelligence program.
Officials dropping off the radar completely, though rare, are not limited to Biden cabinet secretaries. Fifteen years ago, South Carolina’s Republican Governor Mark Sanford peaced-out to South America for a six-day tryst with an Argentinian mistress, while his staff told reporters he was “hiking the Appalachian trail.” After a tearful mea-culpa press conference upon his return, Sanford resigned immediately as president of the Republican Governors’ Association.
Unlike Sanford, Austin’s own ramble on the reputational footpath points up far more than poor judgment and lack of transparency. Austin’s days-long disappearance lays bare both the incompetence of the Biden national security team across the board, and Biden’s refusal to hold his senior leaders accountable when their actions demand it.
Without question, it reveals a National Security Council leadership asleep at the switch on Biden’s watch. The NSC is “the President’s principal forum for national security and foreign policy decision making with his…senior national security advisors and cabinet officials.”
The expert, multi-agency NSC staff that operates the White House Situation Room facility can reach just about any leader or diplomatic official around the world in a matter of minutes to assist the President and his team in making rapid and critical decisions on national security.
The idea that on Biden’s watch, this capable career team is denied the tools to connect him with his own defense secretary – whether though standard interagency communication or contact with his security detail – in the middle of two major global conflicts demonstrates an absolute abdication of leadership by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.
Biden’s multi-day failure to keep tabs on Austin, and his refusal to roll heads over it among his senior team, represents just the latest accountability surrender on his watch over the last three years.
From the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, to his Transportation Secretary’s weeks-long refusal to visit the site of a major railroad derailment and catastrophic chemical spill, to his Secretary of State allowing Chinese officials to lecture him about race relations, to letting Iran’s proxies conduct more than a hundred attacks on U.S. forces with only a token response, Biden lets just about everyone skate, whether on his team or with bad actors around the globe.
In fact, it took a “non-binary” nuclear energy appointee stealing luggage on a taxpayer funded trip to Las Vegas for Biden to fire anyone on his team.
And the only official held accountable under Biden following the Afghanistan debacle was a Marine lieutenant colonel whose sole transgression was calling for accountability from his senior leaders over the mission’s failure. He was relieved of command, thrown in the brig, and ultimately forced to retire without a pension after 17 years of distinguished service.
Thanks to Biden, Austin faced no such reckoning for the hasty and disorganized Afghanistan withdrawal that cost the lives of 13 brave U.S servicemen and women. Ditto for the record-low recruiting that many attribute to his focus on woke policy reforms, kicking out thousands of military personnel for not taking the COVID vaccine, or crimping core military capabilities by mandating that all U.S. military vehicles be electric by 2030, amid other failures.
Without question, Lloyd Austin deserves blame for his total desertion from service this week, but more than anything, his unexcused absence points squarely to Biden’s weak leadership on national security overall, and his decision not to hold senior officials responsible for their missteps over the last three years.
Mr. Ullyot is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former National Security Council spokesman.
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