U.S. government readiness to deal with cyber chaos sown by foreign adversaries around the upcoming 2024 elections is worse under President Biden than it was under former President Trump in 2020, according to Mr. Warner, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chairman.

The extraordinary criticism from the Virginia Democrat, who is briefed regularly on what U.S. officials know about foreign threats to elections, came in remarks to the CrowdStrike Gov Threat Summit in Washington. He said America’s cyber defenses have worsened in recent years because foreign countries have discovered that meddling is inexpensive and easy, voters are more distrustful, and federal government information-sharing with various social media platforms has slowed dramatically.

Mr. Warner’s assessment follows reports of a failure of government agencies to interact with social media sites on disinformation threats. CyberScoop has reported that Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) officials said they had not seen serious attempts to meddle with election infrastructure ahead of Super Tuesday, but also that the agency was no longer communicating or coordinating with social media sites.

Two former top Pentagon commanders say political considerations overrode their recommendation in 2021 that a small U.S. military contingent stay in Afghanistan while the Taliban was toppling the U.S.-backed government in Kabul.

Retired Gen. Milley and retired Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, who headed U.S. Central Command from 2019 to 2022, also told lawmakers on Tuesday that Mr. Biden operated within his authority as commander in chief in making the decision to pull out.

Gen. Milley testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee that a delayed State Department decision on withdrawing U.S. citizens was a key factor in the chaotic and bloody final days of the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan, contributing to the vulnerability that left 13 U.S. service personnel and some 170 Afghans dead after a terrorist bombing at Kabul’s international airport in August 2021.

Pentagon Correspondent Mike Glenn has a deep dive on the testimony, during which Gen. Milley said a complex tangle of political and military decisions led to the tragic end of the 20-year mission in Afghanistan.

The U.S. government is failing to provide “sufficient and stable funding” for national security innovation vital to “acquire and scale critical technology,” according to the Ronald Reagan Institute’s Center for Peace Through Strength.

The center’s National Security Innovation Base (NSIB) Report Card released this week gave the U.S. government an F-minus for its inability to provide sufficient and stable funding needed to fund cutting-edge technology. That is the lowest mark in the sweeping annual study tied to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.

“Major warning signs” in the national security sector could hold back America’s ability to innovate amid intensifying global competition with adversaries such as Russia and China, according to the report. The U.S. defense sector remains a global technology leader, the authors say, but American technological breakthroughs do not always translate into greater security because of the government’s broken budgeting process.

The report card comes days after the Biden administration submitted its Pentagon budget request for 2024. Reagan Foundation Director Roger Zakheim says the inconsistent budgeting process “is stifling the health of the NSIB.”

The fight over Texas’ implementation of a strict new anti-illegal immigration law just got hotter, with a federal appeals court moving Tuesday to erase a previous order that had allowed the law to take effect.

The move, effectively putting Texas’ law on ice late Tuesday, came just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way for the state to begin enforcing the law, known as SB4, which would create state-level crimes for illegal immigrants and attempt to set up a state deportation system.

The U.S. government should move forward with either banning TikTok or forcing its China-based owner, ByteDance, to sell the social media platform to a U.S. company, argues regular columnist Clifford D. May, who notes that U.S. law already restricts foreign ownership of broadcast stations.

“ByteDance has signaled that it may refuse to sell TikTok, which tells you that the issue here is control, which is vital to the Chinese government, not profit, which is the primary concern of independent corporations,” writes Mr. May, who asserts that popular video-sharing site is a vehicle for Chinese Communist Party disinformation operations akin to those carried out by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

“Among the bogus stories the Kremlin pushed into both the Western and international press: that the CIA assassinated President John F. Kennedy, that the U.S. created AIDS, and that rich Americans were adopting Latin American children to harvest their organs,” he writes. “Not in their wildest dreams could the Soviets have imagined what Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping would achieve with TikTok, the video-hosting service that has become the dominant media platform in the United States with 170 million subscribers.”