
President Biden is now set to review these authorities in a newly revised version of National Security Policy Memorandum-13, the official said.
First instituted in 2018, NSPM-13 allowed the delegation of “well-defined authorities to the secretary of defense to conduct time-sensitive military operations in cyberspace,” according to a 2020 speech given by Paul Ney, then the general counsel for the DOD. Designed by President Trump’s National Security Council and promoted by then National Security Adviser John Bolton, NSPM-13 was intended to streamline the approval process for cyber operations that Bolton describes in his memoir as “frozen solid” when he arrived in office.