Trump’s National Security Non-Process

A report in today’s WSJ (“Trump Turns to Small Group of Advisers, Shrinks National Security Council“) is among several recent accounts of the way the administration has altered, if not simply upended, the longstanding way Presidents make national security decisions.

When President Trump ordered airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, U.S. diplomats who would normally be told of the decision were left in the dark.

After the attack, officials from Middle East countries pressed officials in Washington and at U.S. embassies in the region for information about whether the attack signaled Trump was launching a broader regime-change campaign, officials involved in those conversations said.

Almost no one had an answer, other than to refer them to Trump’s public announcement of the bombings. They hadn’t received talking points on what to tell other governments.

It was a sign of how far Trump has gone to create an ad hoc, centralized approach to national security decisions. He has downgraded the role of the National Security Council staff, which other presidents have relied on to oversee developing policy options, ensure presidential decisions are carried out and coordinate with foreign governments.

The NSC’s staff is now fewer than 150 compared with around 400 in previous administrations. Trump ousted national security adviser Mike Waltz after three months, assigning Secretary of State Marco Rubio to handle the job along with his role as top diplomat. The moves have left Trump reliant on a handful of senior advisers.

This is a topic squarely in my professional expertise. I’ve given the Security Studies lecture on the “US National Security Process” to our students for the last dozen or so years, with the most recent version just a few days ago. While what President Trump is doing isn’t exactly unprecedented, it breaks with the traditions of the last half century or so.

Congress created the National Security Council, among many other things (including the CIA and the Air Force) with the National Security Act of 1947. The utilization of the NSC changed radically from Truman to Eisenhower to JFK to Johnson, but settled into something much like the system Trump inherited from Biden by early in the Nixon administration. For a whole lot of reasons, decision-making power had shifted from the various cabinet agencies (notably State and Defense) to the White House by that point.

This reached its apex late in the Obama administration. By this time a decade ago, a series of reports, notably Karen DeYoung‘s “How the Obama White House runs foreign policy,” captured the frustrations of cabinet secretaries, military commanders, and others about micromanagement from “little twerp[s] from the NSC” micromanaging their operations. A series of think tank reports were published over the next year recommending that the next administration streamline the NSC, whose staff had become bloated, and return it to its traditional coordinating role. Pretty much everyone agreed that the ideal model was that led by Brent Scowcroft during the Bush 41 administration.

The Trump 45 administration did indeed cut the staff, most of which they distrusted as “Obama holdovers” even though they were career professionals seconded from the interagency, but didn’t really streamline the system. Mostly, they just didn’t use it. The Biden team largely reverted to the Obama model, albeit with a slightly smaller staff.

By all accounts, since Waltz’ firing, the Trump 47 administration sees the NSC—whose staff is again much smaller—as there to implement the President’s decisions, not help him make them. Many are less than happy.

“In many respects, the national security process has ceased to exist,” said David Rothkopf, author of a history of the NSC under several administrations and a staunch Trump opponent. Trump, he added, effectively is the national-security system—“the State Department and the Joint Chiefs and the NSC all rolled into one.”

The current system denies Trump the views of experts within the government that could inform his policies, said the critics. What’s more, officials charged with executing Trump’s orders often don’t know in detail what they are required to do, leading to delays, mistakes or even inaction, the critics added.

Trump’s process has encouraged freelancing by senior officials to gain the White House’s attention and advance their own priorities.

In fairness, that’s not exactly unique to this administration. However, it does diminish the expert advice available to the President.

Doing my best to steel man a view with which I disagree, Trump and his core team see it differently. What I call “experts” or “national security professionals,” they call “the Deep State.” While easy to dismiss as conspiracy-mongering, they are not without a point. Because Trump’s worldview is so wildly out of step with the consensus of career diplomats, intelligence analysts, and the military brass, the advice coming from the interagency is almost always “Sir, that’s a bad idea. Here’s why we’ve always done it this way.”

Trump 45 largely deferred to “his generals” when they told him that. Eventually, he came to resent not getting his way on policy. After all, he’s the elected President. This time, he’s much more confident that he’s right, they’re wrong, and they should shut up and carry out his orders.

During his short tenure, Waltz staffed the NSC with seasoned congressional aides and officials who had served in Trump’s first term. Some were quickly ousted after being accused of disloyalty by far-right MAGA influencers such as Laura Loomer. Others resigned following Waltz’s removal.

Waltz and Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, then chief of U.S. Central Command, persuaded Trump in March to order weeks of airstrikes against Houthi militants in Yemen, even though most members of his national security team were against the operation.

The U.S. needed to husband its dwindling munitions stockpile for a potential war with China, they argued, adding that the U.S.-designated terrorist group was unlikely to surrender under U.S. bombing. 

Two months into the campaign, Trump abruptly reversed course, announcing that the Houthis had agreed to no longer attack American ships. But Houthi attacks on Israel and against other countries’ ships have continued.

After Rubio took over as national security adviser in May, he argued for deep staff cuts to revert the NSC to its original function as more of an interagency coordinator and less of an advisory body. That approach best suited Trump’s top-down style, officials said.

Current and former Trump administration officials said the approach minimizes the risk of leaks that plagued his first term and allows the president and his close confidants to implement decisions swiftly, instead of debating them at length.

“There is just a lot of whiners in the bowels of the NSC who are complaining that they are not getting their voice heard, when, in fact, maybe their voice doesn’t need to be heard,” said Gordon Sondland, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the European Union in his first term.

Trump has every right to ignore advice that doesn’t align with his vision for foreign policy, which is radically different from that of any President in the post-WWII era. But it certainly carries substantial risk.

“They don’t have the same kind of bottom-up process that perhaps we’re most accustomed to,” said Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser during the George W. Bush administration, at the Aspen Security Forum in July. “I don’t think you can stand outside and prescribe an NSC process. It depends a lot on the president.”

White House envoy Steve Witkoff often calls Trump immediately after meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders. But summaries of those conversations rarely filter through to the government.

“We don’t expect anything more” from Witkoff than briefings for Trump and the senior national security team, said Leavitt.

With a slimmed-down NSC, sometimes Trump himself is out of the loop.

He was surprised to learn in July that the Pentagon had paused weapons deliveries to Ukraine during an inventory review until the freeze became public. Trump reversed the decision about a week later.

Even if Trump’s vision is right, it serves him poorly not to have good staffing. In his first administration, he was hamstrung by the fact that the #NeverTrump movement essentially disqualified most of the foreign policy hands that would have otherwise naturally staffed a Republican administration. But a decade has solved that problem; there is now a pretty large coterie of MAGA-friendly national security types. The infamous Project 2025 has a rather robust foreign policy agenda, much of which is already being implemented. But, again, if you agree with that agenda, it would be much more likely to be carried out effectively with a less ad hoc coordination process.