Trump's NSC is Off to a Shaky Start

A new memo sets out the organization of the NSC in second Trump administration and it contains some notable surprises.

Whenever a new administration takes office, I scour www.whitehouse.gov in search of an obscure document that few outside or even inside the administration will ever read. It’s the document that sets out the organization of the National Security Council (NSC) for the new administration. I had my hand in drafting a version of this memorandum for the incoming Obama administration in early 2009.

So last week I went searching for the latest version among the blizzard of executive actions that were being uploaded onto the new White House website.¹ In Trump’s first term, the initial version of the memo had raised some eyebrows when it excluded the CIA Director as a member of the NSC, but included Steve Bannon, the White House Chief Strategist, as a full member. Within weeks of its publication, however, Trump’s first national security advisor, retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, had been ousted for lying to the FBI, and a new advisor, Lieutenant General H.R. McMasters had taken his place. McMasters sought to restore order and common practice in the process, including by releasing a revised memorandum that restored the CIA Director and banned Bannon from the NSC.

Career People Go Home

So what can we say about Trump’s newest NSC? A few notably things. First, Trump appointed as his national security advisor someone who is widely seen as a credible occupant of this critical position. Republican Congressman Mike Waltz, a former Green Beret who served two tours in Afghanistan, has deep experience in national security affairs. He worked in the Pentagon and was a counterterrorism advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. He also served on the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees. Waltz supported military aid to Ukraine, believes in a strong NATO, and is generally known as a China hawk. In short, Waltz is very much within the mainstream of the Republican national security policy community.

But while Waltz may be mainstream, he has taken a quite Trumpian approach to organizing the NSC staff. Partly for budgetary reasons and partly for reasons of continuity, the NSC has generally been staffed by a mixture of outside political and inside career appointees. The political appointees, like the national security advisors themselves, generally reflect the policy priorities of the president and don’t require Senate confirmation. But the NSC has a large staff of several hundred people, which is why the vast majority of positions, especially at lower levels, are occupied with career people detailed from other government agencies. Much of the governing expertise resides with these career people and, critically, their salaries and cost is borne by their home agency rather than the White House itself.

While incoming national security advisors have sought to replace many detailees left from the outgoing administration in due course with people of their own choosing, all have kept most career officials in place during the early months of the administration. Not so, Waltz. Shortly after Trump was sworn in, some 160 officials working at the NSC were told to go home, despite the fact that all of the national security crises and issues that existed before Trump’s inauguration persist thereafter. Transitions are always tricky affairs, but depriving the NSC of the hundreds of people who actually know what is going on is shortsighted, to say the least.

Let’s Vote

As it turns out, ordering most of the NSC staff to go home wasn’t the only, or even most, surprising thing to emerge in the new administration. National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-1 of January 20, 2025, which sets out the organization of the National Security Council, also contained its share of surprises.

First of all, it seems to have been written in great haste. While NSPM-1 lists all the members of the National Security Council, it seems to have omitted a list of the members of the Principals Committee (PC), which is the cabinet-level committee that makes many of the most important national security decisions in every administration. That is probably an oversight that can easily be rectified.

What is more worrisome is the introduction of a new concept in the memorandum—that of “voting” members and “non-voting” advisors of the NSC and PC. The memo recognizes the statutory nature of the NSC membership, which includes both statutory members (mainly the President, Vice President, Secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury, and Energy) and non-statutory advisers (generally the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff). But it adds that the latter (and others so designated) are “non-voting advisors,” suggesting that the statutory members are voting members. That is made explicit in the memo’s section on the PC, which states:

Consensus is reached when all voting (i.e., non-advisory) attendees present either vote affirmatively for the same decisional option or formally abstain, and all such votes shall be recorded and minuted. Issues for which the Committee fails to reach consensus shall be referred to the NSC for decision, with a formal nonconcurrence required by at least one non-advisory attendee present for such a referral. Whether an issue requires Presidential attention, and the Committee attendees’ positions on the issue itself, shall be separately polled. If a voting attendee does not concur with the determination that Presidential consideration is not required, the issue shall be referred, along with the results of the PC’s deliberation on the issue itself and its recommendations, to deliberation by the NSC.

This is a novel, indeed unprecedented, approach. It turns the PC into a congressional committee rather than the advisory body that it needs to be. By design, the executive branch doesn’t work like the legislative branch. In the Executive, only one person has a vote—the President—and his is the only vote that matters. The role of the National Security Council is to advise the President and help him reach decisions on the most critical national security issues of the day. By definition, these are not voting matters.

Trump’s new NSC is off to a shaky start. It lacks an experienced staff necessary to do the analytical and detailed work to prepare decisions for the president and it adopts voting as a mechanism for making decisions when what the President needs is well-considered advice to help him make decisions.

1. The Federation of American Scientists usefully publishes all presidential memoranda and directives on its website: Presidential Directives and Executive Orders.