The Daily Fuckup

The Pentagon spent another late-2020 week behaving as though the transfer of power were some optional administrative chore instead of one of government’s most basic duties. On Dec. 18, Defense Secretary Christopher Miller moved to postpone roughly forty planned meetings between Defense Department officials and the incoming Biden transition team until after Jan. 1, 2021. That may have been easy to dress up as a scheduling matter, a matter of organization, or simply the result of a holiday calendar that had gotten crowded. But in the context of a national security transition, the decision landed as something much more loaded: one more sign that an outgoing Trump appointee was willing to make the handoff harder than it needed to be. At a moment when the next administration was supposed to be getting up to speed on military operations, personnel, intelligence sensitivities, and potential flashpoints around the world, the Pentagon chose to slow the process down. That was not some harmless bureaucratic pause. It was a choice with practical consequences for how much time the incoming team would have to absorb the information it needed before taking command.

The stakes are especially high at the Defense Department, where transition delays are not just inconvenient; they can affect how safely and smoothly the government changes hands. Incoming civilian leaders need to understand ongoing operations, budget pressures, command structure, personnel issues, and whatever crises may already be simmering before they arrive. They need access to classified briefings, a chance to ask detailed questions, and enough runway to sort out what is still in motion and what requires immediate decisions after inauguration. Every day lost to delay means less time for that process to happen in a controlled, responsible way. No one was claiming that moving a round of meetings by a couple of weeks would suddenly cripple national security. But the whole purpose of a transition is to reduce the risk that gaps in knowledge or communication create problems at exactly the wrong moment. If the outgoing administration can keep the next team waiting for basic access, then even small delays start to matter. And when the institution in question is the Pentagon, small delays are never just about calendars.

The political setting made the move look worse than it might have in isolation. By mid-December, Donald Trump was still refusing to concede the election and continuing to push unsupported claims of fraud, even as courts and election officials found no evidence that would overturn the result. That broader refusal to accept the outcome gave every act of resistance from the outgoing administration an uglier cast. Instead of appearing like ordinary bureaucratic caution, delays and roadblocks looked like part of a larger effort to slow, complicate, and punish the incoming team. Miller’s decision did not have to be dramatic to fit into that pattern. It only had to be another example of the same basic instinct: make cooperation conditional, shrink the window for preparation, and leave the new administration with less information than it should have had. Defenders of the move could argue that the Pentagon was trying to manage the flow of briefings in an orderly way, or that the schedule needed to be adjusted for practical reasons. But the public meaning of the delay was hard to separate from the political reality around it. In a period defined by Trump’s refusal to accept defeat, almost any brake applied to the transition was going to be read as another act of sabotage, and this one fit that reading uncomfortably well.

That is why the criticism was immediate and why the delay carried significance beyond the narrow question of meeting calendars. A serious presidential transition assumes that the country’s interests come before partisan grudges, particularly when it comes to national security. The Defense Department depends on continuity, and continuity depends on open communication between outgoing officials, career staff, and the incoming team that will soon inherit responsibility. When meetings are pushed off, the burden does not fall only on the Biden transition. It also falls on the people inside the Pentagon who are trying to keep the machinery of government running while political chaos swirls around them. It sends a signal, too, about what the outgoing administration thinks matters. If the goal was simply to buy time, the effect was still to narrow the runway for the next team. If the goal was to slow the handoff and make it more difficult, then the move was more than bureaucratic sluggishness. Either way, it reinforced the sense that the final stretch of Trump’s presidency was being defined by friction, spite, and refusal rather than responsibility. The country was headed toward a new administration whether Trump appointees liked it or not, and the moment called for basic institutional seriousness. Instead, the Pentagon gave the transition one more unnecessary obstacle, and in doing so turned a routine set of briefings into another small but telling chapter in the post-election sabotage that was still rolling on.