Afrasianet - American writer David Ignatius said that President Donald Trump's administration's eagerness to act quickly and bypass bureaucratic mechanisms left it in a bad situation as a result of a reckless act of its own making, represented by the Signal affair and the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a highly sensitive but unsafe chat group.
He added in his column in the Washington Post that the prevailing spirit in Silicon Valley—home to the world's leading technology companies, located in California—of "move fast and break things" is now embraced by billionaire government efficiency official Elon Musk and many of Trump's aides, who over the past two months have been recklessly leading efforts to reshape US foreign and domestic policy.
He commented sarcastically, saying that they had all succeeded in doing so, tearing apart bureaucracy at breakneck speed and leaving a lot of wreckage in their wake.
Hasty Action The writer criticized the jumping-the-ticket approach adopted by senior officials, considering it a hasty approach that would not yield the desired results due to their neglect of cumbersome procedures and their bypassing of institutions such as Congress and the courts. He criticized those officials for using the non-governmental encrypted messaging app Signal instead of accessing the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a locked area within a building used to process sensitive fragmented types of classified information.
According to Ignatius, Trump and his team want quick results, so since his inauguration, they have viewed the regulations for handling sensitive information as a waste of time, designed for foot soldiers, not change leaders. He continued his attack on US administration officials, alleging that they had siphoned information from intelligence agencies, the military, and civilian departments without clear consideration for security, privacy, or precedent.
The Signal Scandal This contempt culminated, according to Ignatius, in this week's Signal scandal, when National Security Advisor Michael Waltz was tasked with the daunting task of coordinating the disparate threads of Trump's policy to please a president who wanted quick and immediate results.
To carry out this mission, Waltz created an internal chat room on Signal to discuss strikes against the Ansar Allah (Houthi) group in Yemen. He dubbed the participants in the room a "Houthi small group" and unwittingly included The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who later leaked the group's conversations.
According to the author, the most disturbing aspect is that Waltz and the others should have realized that it was a mistake to use the messaging app for such sensitive discussions, as most of them had handled classified information for years and were familiar with the controls in place on platforms like Signal.