Politico

The White House on Tuesday sought to minimize the impact of congressional testimony from top military officials that contradicted President Joe Biden’s past assertions that he was not urged to keep thousands of troops in Afghanistan.

“I think it’s important for the American people to know that these conversations don’t happen in black and white, like you’re in the middle of a movie,” press secretary Jen Psaki said during the daily press briefing.

Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, who commands U.S. Central Command, told members of the Senate Armed Services committee earlier Tuesday that he recommended maintaining a force of roughly 2,500 troops in Afghanistan earlier this year.

McKenzie also acknowledged discussing with Biden a similar recommendation to leave a few thousand troops on the ground from Gen. Scott Miller, the commander of U.S. Forces Afghanistan until July. Miller detailed that recommendation to Congress in closed testimony last week.

“I was present when that discussion occurred and I am confident that the president heard all the recommendations and listened to them very thoughtfully,” McKenzie testified Tuesday.

Just prior to the briefing, Psaki pointed to part of Biden’s mid-August interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in which the president acknowledged that military advisers were “split” on whether to leave a residual force in Afghanistan rather than having the U.S. completely withdraw.

“There was a range of viewpoints, as was evidenced by their testimony today, that were presented to the president, that were presented to his national security team, as would be expected,” Psaki told reporters Tuesday.

However, also during the interview Psaki cited, Stephanopoulos pressed Biden directly on the matter: “So no one told — your military advisers did not tell you, ‘No, we should just keep 2,500 troops. It’s been a stable situation for the last several years. We can do that. We can continue to do that’?”

Biden replied: “No. No one said that to me that I can recall.”

Nevertheless, the Biden administration has held firm in its belief that pulling out of Afghanistan was the correct decision, even amid withering criticisms from both sides of the aisle over the chaos that unfolded during the operation, a posture that Psaki reiterated from the podium Tuesday.

“He did not think it was in the interest of the American people, or the interest of our troops,” to keep forces in Afghanistan, she said.

She also downplayed the divergence between the testimony of military leaders and the White House on the withdrawal strategy, saying that Biden was not looking for “a bunch of yes men and women.”

“Ultimately, regardless of the advice, it’s his decision,” Psaki said.

Former President Donald Trump cannot enforce a nondisclosure agreement with former confidant Omarosa Manigault Newman, an arbitrator ruled late last week.

The arbitrator, Andrew Brown, wrote that the terms of the agreement were “vague, indefinite, and therefore void and unenforceable.”

The agreement “effectively imposes on Respondent an obligation to never say anything remotely critical of Mr. Trump, his family or his family members’ businesses for the rest of her life,” Brown wrote in the decision dated Sept. 24.

“Such a burden is certainly unreasonable.”

Trump, via his campaign organization, targeted Manigault Newman after she wrote a confessional book about her tenure serving in the White House as communications director for the Office of the Public Liaison. She had been a mainstay in Trump’s orbit for years before he entered politics, first as a contestant on “The Apprentice” TV show and later as an executive in his eponymous company.

“Donald has used this type of vexatious litigation to intimidate, harass and bully for years! Finally the bully has met his match!” she said in a statement.

Brown dismissed the Trump campaign’s argument that Manigault Newman — commonly referred to by her first name — revealed confidential information in her book and other public statements.

“The statements do not disclose hard data such as internal polling results or donor financial information. Rather, they are for the most part simply expressions of unflattering opinions, which are deemed ‘confidential information’ based solely upon the designation of Mr. Trump,” he wrote.

Trump has long wielded nondisclosure agreements as a cudgel against embarrassing revelations from disaffected associates, both in his business and political operations. However they have struggled to hold up under legal scrutiny, given their often broad scope.

Earlier this year a federal judge ruled that one such NDA was so sweepingly vague as to be unenforceable under New York state law amid a dispute with Trump’s former Hispanic outreach director, Jessica Denson, who had accused the campaign of sex discrimination in separate litigation.

The Trump campaign had tried to distinguish between Denson’s case and Manigault Newman’s, though the arbitrator found that argument unconvincing as Trump’s side “offers no basis for drawing this distinction.”

“While the decision of the Denson case is not binding precedent, the Arbitator finds it persuasive and in line with principles of New York contract law,” Brown wrote in his ruling.

President Joe Biden discussed the possibility of raising the debt ceiling via budget reconciliation on Monday evening on a telephone call with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the latest sign that Democrats are searching for a way around entrenched GOP opposition.

No final decision was made on the call, according to two Democrats familiar with the conversation. Senate Republicans on Monday evening blocked Biden and congressional leaders’ plan to raise the debt ceiling through the midterms and fund the government into December, leaving Democrats fuming and searching for a way to avoid a shutdown on Friday and a default in October.

Schumer has been walking his caucus through how cumbersome the process of using the arcane budget reconciliation process to raise the debt ceiling could be and the many pitfalls ahead if leaders choose to follow that route. Schumer has warned his caucus that the gambit would be “burdensome and untenable,” according to one of the Democrats.

Senate Democrats also might need to cancel a mid-October recess to raise the debt ceiling on their own via reconciliation, which allows the party to avoid a GOP filibuster but would require negotiations with the parliamentarian and some degree of cooperation from Republicans. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell confidently predicted that Democrats will raise the debt ceiling “because we always do,” though typically both parties support an increase.

“I know the country is not going to default. I know they have the votes to do this,” McConnell said in an interview. “I don’t have any doubt that they will take care of this.”

But Schumer has more plans in mind for filleting Republicans as the party of “default” and may force them to vote a second time on the House-passed funding and debt proposal they blocked on Monday. House leaders are also considering passing a spending bill that leaves out the debt limit and sending the Senate a stand-alone debt limit bill in the coming days.

Pelosi told Democrats that “there might be a timely vote” on the debt limit as soon as this week and asked if there’s anyone in her caucus “who will not vote to preserve the full faith and credit in the United States,” according to Democratic sources.

Though he is beset by turmoil overseas, confronting chaos at the border and struggling to contain a deadly pandemic back home, the president’s main challenge this week comes from his own party.

With his economic and domestic policy agenda on the line, President Joe Biden needs a big win from his fellow Democrats, whose early unity around his presidency has been strained in recent months. Biden’s now trying to win it back. From Camp David, he worked the phones with lawmakers over the weekend, urging them to support the multi-trillion spending package party leaders are looking to pass this month. Senior adviser Steve Ricchetti, Biden top economic adviser Brian Deese, another economic adviser, David Kamin and the White House’s legislative affairs team led by Louisa Terrell lobbied lawmakers too, visiting the Hill, calling members and holding Zoom sessions with them.

Allies are spending another $4 million in ads starting this week urging unity around two massive spending plans, according to numbers made available to POLITICO by Climate Power & the League of Conservation Voters. And Build Back Together, an outside group closely aligned with the White House, is pushing out messaging to local media outlets, which it views as the most trusted news, asking Democrats to convey that Biden’s economic plans are “popular, popular, popular,” according to the group’s talking points, the toplines of which stress middle class tax cuts, jobs and making the wealthiest Americans and corporations pay more.

Collectively, it is a throw-everything-at-the-wall attempt to push through a $3.5 trillion Democrat-only social and climate spending plan along with a bipartisan infrastructure package with a $550 billion price tag. And it illustrates the sense of desperation that has taken over the party as those agenda items seem painfully close to failing in Congress.

The impact on Democrats if they come up short: “Disastrous,” said John Podesta, a veteran Democrat and former counselor to Barack Obama.

“You need all three of those things” to have any hope of keeping their majorities in the 2022 midterms, Podesta said, referring to the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion Covid relief package that passed in the spring, as well as the two pending plans. “If you pull out the fact that when Democrats were in control they couldn’t do anything for you, then drawing attention to how wacky the Republicans have become doesn’t mean a lot.”

Inside the White House, the tension heading into this week is palpable, aides and allies said.

The president’s approval numbers have been stuck in the mid-40s for weeks. Each attempt at recalibration on its pandemic response – the main force driving down his numbers – has been overshadowed by other world events, from the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan to the troubling scenes of Haitian migrants gathering at the southern border.

Hungry for progress on the domestic front, the White House is now in a compromising state of mind. The president has made it clear he is willing to accept less than the $3.5 trillion that has been the sticker price for his Build Back Better plan, even as his aides publicly say that the cost will ultimately be nothing since it will all be paid for.

Inside the White House, the goal increasingly is to simply get the package over the goal line.

“They need a win,” said Amanda Loveday, senior adviser with Unite the Country, a pro-Biden super PAC, pointing to Afghanistan, the economy, and turmoil at the U.S. border on top of the pandemic. “They’re all connected. If you’re able to get more Americans vaccinated, you’re able to see the economy continue to grow. All of it is an intersecting web, the nucleus is a better America for the people of this country.”

Where the White House finds optimism is in the experience of its staff. A person familiar with the White House’s thinking noted that those in charge of ultimately cutting the deals, like Ricchetti, have been in tough legislative battles in past administrations and even earlier this year.

“They understand that until the vote has been cast, they should be worried,” the person said. “That was the case with the rescue plan, that was the case with the bipartisan infrastructure deal coming together, that was the case with the budget resolutions and that is going to be the case with both of these bills. That until the votes have actually been cast, they’ll be working as hard as they can to make sure they do pass.”

But few legislative vehicles are as complicated to pass as the current package, which relies on progressives and moderates in the party to find commonality on massive domestic spending and taxation policy while trusting each other’s motivations. Democratic allies of the White House said this past week that they feared the president’s team had been caught off guard by the stalemate between the two sides of the party and was playing a massive game of catch up with House votes slated on both the infrastructure component and reconciliation bill this week.

In anticipation of those votes, new ads funded by Climate Power and the League of Conservation Voters — two of the most aggressive champions of the climate components of the reconciliation bill — will go live on TV and digitally this week. The new spending is in addition to $9 million in ads the groups have already been aired in key districts. Rep. Kathleen Rice’s (D-N.Y.) New York district and Rep. Stephanie Murphy’s (D-FL) Florida district are among those targeted with ads underscoring the need to tackle climate change.

A Tuesday news conference held by Climate Power and League of Conservation Voters will

will also amplify messaging that ties climate change to the economic packages. Reps. Sharice Davids (D-KS), Steven Horsford (D-NV), Andy Kim (D-NJ), Susie Lee (NV-03), Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), and Lauren Underwood (D-IL) are set to join the groups.

Last week, Podesta sent a memo to every Democratic congressional office warning the party could lose its majority if lawmakers didn’t coalesce around a bigger spending package. He also pushed for the need to act on the climate while underscoring the political realities that would keep various Democratic factions from getting what they wanted. It was a major turn for Podesta, who earlier this year had urged the White House to not hold out for Republicans on an infrastructure package.

Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who regularly helps run focus groups that look at issues facing the White House, downplayed Biden’s dropping polling numbers as a typical consequence of the realities of governing.

“Anyone who has thought that initial polling numbers at the start of the administration would hold for four years doesn’t understand the partisan climate in which we live,” he said.

But Biden’s numbers – with a Gallup poll last week putting him at just 43 percent approval — remain a concern both in the White House and among Democrats facing tough midterms next year. Donald Trump’s Gallup approval was in the upper 30s at this time in 2017 and Republicans took a pummeling in the midterms the following year.

Still, Ferguson said in the samplings he’s seen, Americans are pointing more and more to “a faction of the minority” they blame for holding back the country’s progress on Covid. “The biggest imperative going forward,” he said, “is to now show he is successfully solving these problems and at the same time when they can’t be solved, making clear who’s to blame.”

With reporting by Sam Stein

Staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are increasingly reluctant to join the agency’s pandemic response team, citing debilitating burnout and fatigue after 19 months of fighting Covid-19.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is trying to build up the response team after paring it down last spring as part of a broader agency reorganization amid optimism the pandemic would ebb. But with the rise of the Delta variant, and projections that cases and hospitalizations could begin to rise again this fall and winter, Walensky is again asking agency staff to help — a plea many are spurning.

POLITICO spoke with five CDC officials, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss internal agency matters more freely. While the CDC has played a central role in the U.S. fight against Covid-19 for nearly two years, sources said the last several months have been particularly difficult. They described an intense summer marked by demands to digest complex data in record time as the government raced to update policies on vaccines, masks and travel in the face of Delta.

Many of the epidemiologists, scientists and statisticians on the CDC’s Covid-19 response team — which collects and analyzes Covid-19 data, drafts scientific reports and coordinates agency policy recommendations — have been putting in 15-hour days since the pandemic began. Some of its dozens of members are also continuing to work on non-pandemic topics.

“It’s been really difficult for people and with Delta, it just felt like we were back at the start of things,” one CDC official said. “And not everyone wants to work on the pandemic response because they know how crazy things are and what long hours they would have to pull. So that means that others who have already put in their time have to continue working.”

The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.

The reports of burnout highlight the extent to which the CDC is struggling to maintain productivity and morale at one of the most pivotal and confusing moments of the pandemic. They also raise questions about the agency’s ability to recruit qualified scientists and leaders to help handle the increased Covid-19 workload that health experts say will come when Americans begin to gather indoors for the holidays, driving up new infections. The agency is also expected to weigh in on the appropriateness of vaccines for young children and any expansion of the nation’s booster rollout.

In the meantime, the Delta variant is already causing devastating spikes in hospitalizations and deaths across an ever-expanding swath of the country. The Biden administration is grappling with how to contain the current outbreak and how to fend off potential future surges.

Senior health officials have in recent weeks debated various ways for the U.S. to protect itself, most notably by expanding the use of booster shots. The CDC sits at the center of that conversation, and the pandemic response team’s work is often used as the basis for major White House Covid-19 policy decisions. Officials inside the agency are in charge of gathering data on vaccines’ performance over time to help predict what the Covid-19 situation will look like in the weeks and months ahead.

State health departments are also asking the CDC for more help tracking and understanding Delta as well as breakthrough infections in vaccinated people. The CDC is under an unusual amount of pressure to not only help local officials across the country manage the spread of the latest, most transmissible variant, but also to provide the administration with greater clarity on whether and how it should prepare for additional spikes in cases.

Of particular interest to senior health officials is determining whether Covid-19 is here to stay and what policies and recommendations the U.S. government should develop to help Americans protect themselves in the long term.

While CDC officials said they know employees at other federal agencies are also struggling with the demands of fighting Covid-19 seven days a week, they said that pressure on their agency has ratcheted up as Delta has taken over. The White House in particular has pushed the CDC to increase the pace of their Covid-19 analyses, with an eye to how Delta may be changing the rules of the pandemic.

The agency has ramped up its studies on vaccine efficacy over the last two months in an attempt to guide the administration’s decisions on boosters. Several CDC officials, as well as two other senior administration officials, said the agency’s employees have felt pressure to collect, analyze and release data on vaccine performance before it was ready for publication, particularly in the race to meet President Joe Biden’s goal of giving out booster shots to most adults starting the week of Sept. 20.

The agency was once again the spotlight Friday as Walensky overruled the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel to endorse giving Pfizer and BioNTech’s booster shot to people with significant on-the-job Covid-19 exposure, along with the elderly, nursing home residents and younger people with health conditions that increase their risk of severe illness.

Another senior administration official familiar with the matter said the CDC has long struggled to share data with the rest of the federal government in a timely manner. The White House and federal officials working on the government’s Covid-19 response this summer pushed the CDC to share its domestic vaccine efficacy data so they could compare it to the data from Israel that showed the vaccine’s protection waning over time.

Henry Walke is the incident manager for the CDC’s Covid-19 response and also directs the agency’s division of preparedness and emerging infections. The pandemic response team he oversees draws from the CDC’s more than 20,000 employees and contractors.

In the spring, Walensky moved to consolidate several Covid-19 task forces under Walke’s leadership, including most of the groups working on vaccines. Walensky moved other officials off of the pandemic response team, including former top CDC respiratory official Nancy Messonnier, in an attempt to streamline the pandemic task force’s work. During the same period, Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s former principal deputy director, announced that she was retiring.

The reorganization came at a time when vaccinations were increasing sharply across the country and the administration was preparing to push reopening and a return to normalcy this summer.

Over the past two months, the agency has struggled to respond to Delta and is in the process of trying to staff task forces working under Walke. Senior officials inside the agency have recently sent notices internally asking for additional volunteers.

“I think it is going to take a while to find people who want to help and who have the ability to help right now,” another CDC official said. “We have to gear up for what is probably coming this winter.”

The rocky U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is imperiling Congress’ plans to repeal the war authorization that sent American troops to the Middle East in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Lawmakers have reached bipartisan agreement on repealing two war authorizations that set up U.S. military presences in the region — the first passed in 1991, during the first Gulf War, and the second in 2002 — but the tumultuous politics of Afghanistan is making repeal of a 2001 authorization thornier than expected. Congress wants to revise that war authorization, but the Biden administration’s pullout from Afghanistan has complicated the question of how to do it.

Here’s the conundrum: The administration has said counterterrorism efforts in the region will continue despite the U.S. withdrawal. President Joe Biden himself declared last month that “the fundamental obligation of a president, in my opinion, is to defend and protect America — not against threats of 2001, but against the threats of 2021 and tomorrow.” Some lawmakers, however, say Biden doesn’t have the authority to do that without a new version of the 2001 war authorization.

“I’m all for allowing the administration to use force when it’s needed. But it’s got to be authorized by Congress, and today they really don’t have an authorization that’s relevant to what they’re doing,” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), a senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime proponent of repealing the 2001 authorization.

Biden’s plans for a new phase of the war on terror, lawmakers in both parties say, only underscores the importance of revising the 2001 authorization for the use of military force — or AUMF — that gave then-President George W. Bush broad power to attack those who orchestrated the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Yet it could be months before they can agree with the White House on a new framework, especially as the Senate and House undertake sweeping investigations into what went wrong in Afghanistan.

The collapse of Afghanistan, Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) said, “underscores the importance of making sure that we maintain those authorities that are laid out in the 2001 AUMF.”

“I think there’s going to be a real near-term focus on making sure that Congress re-asserts its control over the time and the manner in which we make war, but I think folks will be apprehensive about revisiting the 2001 AUMF,” predicted Young, the GOP’s leading voice on AUMF reform. “There have to be legal authorities like those under the 2001 AUMF that allow this and future administrations to carry out a war on terror.”

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who has been leading AUMF talks with the White House, said in an interview that “the change — the absence of combat operations in Afghanistan — that’s a new circumstance and a new fact, so we have to contemplate the current reality on the revision.”

The effort on the 2001 AUMF doesn’t quite need to be paused, Kaine said, because Congress is first looking at the best path forward on repealing authorizations for troops in Iraq from 1991 and 2002, moves already approved by the House.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has committed to a floor vote on those repeal measures that’s likely to occur next month, according to senators and aides familiar with the timeline. With at least 10 Republicans already publicly in favor of repealing those two AUMFs for Iraq, the Senate is likely to pass them.

But even the Republicans amenable to scaling back presidential war powers, such as Young, aren’t eager to jump-start talks on the 2001 AUMF.

Some believe the recent events in Afghanistan — which saw the Biden administration forced to scramble to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies amid the Taliban’s rapid takeover of the country — have strengthened Congress’ hand and will make it more difficult for the Biden administration to get what it wants in the AUMF negotiations.

Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he has been working on a replacement AUMF with the panel’s chairman, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.). He hopes to reach an agreement after the committee hears from military and intelligence officials about the current terror threat landscape.

The priority for Republicans in those negotiations, according to McCaul, is to find a new country in the region to house counterterrorism operations in a way that maintains intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities for Afghanistan. That would give the U.S. “eyes and ears” in the country for a “real-time response” to terror threats, McCaul said.

Officials and congressional aides involved in the talks said the goal is to focus the rewritten 2001 AUMF on specific terror groups rather than specific countries. That could give Biden and future presidents the authority to go after extremist groups that metastasize into other countries in the region, as has occurred with al Qaeda, ISIS and various Iran-backed militia groups that have targeted American troops and interests.

Kaine, a Foreign Relations and Armed Services committee member, said “a redrafted version of the 2001 AUMF should specifically include ISIS” and ISIS-K, the Afghanistan-based affiliate of the terror group. ISIS-K orchestrated last month’s suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. servicemembers.

Still, as members of both parties push the Biden administration to develop a counterterrorism plan for the region, they’re finding their leverage over the White House is shrinking given that top military officials have already committed to using existing authorities — such as the 2001 AUMF — to continue going after terrorists in Afghanistan.

That’s despite the reality that the legal underpinning for presidential wartime authorities has mostly been on autopilot for the last 20 years. For example, Congress has never formally voted to authorize military force against ISIS, but presidents from both parties have used the 2001 AUMF to justify operations targeting the terror group, even though it didn’t exist in 2001.

“Part of the problem was Congress never took another vote on Afghanistan after 2001. This can only be fixed if we overhaul war powers authorities,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said.

Murphy, who chairs the Foreign Relations subcommittee for the Middle East, recently introduced a bipartisan bill that would in part force the modernization of all existing AUMFs. Biden’s support for repealing outdated AUMFs has given Democrats hope that the president, who once chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will work with lawmakers to overhaul the 2001 AUMF after the 1991 and 2002 authorizations are undone.

Another reason that could get messy, however, is the Taliban — which now controls Afghanistan. The U.S. may have to coordinate its counterterrorism efforts with the Taliban given the mutual interest in eliminating the ISIS threat, which would even more severely roil the debate over repealing a third AUMF.

The Biden administration has said it is too early to determine whether to have diplomatic relations with the Taliban, which could require the U.S. to formally recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government. But Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said it was “possible” that the U.S. will coordinate with the Taliban to attack ISIS-K and suggested any such cooperation would depend on the militant group’s behavior moving forward.

“This is a ruthless group from the past,” Milley said of the Taliban. “Whether or not they change remains to be seen.”

President Joe Biden acknowledged Wednesday his administration should have consulted with the French government before announcing a new trilateral security pact with the United Kingdom and Australia, which saw Australia renege on a multibillion-dollar submarine deal with France.

According to a joint statement released by the White House describing a phone call between Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron — which the statement noted came at Biden’s request — the two leaders “agreed that the situation would have benefitted from open consultations among allies on matters of strategic interest to France and our European partners. President Biden conveyed his ongoing commitment in that regard.”

The statement also announced plans for Biden and Macron to meet in Europe at the end of October, as well as Macron’s decision that French Ambassador to the United States Philippe Étienne would return to his post in Washington next week. The envoy had been recalled on Friday amid the diplomatic row.

“The two leaders have decided to open a process of in-depth consultations, aimed at creating the conditions for ensuring confidence and proposing concrete measures toward common objectives,” the statement said, adding that Biden and Macron’s planned meeting next month was intended “to reach shared understandings and maintain momentum in this process.”

The conversation between the American and French presidents appeared to mark a deescalation in what has been one of the most tumultuous periods of the U.S.-French relationship in recent memory — an episode during which the United States’ oldest ally openly criticized the Biden administration for not making Macron’s government aware of the Australia-United Kingdom-U.S. partnership sharing American nuclear submarine technology.

Penny Pritzker and Ashton Carter, two former Obama Cabinet members, were named to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the White House announced Wednesday.

The two are among 30 experts who will advise the president on matters related to science and technology.

Pritzker served as the 38th secretary of Commerce during former President Barrack Obama’s second term in office. She served from 2013 to 2017.

In her tenure, Pritzker launched the Department of Commerce’s first initiative for skilled workforce training, and helped expand broadband coverage to underserved and rural communities.

Pritzker is the chair and founder of PSP Partners, a global private investment firm, and chair of the Board of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Carter was the 25th secretary of defense under Obama, replacing Chuck Hagel in 2015. He had previously served as deputy secretary of Defense.

During his time as Defense secretary, Carter focused on diversity in the armed forces by lifting the ban on transgender service members and opening up combat positions to women, in addition to helping the Defense Department’s “strategic pivot” to the Asia-Pacific.

Currently, Carter is the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a professor of technology and global affairs at Harvard.