MacBook Air not mounting external drives

My Mac is refusing to mount any external hard drives/usb drives. I have followed all of the available troubleshooting information that I can find which seems similar to my issue.

I have done the following steps:

• restarted my mac
• attempted to use a different port to connect the drives
• using disk utility:
  • attempted to click the "mount" button on the drive partitions (doesn't do anything)
  • ran the first aid utility (comes back completely fine for both drives/partitions)
  • reformatted both drives
• Rinsed and repeated

All of the above seems to be the end of the copy-pasta troubleshooting tips, and I am still having the issue. I am not concerned with losing any files on the drives, as the T7 was empty and the SanDisk is brand new. Additionally, both drives work fine on my windows computer.

For reference, I am using a 2022 M2 MacBook Air on Tahoe 26.1