Pentagon officials discuss how to respond if Trump issues controversial orders

() – Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Defense Department would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops to the country and lay off large swaths of personnel who do not belong to any political party, Defense officials said. to .

Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to fill the federal government with loyalists and “cleanse the federal government of corrupt actors.” establishment of American national security.

Officials are now considering several scenarios as they prepare for a Pentagon review.

“We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we still don’t know how this is going to play out,” said a defense official.

Trump’s election has also raised questions within the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an illegal order, particularly if his political appointees within the department do not object.

“The military is required by law to disobey illegal orders,” another defense official said. “But the question is what happens then: will we see resignations of senior military leaders? Or would they see it as abandoning their people?”

It is unclear at this time who Trump will choose to lead the Pentagon, although officials believe Trump and his team will try to avoid the type of “hostile” relationship he had with the military during his last administration, a former defense official said. served under Trump.

“The relationship between the White House and the Department of Defense was very, very bad, and that’s why… I know it’s the most important thing for how they’re going to select the people they put in the Department of Defense this time,” the former official said. .

Defense officials are also scrambling to identify civilian employees who could be affected if Trump reinstates so-called “Schedule F,” an executive order he first issued in 2020 that, if enacted, would have reclassified huge swaths of federal employees. non-political career candidates throughout the US government to facilitate their dismissal.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Tuesday that “I fully believe our leaders will continue to do the right thing no matter what. “I also believe our Congress will continue to do the right thing to support our military.”

Most important to many defense officials is how Trump plans to wield American military power inside the country.

Trump said last month that the military should be used to handle what he called “the enemy within” and “radical left-wing lunatics.”

“I think it should be handled very easily, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if it’s really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen,” he added, referring to possible protests on Election Day.

Several former senior military officials who served under Trump have raised alarms in recent years about his authoritarian impulses, including former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and retired Gen. John Kelly, former general secretary of the Trump White House. Kelly said before the election that Trump fits “the general definition of a fascist” and that he spoke of the loyalty of Hitler’s Nazi generals.

There is not much the Pentagon can do to preemptively protect the force from potential abuse of power by a commander in chief. Defense Department lawyers can and do make recommendations to military leaders about the legality of orders, but there is no real legal safeguard preventing Trump from deploying American soldiers to police America’s streets.

A former senior Defense Department official who served under Trump said he believes it is likely that additional active-duty forces will be tasked with assisting Customs and Border Protection on the southern border.

There are already thousands of troops at the border, including active duty, National Guard and Reserves. The Biden administration sent 1,500 active-duty troops last year, and subsequently sent several hundred more.

But it is also possible, the former official said, that forces could be sent to American cities if they are asked to help with the mass deportation plan that Trump repeatedly mentioned on the campaign.

National law enforcement agencies “don’t have the personnel, they don’t have the helicopters, the trucks, the expedition capabilities” that the military brings, he said. But he stressed that the decision to send active-duty forces to American streets cannot be made lightly.

“You can never minimize it, you can never say with a straight face that it’s not a big deal. It is,” said the former senior official. “But it is the only way to address problems at their scale.”

Separately, an Army official told he could envision the Trump administration ordering several thousand more troops to support the border mission, but warned it could harm the military’s own preparedness to deal with threats. foreigners.

The president’s powers are especially broad if he chooses to invoke the Insurrection Act, which states that in certain limited circumstances related to the defense of constitutional rights, a president can unilaterally deploy troops to the country.

Another law known as Posse Comitatus aims to curb the use of the military to enforce laws unless authorized by Congress. But the law has exceptions for rebellion and terrorism, ultimately giving the president wide latitude to decide if and when to invoke the Insurrection Act.

Trump reportedly considered invoking the Act in 2020 to quell protests following the death of George Floyd.

“If the city or state refuses to take the necessary steps to defend the life and property of their residence, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly resolve the problem for them,” he said at the time.

In a video released last year, Trump said he would “immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove dishonest bureaucrats…we will clean up every corrupt actor in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus, and there are many” if was re-elected.

The Pentagon is already preparing for the policy change.

“My email has been inundated on this issue,” one defense official said of the so-called Schedule F. “It’s definitely going to be a busy couple of months.”

After Trump first issued Schedule F late in his last term, the Pentagon and other federal agencies were tasked with making lists of which employees would move into that category. At the time, Defense officials tried to include as few civilian employees as possible to limit the impact on the workforce, the sources said. The department is now making similar lists.

The Office of Personnel and Management issued a rule in April that sought to strengthen the guardrails that protect federal employees. But “there are still ways a new administration could work around these protections,” a Defense official said, although it could take several months to do so.

Austin has repeatedly warned about the risk of political abuse by the military. In July, he said in a memo that it is “necessary to ensure the integrity and continuity of the civilian workforce by ensuring that Department of Defense career civilian employees, like their uniformed counterparts, are protected from illegal and other inappropriate political meddling.” ”.

Austin added that career officials are tasked with “maintaining strict political neutrality centered on loyalty to the Constitution and the laws of the United States.”

And on Wednesday, he wrote in a message to forces that the US military will only obey lawful orders.

“As it always has, the US military will stand ready to carry out the policy decisions of its next Commander in Chief, and to obey all lawful orders from its civilian chain of command,” he wrote. “You are the United States Army, the greatest fighting force on Earth, and you will continue to defend our country, our Constitution, and the rights of all our citizens.”

– ‘s Oren Liebermann contributed to this report.