CNN —

President Donald Trump is granting temporary, six-month security clearances to incoming White House officials who have not completed the vetting process typically required before being allowed to access highly-classified information, blaming a backlog of background checks that he helped cause.

It’s a move national security lawyers inside and outside the government say is unusual, if not unprecedented.

One former US official who worked on clearance issues in the Biden and first Trump administrations raised concerns that foreign intelligence partners, on which the US relies for much of its intelligence work, will curtail what they share with the US, out of fear that their sources may be put in danger.

“They will start restricting their intelligence,” the official said. “If someone on the other end here has not been vetted, why would they share that?”

Trump made the move in one of the dozens of executive orders issued on his first day in office, immediately giving high-level clearances called TS/SCI to incoming officials, including some who have never been vetted for potential security vulnerabilities.

“It’s such a dangerous thing,” the former official said. “To forego that process is stupid.”