Biden Is Inviting China To Have Control Over Some Of Our Most Critical Infrastructure

The Western Journal reported: 

Amid President Joe Biden’s wholesale efforts to use executive authority to wipe away the impacts of former President Donald Trump came one swipe of the pen that impacts China’s ability to gain a foothold in America’s power grid.

A Biden executive order issued on the day he took the oath of office included, without comment, a change to an order Trump signed in May, according to the White House.

“Executive Order 13920 of May 1, 2020 (Securing the United States Bulk-Power System), is hereby suspended for 90 days.  The Secretary of Energy and the Director of OMB shall jointly consider whether to recommend that a replacement order be issued,” Biden’s order stated.

On the face of it, that does not sound like much.

But the archived White House website from the Trump administration reveals the importance of the order, in which Trump declared “a national emergency with respect to the threat to the United States bulk-power system.”

In an earlier report, Lawfare outlined the issue more deeply: 

The need to understand particular risks of foreign compromise in the U.S. energy grid is growing increasingly urgent. Among other things, the U.S. government has slowly increased the attention it pays to these threats. For instance, the recent executive order says,

I therefore determine that the unrestricted foreign supply of bulk-power system electric equipment constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States, which has its source in whole or in substantial part outside the United States. This threat exists both in the case of individual acquisitions and when acquisitions are considered as a class.

For anyone watching this space, intrusions and potential intrusions into the energy grid are not a new threat. The White House’s 2018 National Cyber Strategy said as much: “We are vulnerable to peacetime cyber attacks against critical infrastructure, and the risk is growing that these countries will conduct cyber attacks against the United States during a crisis short of war.” That 2018 strategy document noted that “energy and power” is a key critical infrastructure area vulnerable to threats. (Washington is hardly the only one drawing attention to these risks; a January 2020 threat assessment published by the industrial security firm Dragos noted that “the number of publicly known attacks impacting ICS [industrial control systems] environments around the world continues to increase, and correspondingly the potential risk due to a disruptive cyber event impacting the North American electric sector is currently assessed as high.”)