The Purge: How the White House Broke the NSC and How to Fix It

The 2025 National Security Council (NSC) purge—the mass removal of career detailees on the third day of the second Trump administration, followed by waves of firings in April and May—broke the interagency coordination system that has managed U.S. national security since 1947. I served as the National Security Council’s acting senior director for intelligence programs at the end of the Biden and first days of the second Trump administration. From inside the White House, I watched the coordination machinery come apart in real time, until my own removal on April 2, 2025.

In this piece—the first of two articles on the NSC—I look at the same purge from an institutional angle, focusing on what the NSC system actually does and why political loyalty is not a substitute for institutional knowledge in the management of U.S. foreign policy. A subsequent article will turn to specific recommendations on a future NSC’s structure, function, and potential statutory reform.

More broadly, the administration’s evisceration of the NSC hobbles the White House’s ability to weigh competing U.S. interests or coordinate U.S. foreign policy—from tariffs to Venezuela—culminating in the disastrous planning and execution of the war with Iran.

Things Fall Apart

THE WHITE HOUSE — JANUARY 22, 2025

I’d just finished briefing the deputy national security adviser when someone handed me a note: “Come back. Now.” Seconds later, my assistant intercepted me just outside the West Wing. He shook his head:

“Everyone’s fired,” he paused. “Except you.

On Jan. 22, 2025—the third day of the administration—the White House summoned 160 career detailees to an all-staff call and told them to clean out their desks. In 2021, by contrast, most Trump administration career staff had stayed on for weeks or months during a transitional period into the Biden administration, as had been customary across party lines for decades. In 2017, Trump himself kept roughly 50 Obama officials in place for continuity. The purge of diplomats, intelligence professionals, and military officers on loan to the White House ripped the wiring out of the national security system at a critical moment when the nation transitions power from one leadership team to another.

Then came the second wave on April 2, 2025. That night, White House officials brought a far-right activist into the Oval Office. Driven by fears of “deep state” bureaucrats who had allegedly lain in wait for the president during his first term, she provided the president a list of “enemies” within the administration.

The unprecedented involvement of outside internet activists in White House personnel decisions resulted in the dismissal of this article’s author, the director of the National Security Agency, and the Trump-appointed NSC senior directors for technology, Middle East, and legislative affairs—all conservative Republicans with decades of national security experience. Activist-led “vetting” had begun even before Trump took office, and forced the withdrawal of National Security Adviser Mike Waltz’s first choice to lead the intelligence directorate, and his replacement with another Republican staffer who would also be ousted in the April purge.

The final blow landed May 1, 2025, with the removal of Waltz and his deputy, Alex Wong. The move, which one official described as a “liquidation” of NSC staffing, removed dozens of career staffers hired by the Trump administration, in some cases leaving senior directors with no supporting staff, and collapsed the NSC legal adviser position into the more politically pliable White House Counsel’s Office. By contrast, the homeland security adviser’s office and the counterterrorism directorate grew in size over the same period.

By June 2025, the NSC was down to fewer than 50 policy experts—a level not seen since the Eisenhower administration, applied to a world orders of magnitude more complex. The newly appointed senior director for Middle East policy had been in his role for just days before the June 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, and found his staff slashed from 10 officers to five. The Western Hemisphere directorate had a single senior director and no working-level staff, and the NSC lacked any staff working on Africa at all.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “dual-hatting” as acting national security adviser, combined with the NSC’s diminished size, effectively ended it as a serious coordination body. Today, principals continue to meet, but without regular policy coordination at the implementation and expert levels, the White House has few tools to impose coherence, generate options, or weigh the consequences of the president’s decisions.

What the NSC Actually Does

Most people get the NSC wrong. They think of it as a policy shop: a place where advisers craft the president’s foreign policy. It can be that. But its most important function—which no other U.S. government body can replicate—is coordination: reconciling competing institutional equities from diplomacy, defense, intelligence, and treasury before decisions reach the president’s desk.

The National Security Act of 1947 created the NSC because of the postwar realization that U.S. interests, global competition with the Soviet Union, and modern statecraft had become too complex for any single department to manage alone. The NSC was designed to force the conversation—and ensure that no president made a national security decision without hearing all potential diplomatic, intelligence, military, and economic options, and weighing the potential blowback on U.S. national interests.

For its first four decades, that system operated on evolving norms rather than a formal structure. Then the Iran-contra scandal broke it. In 1987, the Tower Commission’s recommendations shaped the modern NSC’s design: the honest broker coordination model, the creation of the NSC legal adviser position, and the prohibition on NSC staff from operational roles. President Reagan adopted these reforms “in total,” and President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, built the modern NSC, including the committee structure that has governed every administration since 1989. In ascending order:

• The Interagency Policy Committee (or the Policy Coordinating Committee), chaired by NSC senior directors at the assistant level for frequent coordination and options development.
• The Deputies Committee, chaired by the deputy national security adviser to manage process up and down, task Interagency Policy Committees, and vet options for principals.
• The Principals Committee, chaired by the national security adviser as a Cabinet-level forum for decisions and recommendations to the president.
• The full NSC, chaired by the president.

Congress has legislated on this system exactly once. In response to concerns that the Obama-era NSC had grown too large and operational, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 capped NSC professional staff at 200 (50 U.S.C. § 3021(e)). The logic was straightforward: a personnel ceiling to constrain overreach. Congress never established a floor—and never imagined a president would destroy his own means to coordinate the executive branch.

Without the NSC forcing coordination, individual departments default to their own institutional preferences—and the president’s decision space shrinks without him knowing it. When the Pentagon plans a military operation without the State Department at the table, diplomatic off-ramps disappear from the options paper before the president sees it. When the Treasury Department designs a sanctions package without CIA input, the intelligence equities that took years to build can be burned overnight.

The people who make this machine run are career professionals on loan from their home agencies— such as the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Treasury Department—serving one-to-two-year tours at the White House. Known as detailees, they serve as the NSC’s connective tissue in both directions: bringing their home agencies’ institutional knowledge and policy equities into the White House, while giving those agencies a working-level channel back to the president’s staff.

NSC staff require a specific kind of knowledge and rigor that political loyalty cannot supply. A director managing the Iran portfolio needs to know how the CIA structures a covert action finding, how the Pentagon builds a target package, and how the Treasury Department writes sanctions designations to survive judicial review. That working knowledge exists in no manual or organization chart, takes 12 to 18 months to acquire on the job, and rests on competencies built over careers. This expertise determines whether a president’s policy direction turns into executable options or aspirational statements agencies cannot implement.

These competencies exist in a person—and when the person is walked off the compound, they walk out with them.

How Prior Administrations Managed the NSC

Reasonable people have disagreed about the NSC’s proper size and scope, but that debate has always taken place within a shared premise: that its coordination function is critical to the execution of U.S. foreign policy, and that career expertise is its mechanism. What happened in January 2025 does not sit on that spectrum.

President Clinton’s first national security adviser, Anthony Lake, adopted Scowcroft’s four-tier committee structure wholesale via Presidential Decision Directive/NSC-2, and doubled the policy staff to roughly 100 personnel to manage the complex post-Cold War landscape.

After Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush’s policy staff grew to roughly 204 to manage two simultaneous wars and the global counterterrorism campaign. The Bush NSC’s defining problem was not overreach, but its opposite. Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld became the center of gravity, frequently bypassing the interagency process that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice chaired. Rumsfeld openly resisted NSC coordination, and postwar planning for Iraq failed in part because no one reconciled the competing visions of the State Department, the Pentagon, and the intelligence community.

The Obama administration ran the largest, most centralized NSC in the institution’s history, peaking at 222 policy staff. The critique was that this model went too far: Former defense secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta accused the Obama NSC of micromanaging agencies, directly contacting combatant commanders, and holding repetitive meetings that centralized decisions in the White House.

Trump’s first term was chaotic—four national security advisers and unprecedented senior turnover. The system survived but ran unevenly. Beginning in late 2019, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien moved 40 to 45 staffers back to their home agencies, leaving roughly 119 policy staff. The NSC still coordinated policy execution, with career professionals in every directorate. However, when career civilians and military officers became whistleblowers whose disclosures led to the Ukraine impeachment, it hardened a conviction, shared by Trump and his political operatives, that detailees were not neutral professionals but potential adversaries.

Biden’s NSC represented a return to “regular order” after the turbulence of the first Trump administration. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan pointedly titled his organizing directive “Renewing the National Security Council System.” The NSC stood at 186 at the end of the term. The Biden NSC was not without its critics, who claimed that its decision-making was slow and cumbersome, and that it overly centralized decisions in the White House that could have been delegated to departments and agencies. However, the coordination architecture functioned and generated the range of options and agency perspectives that inform presidential decisions.

Across these administrations, the record shows more continuity than divergence in the NSC’s structure, function, and size, and career detailees continued to serve across party transitions. Staffing levels ranged from roughly 100 to 200 policy staff, but no administration questioned the underlying premise that the NSC’s coordination function was necessary and that career expertise was its mechanism.

What the Purge Destroyed

The January, April, and May 2025 purges were not a reduction in force. They dismantled the interagency coordination mechanism itself—waves of dismissals with no warning and no knowledge transfer. The president will still want things. The departments will still act. But without the connective tissue that translates presidential direction into coordinated policy, the U.S. government will not act as one.

The consequences were immediate. In the chaos following the initial purge, departments and agencies could not identify or reach counterparts at the White House. The NSC’s intelligence and security directorates scrambled to determine who had been authorized to receive the President’s Daily Brief, who had been read into sensitive compartmented programs, and who held interim clearances granted by the president. For days, and in some cases weeks, Trump appointees could not access vital intelligence compartments—the officers who could have helped them had been walked out.

The NSC’s new senior directors for China, the Middle East, and Russia attempted to restart interagency meetings within the first few weeks of the administration, but these were suspended at the direction of the White House’s chief of staff, and could not be restarted without the personal approval of Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller. The normal cadence of interagency coordination at the assistant secretary level—where intelligence and analysis weigh the impact of potential U.S. actions and help shape realistic options—has never resumed.

But the purge didn’t just create a void—it filled it with a parallel structure optimized for political loyalty. National Security Presidential Memorandum-1, issued on the first day of the administration, merged the Homeland Security Council (HSC) and the NSC on “topics agreed to in advance” by the national security adviser and the homeland security adviser. This built on Project 2025’s recommendation to consolidate both bodies and staff the NSC with individuals whose primary qualification is political fealty.

In practice, Miller’s HSC became the administration’s most effective policy engine—running “like clockwork,” according to White House sources, while the NSC struggled. Miller’s HSC handled not only immigration but counterterrorism, cyber, and domestic military deployments. Sebastian Gorka—who was forced out of the White House in 2017 after failing his background investigation—was installed as senior director for counterterrorism, overseeing lethal operations requiring the most sensitive compartmented intelligence. The administration’s designation of drug trafficking organizations as foreign terrorist organizations also expanded Gorka’s portfolio beyond its traditional Middle East focus into the Western Hemisphere, including strikes in the Caribbean.

With the NSC gutted and policy coordination at the assistant secretary level now paralyzed, mistakes were inevitable. The so-called Signalgate group chat, arranged by inexperienced political appointees over a commercial messaging app, offered a glimpse into principals-level discussions that were largely devoid of the debate and rigorous analysis that lower levels would normally develop. The transcript contained no reference to legal review of the strike’s authorization or intelligence analysis of the likely Houthi or Iranian response, products an interagency process exists to generate.

A Broken NSC Courts Disaster

The breakdown of the NSC’s coordination function may be precisely what the president and his advisers want—but it has produced serious miscalculations, from ill-conceived tariffs to the catastrophic planning failures in the run-up to the war with Iran.

The administration’s sweeping tariffs on U.S. allies—including 24 percent on Japan, 25 percent on South Korea, and 20 percent on the European Union—were imposed without the interagency process to weigh their impact on defense cooperation, intelligence sharing, or basing agreements, and to present options to the president. Japan hosts over 50,000 U.S. troops, and South Korea hosts 28,000 and pays over a billion dollars annually, each essential to U.S. efforts to deter conflict with China and North Korea. Similarly, the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development without any interagency policy process gutted U.S. influence in countries vital to the global competition with China, and undermined other administration priorities, such as expanding U.S. market access to sources of critical minerals.

The January 2026 military operation to capture Nicolás Maduro was the product of months of planning by the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Command, but the strategic decision and post-capture planning bypassed the interagency process that would normally precede an action of this magnitude. The NSC’s Western Hemisphere directorate had been reduced to a single senior director and virtually no working-level staff in the months before the operation. Even the Pentagon’s broader leadership did not learn of the precise timing until hours before launch, and Congress was not notified in advance.

In the absence of policy planning beyond the military dimension, the administration’s post-capture objectives and plans remain undefined. While Trump declared that the United States would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, and the broader Chavista security apparatus remain in place. More than four months on, the only U.S. policy aim consistently articulated has been access to Venezuelan oil: a goal that remains unrealized as U.S. sanctions continue to bar American firms from the country’s reserves.

While the tactical success of the U.S. military operation in Venezuela helped to mask the planning failures, no such cover was available with Iran. The June 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were executed with a Middle East directorate that had been gutted in the May 2025 purge, including the top officials overseeing Iran and Israel. The new senior director was just 12 days into his role. Then, on Feb. 28, 2026, the U.S. and Israel launched a full air campaign without clear planning for a protracted conflict, for Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipments, the global spike in energy prices, or the evacuation of U.S. citizens from the region. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had warned Trump before the strikes that an Iranian closure of the strait was a foreseeable consequence. These are precisely the second- and third-order consequences that decades of Pentagon wargaming on the strait had identified—and that a functioning NSC interagency process is designed to surface in advance.

Subsequent reporting bore this out. CNN reported that the White House “significantly underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz” and that agency analysis and forecasts were “secondary considerations” in the planning process. A senior U.S. official told CNN that the NSC “used to be the final synthesizer” before deputy or principal meetings, but “without a real interagency process led by the NSC, the planning falls apart.” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy concluded that the strait’s closure owed at least in part to the administration’s failure to plan for foreseeable contingencies, and that “while a lean interagency process can produce fast and bold decisions, the tradeoff is often this sort of oversight.”

The evacuation failure was equally stark. The administration launched strikes on Feb. 28 without pre-positioning charter flights or issuing departure advisories to the roughly half a million Americans living in the Middle East. The State Department did not urge citizens or the dependents of U.S. diplomatic personnel to leave until two days after strikes began, by which time airspace across the region had closed. Americans who called the State Department’s emergency line received a recording: “Please do not rely on the U.S. government for assisted departure or evacuation at this time.” Asked why no evacuation plans existed for a conflict initiated by the U.S., the president said it “happened all very quickly.” By contrast, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom began evacuating their nationals within hours.

The allied dimension proved equally damaging. The Council on Foreign Relations found that the U.S. “launched a major military operation with little to no consultation with its transatlantic allies.” Germany’s government spokesman, Stefan Kornelius, told reporters that the U.S. and Israel “did not consult us before the war” and that “Washington explicitly stated at the start of the war that European assistance was neither necessary nor desired.” When the president then demanded European navies help reopen the Strait of Hormuz, every major NATO ally refused—a predictable consequence of launching a war without consulting the allies you would need to help finish it.

This is not a new lesson. The pre-Iraq war failure to plan for the collapse of the Iraqi state is the classic case of an interagency planning failure, and the result was a decade-long war.

Restoring the NSC

A new administration will need to restore the tiered coordination system immediately, ensuring policy discussion at the assistant secretary level that surfaces options for deputies and principals. This piece outlines the principles; the second part will turn them into specific recommendations on NSC structure, function, and statutory reform.

Staffing must return to the historical range of 100-200 policy professionals. Beyond headcount, the new NSC leadership will need to set clear expectations: broad policy options, objective analysis, and protection against retaliation for dissent. Restoring the willingness of career officers to serve will be the hardest part. When detailees are dismissed for political disloyalty, or targeted by name by external activists, the pipeline of expertise dries up. The coordination architecture can be rebuilt, but it runs on people, and many have learned what happens when they raise their hands.

Administrations of both parties have historically opposed statutory fixes to reinforce the NSC’s institutional capacity. The Tower Commission itself recommended against statutory reform in 1987, trusting executive self-correction and the personal integrity of future national security advisers. That trust has now failed, and the NSC has no structural protection against the impulse that broke it.

Whatever the final mix of reforms, Congress and a new administration will need to ensure that a functional NSC is helping the president make good decisions, not shielding him from hard truths. Far from being the “enemies within,” career detailees are the institutional memory that tells a senior director which agencies need to be in the room, which classified programs can contribute, and which allied governments will need to be consulted for a policy to succeed. Destroying that layer does not empower the president.

It’s the equivalent of firing the air traffic controllers and expecting the planes to land safely on their own.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.