Pentagon pauses meetings with Biden team as officials complain transition tasks are making them feel ‘overwhelmed’
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Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller ordered the Pentagon to cancel meetings with the Biden transition team, Axios reported Friday, revealing that a Pentagon official said that staff involved in the transition felt “overwhelmed.”
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The start of the transition was delayed by election disputes, limiting the time to complete necessary tasks. Pentagon officials also have other responsibilities outside of the transition.
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A defense official clarified parts of the Axios report, explaining that the Pentagon and the Biden transition team agreed to a break and that the canceled transition meetings are being rescheduled for after the holidays.
The Pentagon is temporarily pausing meetings with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team due to other demands and reportedly because some Department of Defense staff have felt “overwhelmed” by transition tasks.
Meetings originally scheduled for Friday were canceled, a defense official said Friday morning. Axios first reported the cancellations.
The defense official explained that Friday’s meetings were canceled due to competing priorities and are expected to be rescheduled for after the holidays, a two-week break starting Saturday that was agreed to by both the Pentagon and the Biden transition team.
While meetings are being canceled and rescheduled, other transition activities, such as answering requests for information and providing written materials, continue uninterrupted, the official explained.
Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller said in a statement Friday that since Nov. 23, the Department of Defense has conducted 139 interviews with 265 officials, responded to 161 requests for information, and provided 4,400 pages of controlled information and 900 pages of classified information in support of the transition.
Axios reporter Jonathan Swan, citing a senior Pentagon official, reported that the reason for the pause on transition meetings was because some of the Pentagon staff members involved in the transition feel “overwhelmed.”
Washington Post reporter Dan Lamothe, reported that there have sometimes been as many as 20 meetings per day, even as officials dealt with other demands, and that some people had raised concerns.
“We had fewer than two dozen remaining meetings on the schedule today and next week,” a Pentagon official told Axios, explaining that the department is “taking a knee” for a couple of weeks rather than having those meetings but is “still committed to a productive transition.”
The official said that “the DoD staff working the meetings were overwhelmed by the number of meetings,” adding that “these same senior leaders needed to do their day jobs and were being consumed by transition activities.”
The Trump administration delayed the start of the transition as the president disputed the results of the presidential election, forcing officials in federal departments and agencies involved in the transition process to scramble to hold all of the necessary meetings before Biden officially takes office on January 20.
Another potential challenge is that a number of senior leaders are also new to the Pentagon, including the acting defense secretary and the the senior official tasked with leading the transition.
Shortly after the election, the Pentagon experienced a major upheaval as the secretary of defense and his chief of staff, as well as the top policy and intelligence officials, departed, leaving vacant posts the Trump administration filled with loyalists.
Talking to Insider about the newcomers, a former Pentagon official said late last month that “the individuals being installed do not have the level of experience their predecessors did to assist with the transition.”
The former official said that the transition process would potentially be “hampered because you will have new people that don’t have that experience.”
In his statement on changes to the transition meetings, Miller said Friday that he is “committed to a full and transparent transition” because “this is what our nation expects and the DoD will deliver AS IT ALWAYS HAS.”
The acting secretary added that 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.”
Update: This post has been updated with more information on the moves at the Pentagon provided by a defense official and the acting secretary of defense.
Read the original article on Business Insider
