Donald Trump was busy on his very first day back in the White House, issuing edicts and signing directives and executive orders. They ran the gamut, from pardoning 1,600 of the traitors who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to declaring that the government must now use the term “sex” instead of “gender” on federal forms and proclaiming that only “female” and “male” are acceptable designations.

There were plenty of actions Trump took that will have devastating effects if they’re implemented immediately. For example, he overturned an executive order from former President Biden that allowed Medicare and Medicaid patients to pay lower prices for prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical companies are sure to pounce on that to rake in profits right away.

But one order that Trump signed seemed to fly under the radar. Blaming the need for it on the outgoing administration, Trump signed a directive for his White House Counsel to create a list of personnel who will be “immediately granted” access to Top Secret and Sensitive Compartmented Information, or SCI, for six months.

Whoever ends up on that list will get “access to the facilities and technology necessary to perform the duties of the office to which they have been hired.”

In his memorandum to his White House Counsel, Trump wrote “The Executive Office of the President requires qualified and trusted personnel to execute its mandate on behalf of the American people. There is a backlog created by the Biden Administration in the processing of security clearances of individuals hired to work in the Executive Office of the President.”

The memo did not list the people it would cover, and in theory, could include anyone Trump chooses.

The Department of Defense Manual says that Top Secret and SCI clearance grants a holder access to information that, if it got out, could be expected to cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security” of the United States.

Eligibility, according to the Manual, is only for people who “need to know,” and who have shown “compliance with the 13 National Security Adjudicative Guidelines, which include allegiance to the U.S. as well as responsible personal, sexual, and financial conduct.”

That last part might prove important in Trump’s reasoning for bypassing the rules altogether and just granting the clearance immediately, without undergoing the vetting process.

The order will completely bypass the normal amount of time that it usually takes to get these clearances, which is usually at minimum 6 months for Top Secret, and can take up to 15 months for SCI.

In an interview with Newsweek, William Henderson, the co-founder and principal consultant at the Federal Clearance Assistance Service, said that there actually are procedures in place for expediting these clearances with the involvement of the president, and that it can be done for interim clearance in as little as two days.

But Henderson says that Trump’s order simply bypasses everything and just gives him the authority to simply grant access to anyone he chooses. From Newsweek:

Henderson said that during the Biden administration, a backlog built up in the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), a federal agency within the Defense Department that provides security oversight and investigative services to safeguard the nation’s classified information and personnel, and that deals with 85 percent to 90 percent of security clearance investigations.

However, he believes that Monday’s decision was likely due to the Trump transition team’s failure to initiate the vetting process and make necessary preparations for incoming personnel.

So it wasn’t actually the Biden administration. It was Trump’s illegal refusal to submit his nominees to the necessary FBI background checks that would have started right when he made the nominations.

“They’ve got to circumvent all the rules because they didn’t do what they needed to do on a timely basis,” Henderson told the outlet. “And now they’re trying to get it done immediately … and just bypass all the rules.”

Here, see how this grabs you:

🚨NEW: Donald Trump has issued an executive order giving White House Counsel the power to issue top secret security clearances to any person. It’s unclear if this would include foreign nationals.

Trump could in theory could give a top U.S. security clearance to Vladimir Putin. pic.twitter.com/XvTzQuPJei

— Protect Kamala Harris ✊ (@DisavowTrump20) January 21, 2025

Henderson was pretty alarmed by the whole thing. “He’s bypassing everything. He’s just saying somebody’s going to write up a list and those people are going to be granted interim clearance without even fulfilling the interim clearance requirements. As far as I know, the president has absolute authority when it comes to security clearances. I mean, he’s the ultimate authority.”

As a matter of course, Trump also rescinded the security clearances of everyone from the Biden administration who signed a 2020 letter that called the Hunter Biden laptop story Russian disinformation — something it was proven to be very shortly after that letter was delivered.

In the executive order, Trump still insisted that the debunked laptop story was true, calling those who signed it liars: “Signatories of the letter falsely suggested that the news story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.”

Most of those signatories, however, are retired and no longer involved in the government anyway, or their clearances had already lapsed.

Political Flare will report on any other important or impactful executive orders that may have gone unnoticed as we go through the litany of edicts that Trump has issued since he ascended to the throne took office again.