Last-Minute Ukraine Aid, Protecting the Polar Bears: Joe Biden Races to Blunt the Impact of Trump

On January 20, 2025, Joe Biden will leave the White House. When he does, his successor will not be a person with whom he is ideologically aligned and who will continue the work he started over the past four years, but Donald Trump. Trump’s immediate priorities, as he told us on the campaign trail, are launching “the largest deportation operation in American history,” rolling back environmental regulations, revoking transgender student protections, pardoning individuals who took part in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and firing special counsel Jack Smith. (Later, he’ll likely get to Project 2025 priorities like taking an ax to abortion rights, which his MAGA allies admitted to after he won.) Trump has also claimed he will quickly end the Ukraine-Russia war in a way that critics fear will be extremely advantageous to his Kremlin pals.

All of which leaves Biden just over 70 days to try to blunt the impact of the 47th president. Obviously, there isn’t a lot the current president can do to protect the country (and the globe) from the policies the incoming commander in chief is set on implementing, but apparently he’s going to try—starting with Ukraine.

Per Politico:

The Biden administration is planning to rush the last of over $6 billion remaining in Ukraine security assistance out the door by Inauguration Day, as the outgoing team prepares for the weapons flow to end once President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

The plan, described by two administration officials who were granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, is the only option the White House has to keep sending equipment to Ukraine to fight off continued Russian offensives. But the problems are immense. It normally takes months for munitions and equipment to get to Ukraine after an aid package is announced, so anything rolled out in the coming weeks would likely not fully arrive until well into the Trump administration, and the next commander in chief could halt the shipments before they’re on the ground.

As Politico notes, another major holdup is that the weapons slated for Ukraine have to be manufactured, and as Mark Cancian, a former Defense Department budget official, told the outlet, “We have been sending whatever industry can produce each month, but the problem is you can only send these things as they are produced. The administration could dip into the stockpiles and send equipment more quickly, but it’s unclear the Pentagon would want to do that since it would affect its own readiness.”

Ukraine, of course, is no doubt hoping Biden does whatever he can to speed things up, knowing what’s likely coming in the next several months. “The first thing [Trump] would do is to roll back assistance to Ukraine,” Jim Townsend, a former top Pentagon official for NATO and Europe under Barack Obama, told Politico. “I would expect him to make a big show of that. He’d say ‘promise kept,’ but he’s going to halt it early, I’m certain of it.”

Elsewhere, the president is making moves to save the polar bears Trump nearly killed during his last term, and will likely go after again come January.

Per The Washington Post:

The Biden administration moved Wednesday to narrow the scope of an oil-and-gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that was mandated under President Donald Trump. The plan underscores how the Biden administration is racing to cement its environmental legacy mere hours after Trump secured a second term. Trump has vowed to boost oil drilling in the refuge, as part of broader plans to expand fossil fuel production on public lands across the country.

For nearly four decades, drilling was banned in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, whose 19.3 million acres provide critical habitat for the Southern Beaufort Sea’s remaining polar bears, along with tens of thousands of migrating caribou and waterfowl. But in 2017, Trump signed a tax bill mandating at least two lease sales in the refuge’s 1.6 million-acre coastal plain by the end of 2024. Two weeks before Trump left office in 2021, the Interior Department auctioned off the first of these leases to oil companies and an Alaska state agency.

The Biden administration later canceled those leases, arguing that the Interior Department had performed an “insufficient analysis” of the impact of drilling in the region. Now, with the clock ticking, it is trying to narrow the scope of the second lease while staying in the bounds of the 2017 law. On Wednesday, it said one “preferred alternative” would be to offer the minimum number of acres required by law, and avoiding, per the Post, “important habitat for polar bears and calving grounds for the Porcupine caribou herd, and minimizing harm to the subsistence activities of Alaska Native communities.”

For his part, the president-elect is obviously unbothered by the environmental impact of his drilling plans, having promised oil donors in May that he will expand drilling, and effectively approve whatever projects they want in a second term.

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