The former head of the National Nuclear Security Administration is one of the hundreds of people who will be caught up in the Joe Biden administration’s purge of Pentagon advisory boards this month.
Ex-Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty got a spot on the Defense Policy Board during the eleventh hour of the Donald Trump administration, shortly after then-Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette demanded her resignation in what then-Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) characterized as an intra-agency vendetta.
Dismissed by one cabinet agency and picked up by another, it looked like Gordon-Hagerty might wind up with a direct line to the next administration, like most of her predecessors. Her term was supposed to be between two and four years long.
Then, not a week after inauguration day, the Biden administration announced a wholesale purge of Department of Defense advisory committees, explicitly including the Defense Policy Board. Trump packed the boards in the final months of his administration, to the consternation of many Democrats. Like many of the other Pentagon advisory boards, everyone on the Defense Policy Board gets the boot no later than Feb. 26.
That will include a few familiar names with deep nuclear-weapons policy experience, including former special assistant to President George W. Bush, Frank Miller and Bush 43’s ex-under secretary of state for arms control and international security, Robert Joseph.
Even the 97 year-old Henry Kissinger, one of the 13 people still listed as Defense Policy Board members at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, will be turned out, come the final week of February.
