Lloyd Austin after being nominated by President-elect Joe Biden in Delaware on Dec. 9

WASHINGTON: The Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a confirmation hearing for Lloyd Austin, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for Secretary of Defense, on Jan. 19 — one day before Biden and VP Kamala Harris take the oath of office on the very steps where Trump insurrectionists swarmed yesterday.  

That should mean Austin would be able to move into the Pentagon soon after Biden is sworn in, depending on Congressional approval. The SASC hearing was announced late this afternoon by incoming chairman Sen. Jack Reed, who will take over the gavel now that Democrats won control of the Senate.

Trump nominees Jim Mattis and John Kelly, the administration’s first Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, were confirmed by the Senate just hours after Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2017, when lawmakers marched straight from the inauguration festivities to cast their votes, but the timeline for any vote on Austin remains unclear.

It was originally thought Austin’s hearing would be delayed until after the inauguration, since the House and Senate were expected to be in recess next week. But the committee will press forward.

Originally, the House Armed Services Committee said they wanted Austin to testify there before he went to the SASC. They wanted him to explain why he should be granted a waiver to serve, as he hasn’t been out of uniform the legally mandated seven years. 

But the Biden team pressed the issue. “President-elect Joe Biden will be sworn in on January 20th and the American people rightfully expect the Senate to confirm his crisis-tested, qualified, history-making cabinet nominees as quickly as possible,” Biden transition spokesman Ned Price said in an email today. “With so much at stake, we can’t afford to waste any time when it comes to leading the response to the deadly coronavirus crisis, putting Americans back to work, and protecting our national security.”

Reed will have a bit of a tightrope to talk next week; he had vowed not to grant a waiver a second time to allow a recently retired military officer to serve as secretary, after he voted to allow the waiver for Jim Mattis to assume the post in 2017.

“Waiving the law should happen no more than once in a generation,” Reed, a West Point graduate and former Army Ranger, said at the time. “Therefore, I will not support a waiver for future nominees.”

With time running out before Jan. 20, both the Biden team and Pentagon officials confirmed to Breaking Defense today that meetings between them resumed this week, after they were abruptly cancelled on Dec. 18 by Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, angering Biden transition officials.

Miller called it a “mutually-agreed upon holiday pause;” the Biden team flatly rejected that. “There was no mutually agreed-upon holiday break,” Yohannes Abraham, a Biden spokesman, said at the time.

One area where the transition appears to be moving smoothly is the Pentagon acquisition portfolio, where Ellen Lord, undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, has been meeting with the Biden-Harris DOD Agency Review Team since Dec. 7. DoD spokesperson Jessica Matthews said “either she or members of her staff have met with the ART on twelve other occasions, and there are multiple scheduled meetings with the ART upcoming.” Lord’s office has also responded to more than a dozen requests for information, including several related to COVID-19.

The acquisition portfolio is one that is receiving particular scrutiny, as the DoD’s modernization efforts might be stressed given flat budgets for the foreseeable future.

“We expect a negative reaction about the outlook for defense spending but think this will be overdone and be corrected later in the year,” Cowen Research Group analyst Roman Schweizer said in a note to investors Wednesday. “But, for the time being, defense will be talked about as a potential bill payer for a range of things. Ultimately, we don’t think the Biden Admin or prominent/moderate House and Senate Dems will support slashing defense.”

The Trump administration drafted a $759 billion 2022 defense budget which was released in part last month, calling to eliminate the entire Overseas Contingency Operations account, trim 1,300 soldiers from the Army and massively swell Navy shipbuilding accounts, but it’s not clear what changes the Biden administration will make to that plan.

Overall, however, the transition effort got off to an uncommonly late start on Nov. 24 after the General Services Administration finally issued its decision that Biden had won the election. That delay set the whole process back weeks, and both sides have been working to catch up ever since. The multiple firings and resignations after the election haven’t helped things along, with Trump firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper and his chief of staff and installing Miller as the acting head of the department, with Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as Miller’s chief of staff.