What the Defense Secretary Austin Scandal Reveals About the Secretive Biden Administration

It’s bad enough that there are so many clashes happening around the world, but we’ve had to add in the fact that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin disappeared for days without anyone in the chain of command being alerted.

We now know that Secretary Austin has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and was hospitalized for a surgery to address the condition, for which he was put under general anesthesia. Days later, he developed an infection and severe pain requiring him to be transported by ambulance back to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

As of this column, he remains in the hospital and is reported to be in “good condition.” That’s good news, but in the process, some very serious issues regarding our government and the Biden administration have been revealed.

Now, the inspector general of the Department of Defense has announced an investigation into exactly what happened that allowed Austin’s hospitalization and incapacitation to be hidden from the White House, the president, the NSA, and even his own second in command, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. She had been handling the duties of the secretary of defense for at least two days from her vacation spot in Puerto Rico. Reports are that even she was kept in the dark about why she had been delegated the responsibility. This new DoD watchdog investigation joins congressional investigations already underway.

The statement from the DoD watchdog, however, gives us a hint about how this dangerous turn of everts will be minimized. In a memo announcing the investigation, they write: “The objective of the review is to examine the roles, processes, procedures, responsibilities, and actions related to the Secretary of Defense’s hospitalization in December 2023 – January 2024, and assess whether the DoD’s policies and procedures are sufficient to ensure timely and appropriate notifications and the effective transition of authorities as may be warranted due to health-based or other unavailability of senior leadership…” 

“Policies and procedures.” Got it. For this to be discussed as some sort of problem involving regulations and rulebooks is absurd. The country is not ten weeks old, we’ve been doing this now for almost 250 years. Are we supposed to believe that somebody just didn’t get the right memo and didn’t understand that it would be important for the Secretary of Defense, who is in a vital position regarding the chain of command on issues of war, the military, and the national security of the nation, to alert the president of the United States about his incapacitation?

Hardly.

Just today we have learned, finally, that the United states, in concert with the United Kingdom, have unleashed major strikes against the Hoothi, the Iranian proxy terrorist group in Yemen. They are responsible for several strikes against shipping in the Red Sea. That global shipping lane has now been frozen due to the untenable situation.

All of the investigations looking into the inexplicable suppression about Austin’s situation, must at some point not just address the how of the secrecy surrounding Austin’s condition and abilities, but the why of it. Former defense secretary and White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta was asked about the situation, and made an interesting observation: “There’s been a gradual deterioration here with regards to the role of the Cabinet. Because so much authority is centralized in the White House these days, the Cabinet really only comes together usually for a press briefing by the president.” He also noted that the Biden administration “dodged a bullet because if something had happened in that gap that was created, that could’ve been a serious event.”

What this sounds like to me is that everything is being run and micromanaged from the White House, and the cabinet is a bunch of cardboard cutouts propped up to placate the press and the American people.

Moreover, during a time of the war between our major ally Israel and Iranian proxy terrorist group Hamas, as Houthi terrorists were attacking our ships and troops, and our troops in the region were under constant assault resulting in dozens wounded, neither the president or anyone at the NSA had been contact with Austin for days. Meaning the secretary of defense was not a factor in major global military events, and no one noticed. This speaks to Panetta’s remark about “deterioration.”

In some ways, this was inevitable from an administration that behaved secretly from the beginning as President Biden’s own campaign in 2020 was managed from the basement, hidden from the media. Has the Biden administration’s reliance on secrecy, obfuscation, lies, and gaslighting, become the corporate culture of our government?

There is a reason why we elect people, and that is to make sure that we have representation in our republic, but also so that we can hold people accountable for what transpires under their watch. When an anonymous group of bureaucrats makes decisions involving life and death, whether it be about war or the erasure of the southern border, and all the other innumerable issues directly affecting our lives as citizens, we have the right to know who has done these things and then to reward or punish them for their success or failure.

The Austin scandal is not about him exclusively, but the inevitable result of a culture of groupthink and deterioration infecting the Biden administration while allowing our country and the world to collapse into chaos. There is no real cabinet as the bureaucratic state, faceless and unaccountable, appears to be running this country into the ground. Thank goodness we at least have the chance in November to say enough is enough.