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WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Joe Biden will nominate retired four-star Army general Lloyd J. Austin to be secretary of defense, according to four people familiar with the decision. If confirmed by the Senate, Austin would be the first Black leader of the Pentagon.

Biden selected Austin over the longtime front-runner candidate, Michele Flournoy, a former senior Pentagon official and Biden supporter who would have been the first woman to serve as defense secretary. Biden also had considered Jeh Johnson, a former Pentagon general counsel and former secretary of homeland defense.

The impending nomination of Austin was confirmed by four people with knowledge of the pick who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the selection hadn’t been formally announced. Biden offered and Austin accepted the post on Sunday, according to a person familiar with the process.

As a career military officer, the 67-year-old Austin is likely to face opposition from some in Congress and in the defense establishment who believe in drawing a clear line between civilian and military leadership of the Pentagon. Although many previous defense secretaries have served briefly in the military, only two — George C. Marshall and James Mattis — have been career officers. Marshall also served as secretary of state.

Like Mattis, Austin would need to obtain a congressional waiver to serve as defense secretary. Congress intended civilian control of the military when it created the position of secretary of defense in 1947 and prohibited a recently retired military officer from holding the position.

One of the people who confirmed the pick said Austin’s selection was about choosing the best possible person but acknowledged that pressure had built to name a candidate of color and that Austin’s stock had risen in recent days.

Austin is a 1975 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and served 41 years in uniform.

Biden has known Austin at least since the general’s years leading U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq while Biden was vice president. Austin was commander in Baghdad of the Multinational Corps-Iraq in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected president, and he returned to lead U.S. troops from 2010 through 2011.

Austin also served in 2012 as the first Black vice chief of staff of the Army, the service’s No. 2-ranking position. A year later he assumed command of U.S. Central Command, where he fashioned and began implementing a U.S. military strategy for rolling back the Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.

Austin retired from the Army in 2016, and he would need a congressional waiver of the legal requirement that a former member of the military be out of uniform at least seven years before serving as secretary of defense. That waiver has been granted only twice — most recently in the case of Mattis, the retired Marine general who served as President Donald Trump’s first Pentagon chief.

The Mattis period at the Pentagon is now viewed by some as evidence of why a recently retired military officer should serve as defense secretary only in rare exceptions. Although Mattis remains widely respected for his military prowess and intellect, critics say he tended to surround himself with military officers at the expense of a broader civilian perspective. He resigned in December 2018 in protest of Trump’s policies.

Loren DeJonge Schulman, who spent 10 years in senior staff positions at the Pentagon and the National Security Council, said she understands why Biden would seek out candidates with a deep understanding of the military. However, she worries that appointing a general to a political role could prolong some of the damage caused by Trump’s politicization of the military.

“But retired generals are not one-for-one substitutes of civilian leaders,” she said. “General officers bring different skills and different perspectives, and great generals do not universally make good appointees.”

Austin has a reputation for strong leadership, integrity and a sharp intellect. He would not be a prototypical defense secretary, not just because of his 41-year military career but also because he has shied from the public eye. It would be an understatement to say he was a quiet general; although he testified before Congress, he gave few interviews and preferred not to speak publicly about military operations.

When he did speak, Austin did not mince words. In 2015, in describing how the Islamic State army managed a year earlier to sweep across the Syrian border to grab control of large swaths of northern and western Iraq, Austin said the majority of Iraqi Sunnis simply refused to fight for their government.

“They allowed — and in some cases facilitated — ISIS’s push through the country,” Austin said.

He earned the admiration of the Obama administration for his work in Iraq and at Central Command, although he disagreed with Obama’s decision to pull out of Iraq entirely in December 2011.

Austin was involved in the Iraq War from start to finish. He served as an assistant commander of the 3rd Infantry Division during the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and oversaw the withdrawal in 2011. When Austin retired in 2016, Obama praised his “character and competence,” as well as his judgment and leadership.

One person familiar with the matter said Biden was drawn to Austin’s oversight of the Iraq pull-out, especially given the military’s upcoming role in supporting the distribution of the coronavirus vaccines.

Like many retired generals, Austin has served on corporate boards. He is a member of the board of directors of Raytheon Technologies.

Word of Austin’s selection broke a day before a meeting between Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and civil rights groups, many of whom had pushed the president-elect to pick more Black Cabinet members.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist, said Monday: “It’s a good choice that I think many in the civil rights community would support. It’s the first time we have seen a person of color in that position. That means something, in a global view, especially after such an antagonistic relationship we had with the previous administration.”

Sharpton, who is set to be in the meeting with Biden on Tuesday, called the choice “a step in the right direction but not the end of the walk.”

Politico first reported Biden’s selection of Austin.

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Lemire reported from Wilmington, Del. AP Washington Bureau Chief Julie Pace contributed to this report.

— Associated Press

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Happy Safe Harbor Day, America.

Other than Wisconsin, every state appears to have met a deadline in federal law that essentially means Congress has to accept the electoral votes that will be cast next week and sent to the Capitol for counting on Jan. 6. Those votes will elect Joe Biden as the country’s next president.

It’s called a safe harbor provision because it’s a kind of insurance policy by which a state can lock in its electoral votes by finishing up certification of the results and any state court legal challenges by a congressionally imposed deadline, which this year is Tuesday.

“What federal law requires is that if a state has completed its post-election certification by Dec. 8, Congress is required to accept those results,” said Rebecca Green, an election law professor at the William & Mary law school in Williamsburg, Virginia.

The Electoral College is a creation of the Constitution, but Congress sets the date for federal elections and, in the case of the presidency, determines when presidential electors gather in state capitals to vote.

In 2020, that date is Dec. 14. But Congress also set another deadline, six days before electors meet, to insulate state results from being challenged in Congress.

By the end of the day, every state is expected to have made its election results official, awarding 306 electoral votes to Biden and 232 to President Donald Trump.

The attention paid to the normally obscure safe harbor provision is a function of Trump’s unrelenting efforts to challenge the legitimacy of the election. He has refused to concede, made unsupported claims of fraud and called on Republican lawmakers in key states to appoint electors who would vote for him even after those states have certified a Biden win.

But Trump’s arguments have gone nowhere in court in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Most of his campaign’s lawsuits in state courts challenging those Biden victories have been dismissed, with the exception of Wisconsin, where a hearing is scheduled for later this week.

Like the others, the lawsuit does not appear to have much chance of succeeding, but because it was filed in accordance with state law procedures for challenging election results, “it’s looking to me like Wisconsin is going to miss the safe harbor deadline because of that,” said Edward Foley, a professor of election law at Ohio State University’s Moritz School of Law.

Judge Stephen Simanek, appointed to hear the case, has acknowledged that the case would push the state outside the electoral vote safe harbor.

Missing the deadline won’t deprive Wisconsin of its 10 electoral votes. Biden electors still will meet in Madison on Monday to cast their votes and there’s no reason to expect that Congress won’t accept them. In any case, Biden would still have more than the 270 votes he needs even without Wisconsin’s.

But lawmakers in Washington could theoretically second-guess the slate of electors from any state that misses the Dec. 8 deadline, Foley said.

Already one member of the House of Representatives, Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., has said he will challenge electoral votes for Biden on Jan. 6. Brooks would need to object in writing and be joined by at least one senator. If that were to happen, both chambers would debate the objections and vote on whether to sustain them.

But unless both houses agreed to the objections, they would fail.

The unwillingness of Trump and his supporters to concede is “dangerous because in an electoral competition, one side wins, one side loses and it’s essential that the losing side accepts the winner’s victory. What is really being challenged right now is our capacity to play by those rules,” Foley said.

The safe harbor provision played a prominent role in the Bush v. Gore case after the 2000 presidential election. The Supreme Court shut down Florida’s state-court-ordered recount because the safe-harbor deadline was approaching. The court’s opinion was issued Dec. 12, the deadline in 2000.

Vice President Al Gore conceded the race to George W. Bush, then the Texas governor, the next day.

In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer said the deadline that really mattered was the day on which the Electoral College was scheduled to meet. Whether there was time to conduct a recount by then “is a matter for the state courts to determine,” Breyer wrote.

When Florida’s electoral votes, decisive in George W. Bush’s victory, reached Congress, several Black House members protested, but no senators joined in. It was left to Gore, who presided over the count as president of the Senate, to gavel down the objections from his fellow Democrats.

 

— Associated Press

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How could scientists race out COVID-19 vaccines so fast without cutting corners? A head start helped — over a decade of behind-the-scenes research that had new vaccine technology poised for a challenge just as the coronavirus erupted.

“The speed is a reflection of years of work that went before,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, told The Associated Press. “That’s what the public has to understand.”

Creating vaccines and having results from rigorous studies less than a year after the world discovered a never-before-seen disease is incredible, cutting years off normal development. But the two U.S. frontrunners are made in a way that promises speedier development may become the norm — especially if they prove to work long-term as well as early testing suggests.

“Abject giddiness,” is how Dr. C. Buddy Creech, a Vanderbilt University vaccine expert, described scientists’ reactions when separate studies showed the two candidates were about 95% effective.

“I think we enter into a golden age of vaccinology by having these types of new technologies,” Creech said at a briefing of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Both shots — one made by Pfizer and BioNTech, the other by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health — are so-called messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines, a brand-new technology. U.S. regulators are set to decide this month whether to allow emergency use, paving the way for rationed shots that will start with health workers and nursing home residents.

Billions in company and government funding certainly sped up vaccine development — and the unfortunately huge number of infections meant scientists didn’t have to wait long to learn the shots appeared to be working.

But long before COVID-19 was on the radar, the groundwork was laid in large part by two different streams of research, one at the NIH and the other at the University of Pennsylvania — and because scientists had learned a bit about other coronaviruses from prior SARS and MERS outbreaks.

“When the pandemic started, we were on a strong footing both in terms of the science” and experience handling mRNA, said Dr. Tal Zaks, chief medical officer of Massachusetts-based Moderna.

Traditionally, making vaccines required growing viruses or pieces of viruses — often in giant vats of cells or, like most flu shots, in chicken eggs — and then purifying them before next steps in brewing shots.

The mRNA approach is radically different. It starts with a snippet of genetic code that carries instructions for making proteins. Pick the right virus protein to target, and the body turns into a mini vaccine factory.

“Instead of growing up a virus in a 50,000-liter drum and inactivating it, we could deliver RNA and our bodies make the protein, which starts the immune response,” said Penn’s Dr. Drew Weissman.

Fifteen years ago, Weissman’s lab was trying to harness mRNA to make a variety of drugs and vaccines. But researchers found simply injecting the genetic code into animals caused harmful inflammation.

Weissman and a Penn colleague now at BioNTech, Katalin Kariko, figured out a tiny modification to a building block of lab-grown RNA that let it slip undetected past inflammation-triggering sentinels.

“They could essentially make a stealth RNA,” said Pfizer chief scientific officer Dr. Philip Dormitzer.

Other researchers added a fat coating, called lipid nanoparticles, that helped stealth RNA easily get inside cells and start production of the target protein.

Meanwhile at the NIH, Dr. Barney Graham’s team figured out the right target — how to use the aptly named “spike” protein that coats the coronavirus to properly prime the immune system.

The right design is critical. It turns out the surface proteins that let a variety of viruses latch onto human cells are shape-shifters — rearranging their form before and after they’ve fused into place. Brew a vaccine using the wrong shape and it won’t block infection.

“You could put the same molecule in one way and the same molecule in another way and get an entirely different response,” Fauci explained.

That was a discovery in 2013, when Graham, deputy director of NIH’s Vaccine Research Center, and colleague Jason McLellan were investigating a decades-old failed vaccine against RSV, a childhood respiratory illness.

They homed in on the right structure for an RSV protein and learned genetic tweaks that stabilized the protein in the correct shape for vaccine development. They went on to apply that lesson to other viruses, including researching a vaccine for MERS, a COVID-19 cousin, although it hadn’t gotten far when the pandemic began.

“That’s what put us in a position to do this rapidly,” Graham told the AP in February before the NIH’s vaccine was first tested in people. “Once you have that atomic-level detail, you can engineer the protein to be stable.”

Likewise, Germany’s BioNTech in 2018 had partnered with New York-based Pfizer to develop a more modern mRNA-based flu vaccine, giving both companies some early knowledge about how to handle the technology.

“This was all brewing. This didn’t come out of nowhere,” said Pfizer’s Dormitzer.

Last January, shortly after the new coronavirus was reported in China, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin switched gears and used the same method to create a COVID-19 vaccine.

Moderna also was using mRNA to develop vaccines against other germs including the mosquito-borne Zika virus — research showing promise but that wasn’t moving rapidly since the Zika outbreak had fizzled.

Then at the NIH, Graham woke up on Saturday Jan. 11 to see Chinese scientists had shared the genetic map of the new coronavirus. His team got to work on the right-shaped spike protein. Days later, they sent Moderna that recipe — and the vaccine race was on.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

 

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— Associated Press

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Public health guidance to avoid big parties in the age of coronavirus is about to collide with what is typically one of America’s biggest celebrations of all: the swearing-in of a new president.

While lots of details are still to be worked out, this Jan. 20 is sure to be more subdued than prior inauguration days.

A giant parade down Pennsylvania Avenue? Not likely.

Fancy balls? They may morph into virtual events.

The traditional luncheon where lawmakers offer best wishes to the new president? It might not include food this year.

What about the swearing-in itself? The inaugural platform on the Capitol’s West Front is going up just like always, but it probably won’t be as crowded.

“I think you’re going to see something that’s closer to what the convention was like than a typical inauguration,” President-elect Joe Biden said Friday, referring to the all-virtual event that marked his nomination last summer. “First and foremost, in my objective, is to keep America safe but still allow people to celebrate — to celebrate and see one another celebrate.”

For their convention, Democrats pulled together a made-for-TV mashup of homemade videos, speeches from classrooms and living rooms, and music played from afar, narrated by celebrity hosts.

Biden’s swearing-in itself will not be virtual. But guests should be prepared to socially distance and wear a mask. Lawmakers are also considering requiring a COVID-19 test for anyone on the platform near the president-elect, said Paige Waltz, a spokesperson for the joint congressional committee charged with overseeing the event.

The VIP platform can hold 1,600 people. Lawmakers also generally distribute tickets for positions nearby. While no hard decisions have been made, the committee is looking at cutting the numbers on both accounts.

“My guess is there will still be a platform ceremony,” Biden said. “But I don’t know exactly how it’s all going to work out. The key is keeping people safe. I can’t do a super version of the president’s announcement in the Rose Garden.”

That was an apparent reference to President Donald Trump’s Rose Garden introduction of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, where hundreds of people crammed together, many without masks. It turned out to be a superspreader of the virus.

Biden’s play-it-safe approach to the coronavirus during his campaign offers clues about what to expect in terms of inaugural modifications.

He said Friday that a “gigantic inaugural parade down Pennsylvania Avenue” was unlikely, although a big reviewing stand is being constructed in front of the White House.

No decisions have been made on whether the official inaugural balls should go forward. Some advocacy groups already are going virtual with their galas, including the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization.

“Our goal is to democratize the inauguration party experience by holding a virtual event integrating our 3 million-plus members and supporters into the day’s events and breaking the traditional bubble of a Washington insider experience,” said Lucas Acosta, a spokesperson for the group.

The celebrity component of this year’s celebration has yet to be determined, but one source close to the inauguration suggested looking for hints in the lineup of celebrities who campaigned for Biden, including Lady Gaga, John Legend and Jon Bon Jovi.

Work to build the inaugural platform at the Capitol and the White House reviewing stand began before the Nov. 3 election, as is traditional. New this year: Congressional planners have invited lawmakers to record video messages for the president-elect and vice president-elect that can be played on Jumbotrons before the swearing-in.

After the ceremony, the president and vice president have traditionally attended a luncheon in National Statuary Hall that includes speeches, gifts and toasts. The event began in 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower, his wife, Mamie, and 50 guests dined on creamed chicken, baked ham and potato puffs in the Old Senate Chamber.

This year’s format and venue are up in the air. One congressional aide familiar with the planning said it’s likely that food will be out altogether. Rather, the event would revolve around the speeches lawmakers make wishing the new administration well.

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., who heads the congressional inaugural committee, has been careful not to refute Trump’s baseless claims that he won the election. But Waltz said the congressional inaugural committee staff nonetheless is ready to work with Biden’s Presidential Inaugural Committee.

That committee oversees inaugural events held away from the Capitol, including the parade and balls. Tony Allen, president of Delaware State University, serves as CEO.

“This year’s inauguration will look different amid the pandemic, but we will honor the American inaugural traditions and engage Americans across the country while keeping everybody healthy and safe,” Allen said.

Plans for protests are underway, too.

A few groups have submitted requests for protest permits with the National Park Service. The Answer Coalition, made up of antiwar and civil rights organizations, plans a demonstration demanding “urgent action to save the environment, end war and prioritize money to meet people’s needs.” Let America Hear Us Roar For Trump is seeking a permit to “support our President.”

As for Trump, it’s unclear whether he’ll show up for the inauguration. He recently told reporters: “I know the answer, but I just don’t want to say it yet.”

Biden, asked if Trump should attend, said it’s important for the United States to show that competing party leaders can stand together, shake hands and move on. “It is totally his decision, and it’s of no personal consequence to me. But I do think it is for the country,” he told CNN.

Even though plans are still taking shape, Biden’s inaugural committee is already raising money for such events as balls and concerts. The law allows unlimited contributions to the committee, but Biden will limit contributions from individuals to $500,000 and from corporations to $1 million. The committee won’t accept contributions from lobbyists or the fossil fuels industry.

That’s according to an inaugural official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the work of the committee.

The contribution limits for Biden are far lower than those for Trump’s inaugural four years ago. He raised a record $107 million for his inauguration and accepted massive checks, including $5 million from Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson.

The inauguration is normally an economic boon for the Washington region, with visitors typically required to book several days in a hotel and at premium rates to get a reservation. This year, there are more options than usual — a sign the inauguration is less of a draw.

“Given the pandemic, it’s good news that we’re hearing of some hotels being full already. But for the most part, there is still capacity in the city,” said Elliott L. Ferguson, president and CEO of Destination DC, the district’s marketing organization.

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Associated Press writers Alexandra Jaffe and Brian Slodysko contributed to this report.

— Associated Press

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