It seems to be part of the New York Times style guidelines to put everything into context of presidential politics.
For example, they published an article yesterday about the technical merits of hypersonic missiles, but instead of focusing on the details, it was full of phrases like “Biden will have to decide on the future of Trump’s program...”
In reality, the president doesn’t get into the minutiae of weapon system design. I find the NYT’s style very irritating to read, since I have to spend too much time filtering out the rather meaningless political fluff to find the nuggets of useful information.
It’s even more irritating if you’re from the UK. The NYT seems to think of us as either champagne-swilling toffs in fancy dress or xenophobic troglodytes.
I'd argue that much of modern military research and engineering is more politics than defense, so in that sense the political angle of the news story has more meat than the technical.
That seems perfectly reasonable; it’s very common for a change in administration to result in the killing off of various weapons programmes, especially those on the more exotic end of the spectrum. These are often political projects as much as military ones; the progenitor administration may be attached to them, but they’ll be reevaluated with a change of administration and if they’re not much good they may be cut.
But the article doesn’t actually explain any of those politics! That’s the point, they just dropped in Biden’s name, despite the fact that he has no position on this issue, and despite it being largely in the hands of congress to decide the fate of the program’s funding. They took a newly published technical report and said “how can we connect this with the big news this week to make it sound more relevant”, just as they did with Caligula’s garden.
For example, they published an article yesterday about the technical merits of hypersonic missiles, but instead of focusing on the details, it was full of phrases like “Biden will have to decide on the future of Trump’s program...”
In reality, the president doesn’t get into the minutiae of weapon system design. I find the NYT’s style very irritating to read, since I have to spend too much time filtering out the rather meaningless political fluff to find the nuggets of useful information.