Memorandum of June 21, 2017

In the Federal Register, a memorandum dated June 21st, 2017 was published.  This Memorandum was quite short, but rather cryptic.  It states:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby delegate to the Secretary of Defense the functions and authorities vested in the President by section 10005 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017 (Public Law 115-31) (the “Act”).

The link in the above did not actually work for me, so here is a different link that should work.
What this is saying is that the President is delegating the responsibility under section 10005 of the Act to the Secretary of Defense.  This is a rather ironic development.  During the campaign, Trump stated that he did not need the generals and that he had a special secret plan for defeating ISIS.  Since taking power, he has issued an Executive Order which requests that a plan is developed by the Generals as to how to defeat ISIS.  Section 10005 provides for spending ($2.4 billion) on defense subject to the President providing a report to Congress (potentially with a classified appendix) on the strategy to defeat ISIS.  So basically, Congress is having trouble getting information on what the current strategy is.  Sad!
Some news outlets, I believe have written this up as Trump delegating his powers as "commander in chief".  This is definitely overstating what is in the memo.  But clearly, the president does not seem to have an interest anymore on figuring out how to defeat ISIS and so has passed the task on to the Secretary of Defense.  Logically the Secretary of Defense would have in large part been involved in the writing of any strategy document, but this oddly pushes the buck down the chain but is within the pattern of behavior we have seen many times before by the President.