The Trump administration started to dramatically overhaul the White House national security council on Friday, preparing to reassign hundreds of staff and consolidating power with aides trusted by the president, according to people familiar with the matter.
The changes involved downsizing the NSC to about 150 from 300 staff and cutting a number of committees. Most NSC staff are drawn from other parts of the administration including the Pentagon and the state department, and were expected to be sent back to their home agencies.
At the leadership level, the administration appointed the vice-president’s national security adviser Andy Baker and Donald Trump’s longtime policy aide Robert Gabriel to become dual-hatted as deputy national security advisers for the NSC, sources said.
The restructuring of the NSC marked the first set of major changes to the White House’s national security coordinating body since Donald Trump last month replaced Mike Waltz as national security adviser with the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who is serving in both roles.
It underscored how the NSC is set to be changed from a body that traditionally helped presidents formulate an overarching national security policy into one that implements ideas already held by the president.
Trump advisers familiar with the dynamics noted that the addition of Baker and Gabriel, senior aides to JD Vance and Trump respectively, is likely to ensure the White House maintains significant control of the NSC even with Rubio as its titular head.
They also suggested it would end the NSC’s traditional bottom-to-the-top approach, where staff filtered policy recommendations through multiple layers before they reached the cabinet level, since Baker and Gabriel are set to use the NSC to focus more on execution of their bosses’ views.
In doing so, the new leadership may help solve the lingering problem of Trump’s second term NSC being left without an overarching strategy in the wake of Mike Waltz’s removal.
The US strategy for the Russia-Ukraine conflict in particular had remained a work in progress, because Waltz wanted Trump to hit Vladimir Putin with deep, punitive sanctions if the Russian president failed to agree to a peace deal brokered by Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff.
That recommendation from Waltz put him at odds with Trump and Vance, who have been more interested in finding ways to normalize relations with Moscow. With Vance’s top national security aide embedded into NSC leadership, implementing policy may be more straightforward.
The abrupt nature of the personnel changes, which were communicated in a 4.20pm email sent by the NSC chief of staff, Brian McCormack, before the long Memorial Day weekend, means that some of the dismissals and restructurings are expected to drag on until next week, the sources said.
Senior staff leaving the NSC include Alex Wong, who was the principal deputy to Mike Waltz; Eric Trager, who had been handling Middle East affairs; Andrew Peek, who had been handling Europe; and the communications team.
The changes come three weeks after Waltz was pushed out in the wake of a series of controversies including mistakenly adding a journalist to a Signal group chat that shared sensitive information about US missile strikes in Yemen before they took place.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
