President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the national security adviser, are leading the moves aimed at an agency they view as bureaucratic and emblematic of the “deep state.”
The moves will cut the agency’s 350-member staff roughly in half. “The NSC is the ultimate Deep State. It’s Marco vs. the Deep State. We’re gutting the Deep State,” a White House official said in an Axios report, which the Washington Examiner confirmed with the White House.
Rubio said the “right-sizing of the NSC” will fit Trump’s vision.
“The right-sizing of the NSC is in line with its original purpose and the president’s vision,” Rubio said. “The NSC will now be better positioned to collaborate with agencies.”
The agency will now be directed to “coordinate and advise — not carry out — policy,” a third senior White House official said. Other officials detailed that the alleged bureaucracy of the agency, which includes several committees and frequent meetings, is slowing everything down.
“That’s the bottom-to-the-top approach that doesn’t work. It’s going away,” a senior White House official said. “All those things feeding up to principals are the unnecessary piece.”
The officials cited Trump’s recent elimination of the Syria sanctions as a prime example of how the bureaucracy is unnecessary. “It was complete reverse workflow: Here’s what the president wants, get it done,” the official said. “It wasn’t, ‘Oh, let’s get the sub-PCC to send it to the PCC to go to the DC to go to the PC.’”
The NSC’s original role was to advise and assist the president on national security and foreign policy.
Trump officials say the bureaucracy is no longer necessary in a united administration, absent any interagency quarrels. “That’s not what you have here. Rubio, [Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent, [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth, [Attorney General Pam] Bondi — all of them know each other and like each other, and they know they’re there to execute the president’s will,” an official said.
Politico reported that committees and their meetings will be reduced and that the White House reinterviewed a large number of NSC staff members to see whether they should keep their jobs. The outlet also reported that notices went out to staffers late Friday afternoon after a staff meeting, with many out of town for the holiday weekend.
Rubio is reportedly likely to continue as acting national security adviser for “as long as possible” after Trump removed Mike Waltz from the position earlier this month and nominated him to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. It was unclear how long Rubio would hold the job, given that he was set to do it on an interim basis.
HOUSE PASSES LANDMARK ‘ONE BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL’ TO DELIVER TRUMP’S TAX CUTS
Andy Baker, who is Vice President JD Vance’s national security adviser, and Robert Gabriel, a policy assistant to Trump, will now act as deputy national security advisers under the restructuring.
The National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment.
