Outside the Beltway

Rubio Guts National Security Council

A massive purge ahead of the long weekend.

James Joyner · Saturday, May 24, 2025 · 10 comments

WaPo (“White House dismisses scores of National Security Council staff“):

Scores of staffers at the White House National Security Council were abruptly dismissed Friday, as the Trump administration moved to dramatically downsize the coordinating body, according to people familiar with the matter.

The staff sent home included both career officials who were detailed to the NSC and some political appointees, these people said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive personnel issue or because they do not wish to be seen criticizing the administration.

The cuts were made under President Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, Marco Rubio, who also is serving as secretary of state. Rubio, who has emerged as a key figure in the administration, was tapped for the White House post early this month after his predecessor as national security adviser, Michael Waltz, was pushed aside following a series of missteps. Trump has said he intends to nominate Waltz to be his ambassador to the United Nations.

It was not immediately clear how deep the cuts would be or if the dismissals on Friday afternoon would reflect their totality. Most NSC staffers are detailed to the White House from other parts of the federal government and were expected to go back to their home agencies, including the State Department, Pentagon and intelligence agencies, said people familiar with the shake-up.

Those who were told they were leaving had the news delivered to them via email shortly before 4.30 p.m. on the Friday before a long weekend, according to these people.

A White House official confirmed that cuts had been made and said that two new deputy national security advisers have been appointed: Andy Baker, who has been national security adviser to Vice President JD Vance, and Robert Gabriel, a policy adviser to Trump.

Alex Wong, who had been Waltz’s deputy, has been reassigned, according to two people familiar with the matter. Wong did not respond to a request for comment.

[…]

Since Waltz’s ouster, administration officials have signaled a major scale-down of the National Security Council was imminent. Some have argued that the NSC had become bloated under previous administrations.

According to Dilpreet Sidhu, NSC executive secretary and deputy chief of staff under President Joe Biden, the policy staff stood at 186 toward the end of Biden’s term. Citing NSC human resources data, she said the first Trump administration’s NSC policy staff numbered 119 at a similar point. Both George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s NSC staffs were larger, at 204 and 222, respectively.

Trump’s allies have called for the administration to follow an older model used by Brent Scowcroft, who first became national security adviser in 1975 and assumed the role for a second time in 1989. Scowcroft, who viewed his role as offering private counsel to the president, kept a small staff during his two stints in the job.

“The NSC is not there as a think tank or shadow department,” Alexander Gray, a former NSC chief of staff during Trump’s first term, said in an interview last week. “It is about coordinating and implementing work originated in the departments and then ensuring the president’s decisions are implemented.”

Scowcroft is widely considered the ideal type National Security Advisor, so moving in that direction could be promising. But there’s a big catch:

Other former officials said that for a leaner NSC to work, the White House would need to grant greater authority to other national security agencies — something that is hard to imagine, these people said, under Trump’s personalized style of leadership.

“I don’t see the Trump administration deferring national security policy to the State Department,” said Philip Gordon, who was Vice President Kamala Harris’s national security adviser and previously had roles on the Obama and Clinton NSC staffs.

“The president is going to run everything,” Gordon added. “If he’s going to do that, he should have the type of staff to do it effectively.”

There have long been complaints—which came to a head during the Obama administration—that the NSC had become bloated and was stepping on the toes of the cabinet departments. There were numerous reports of 30-something NSC staffers calling the combatant commands and making demands of four-star generals. Robert Gates and Leon Panetta were both outraged by this and complained about it in the books they wrote after their stints as SECDEF.

But Gordon is right: If the NSC is the function merely as an interagency coordination body and the National Security Advisor as an orchestra conductor ensuring everyone is playing from the same sheet of music, the agencies have to be empowered. Every indicator is that the opposite is happening.

A former senior NSC staffer in Trump’s first administration warned against conflating size and approach. “The NSC is a way to ensure that the president’s policies are actually being implemented,” said the former aide. “It ensures that the president is getting the best information possible, and that the president’s policies are being implemented. It’s very hard to accomplish those two objectives if you cut all the staff.”

For decades under both parties, the NSC has been composed “almost entirely of apolitical experts” on every significant issue to help the president manage any crisis in the world, said Jonathan Finer, deputy national security adviser under Biden.

“Whatever your view of esoteric debates about its size or org chart, that’s an enormous national asset to just throw away at a time when the challenges the United States faces — from terrorism to competition with China to Russian aggression to pandemic disease — get more daunting by the day.”

The NSC tends to get bigger during Democratic administrations and shrink a bit during Republican administrations. Mostly, that’s because the former tend to want to coordinate economic policy under the NSC rubric. I can preach that one either way. And, currently, the Trump administration has a separate NSC and Homeland Security Council; those are often merged, inflating the size of the NSC.

It’s quite probable that the NSC is bloated, and it’s almost certainly the case that its staffers break the chain of command on a regular basis. Some of that is entitlement and an inflated sense of their own importance. Mostly, though, it’s a function of their being in direct meetings with the President and seeing their job as ensuring his polices are executed, whereas the agencies tend to have strong inertia in terms of process and SOPs.

Beyond that, the modern information environment has made it such that the President is expected to have instant answers, even instant policy solutions. So, having an internal White House think tank with organic staffers from throughout the interagency makes a lot of sense.

The combination of the need for instant answers and instant action makes it really seductive to run everything from the White House. That’s likely bad process, regardless of the administration, as it short circuits the work of the agencies. It is even worse, of course, if the White House is poorly staffed.