By Saqib Saleem Qureshi
Biden team debates how to ‘Trump-proof’ foreign policy
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Despondent Biden administration officials are mulling how to protect their national security priorities before president-elect Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office in January. Whether it’s sending funds to Ukraine or imposing new sanctions on extremist Israeli settlers, an array of options are on the table.
But there’s no formal plan yet for how to lock in President Joe Biden’s big-ticket policies against a Trump effort to dismantle them, a senior Biden administration official said.
Some administration officials also believe having such a plan won’t make a difference.
Trump is sure to quickly halt or reverse much of what Biden’s team manages to push through in these final months, multiple current and former U.S. officials said. He will have broad executive authority to do so, as well as enough support in Congress and in the judiciary that almost nothing will stop him.
“You really can’t ‘Trump-proof,’” one U.S. official said. “You can ‘Trump delay,’ you can throw sand in the gears, but there is no way short of legislation to ‘Trump-proof.’”
The official and others interviewed for this story were granted anonymity to candidly discuss sensitive issues that in some cases could affect their jobs.
The White House National Security Council and the Trump transition team did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Biden and his aides are taking steps already to do what they can to help Ukraine. For one thing, they are working feverishly to ship the Ukrainians the rest of the $6 billion left in weapons and equipment Congress appropriated to assist them as they fend off a brutal Russian invasion.
It’s not clear what Trump will do, if anything, to halt the weapons shipments and contracts with the U.S. defense industry for more air defense systems that will arrive in years to come. But the Pentagon will likely be unable to send everything it has pledged to bring those accounts down to zero by Inauguration Day, given that it takes weeks or months for munitions and other equipment to arrive in Ukraine once the U.S. announces it. And once Trump is in office, he could decide not to send Kyiv those weapons — even if they’ve already been promised.
The president-elect has suggested that he’ll pressure both Ukraine and Russia to come to a peace deal, which some Ukrainians fear means he’ll insist they allow Russia to keep the land it has taken from them.
Other areas where the Biden administration could seek to cement its changes include beefing up the refugee resettlement program or taking steps at the United Nations against Israeli settlements in the West Bank. But many, if not all, such moves would quickly be reversed by the Trump team.
During the final months of his first term, Trump had some success “Biden-proofing” his foreign policy. Trump and his team pushed through several decisions that — for political and other reasons — the Biden administration was unable or unwilling to reverse.
The Trump administration declared China’s crackdown on its Uyghur Muslim population a genocide, added Cuba to the state sponsor of terrorism list and designated the Houthi militant group in Yemen as a foreign terrorist organization.
Biden reversed a few of the last-minute moves, such as the Houthi designation, which had alarmed humanitarian groups that said it made it harder for them to get aid to Yemeni civilians.
But Biden left many other changes in place. His team reasoned that it would be politically unpalatable to do otherwise, and in some cases they didn’t entirely disagree with the move.
Leaving Cuba on the terrorism list was one case in which the politics in Florida — where many U.S. lawmakers try to appeal to hard-line Cuban voters — appeared to affect Biden’s decision.
That hesitation angers some Biden backers today, who say the president and his team should have taken a page from Trump: Act without fear of the consequences.
“They were bold and ambitious and willing to take risks. We were not,” the U.S. official said. “We could have overturned everything they did on day one.”
The U.S. official, echoing others, said the Biden administration won’t sit around “twiddling its thumbs” the next few months. But no one interviewed even hinted at some groundswell of spirited resistance.
“We are realistic about the limits of our power and the breadth and scope of the power that Donald Trump will inherit on day one,” the U.S. official said.
There are some areas in which Trump might agree with a last-minute Biden decision, such as anything that is tough on trade or the Chinese Communist Party.
There’s also the possibility that some last-minute Biden changes — such as, hypothetically, adding slots to a fellowship program — simply wouldn’t arouse passionate opposition in Trump’s team.
Trump showed that “last-minute changes can be locked in if the next administration is under pressure to keep some policies or doesn’t really care enough to undo them,” said one State Department official.
Still, the Trump team could also order a broad halt to any changes put in place in the final months. Some of Trump’s appointees will be returning to government with much more experience than last time, so they’ll have a better sense for how to make the bureaucracy bend to their will.
“They have sufficiently figured out how to run things how they want,” a former State Department official said.
The Biden administration’s discussions about what to do next come as Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday sent waves of fear through federal workers, most of whom, unlike political appointees, serve regardless of who is in the White House.
Trump aides have pledged to slash staff in places such as the State Department, hire only people who pledge loyalty to Trump himself and circumvent the Senate confirmation process if necessary to put political appointees in place. Already, some Trump allies have drafted lists of career government employees whom they want to see fired — something that happened last time he was president.
A second State Department official said there was a strange silence among many of his colleagues on Wednesday, which he ascribed to the notion that “We all know what this means: not good.”