Americans were shocked to hear Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was secretly in the hospital, failing to tell anyone of his illness, including President Biden. In response, Representative Aaron Bean (R-FL) introduced a bill designed to prevent similar incidents from occuring in the future.
Named the Cabinet Accountability and Transparency Act, Rep. Bean's bill would require members of the Presidential Cabinet to inform Congress of any absences within 24 hours, or in an emergency, within 24 hours of the emergency becoming known.
The bill differs from the 1998 Federal Vacancies Reform Act cited by Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) in a recent letter to Sec. Austin, as the Reform Act deals specifically with capping the limit on how long the President can appoint an acting official in a Senate-approved position without that approval. In contrast, Rep. Bean's bill covers the emergence of a vacancy itself.
In his press release, Bean called Austin's, and by extension, the Pentagon's, lack of communication during his absence "totally unacceptable" as "America is in a time of global conflict, as our service members endure attacks in Iraq and Syria, our ally Israel is at war with Hamas, and the threat of Communist China escalates. The Defense Secretary must make aggressive and crucial decisions in minutes, and Secretary Austin’s lack of transparency presented an unnecessary risk to the American people."
Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), a co-sponsor of the bill, similarly blasted the lack of transparency exhibited by the Department of Defense about Austin's absence in a time of global tension, saying, "We live in a time when the United States faces growing national crises, and global tensions are at an all-time high. There is absolutely no excuse for our Secretary of Defense to be missing in action because he and the agency deliberately left Congress and the American people out of the loop."
When the news broke, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) demanded a Congressional hearing over the affair, and directly attacked the Biden Administration for its "lack of leadership, competency, and transparency throughout."
