The Trump NSC’s accidental leak to The Atlantic should force a rethink of the body’s role in crafting American foreign policy.

    On March 24, Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic broke news about a security breach within the national security decisionmaking process. As the Trump administration prepared to strike Houthi military targets in Yemen earlier in March, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz reportedly created a Signal group chat with top administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and others, to discuss the strikes. While the incident was clearly a lapse of judgment by top administration officials, it highlights the need to address integral questions about the character and concept of the National Security Council (NSC).

    During the early weeks of the new Trump presidency, his administration reshaped its NSC, dismissing dozens of staffers and issuing a memorandum (NSCM-1) that outlines how the council will serve the agenda of the new president. NSCM-1 shrinks the number of officials involved in NSC decision-making and introduces a more streamlined structure for how information flows to the president.

    While these changes may appear drastic, it is uncertain whether this marked a meaningful break from the model developed over the past five decades, whereby the NSC became a centralized policymaking body, rather than an interagency coordinating hub, as originally conceived. If the Trump administration wants to produce a sound, actionable foreign policy, it should look to pare the NSC’s functions back and encourage the flow of constructive information and policy ideas from those who implement them at the department level. This will ensure the president can make hard choices about strategic prioritization while minimizing insular decisionmaking occurring within a body that receives almost no oversight.

1.     The Original Intent

    The 1947 National Security Act created the NSC but provided a vague mandate for organization and function. Over time, presidents have used this ambiguity to wield the NSC as they see fit. Along the way, the council picked up the National Security Advisor and professional staff, which empowered it to evolve from a coordinating body to a policymaking body.

    According to the late historian Anna K. Nelson, Harry Truman’s budget director, James B. Webb, had the greatest impact on defining the original NSC. While other influential members of Truman’s cabinet envisioned a larger council dominated by the defense establishment, Webb advocated for a strictly advisory body populated by departmental detailees, not a professional staff. Webb’s plan aimed to prevent the NSC from becoming an operating body that forced the president to resolve “spot issues,” and insisted the council only discuss issues deemed appropriate by the president. Truman embraced Webb’s vision for the NSC.

    From its inception in 1947 until the National Security Act Amendments of 1949, the council was dominated by the State Department. It helped that the first executive secretary of the NSC, Admiral Sydney W. Souers, was content to allow the State Department to take the lead on policy synthesis, which was in line with the Webb plan. Souers saw service to the president and council members through interagency coordination as his fundamental responsibility, not policymaking. Indeed, most of the policy papers produced by the NSC during this time were drafted by the State Department’s newly formed Policy Planning Staff (PPS), preserving State’s preeminence in foreign affairs. In practice, Souers was an honest broker who, when prompted by Truman, merely conveyed developments from NSC meetings to the president, namely policy recommendations that the member departments decided.

    Although Dwight D. Eisenhower ascended to the presidency in part by campaigning on the need to reform Truman’s national security system, the measures implemented by Robert Cutler, Ike’s special assistant for national security, demonstrated revised continuity in the NSC process. Resisting calls from the second Hoover Commission (1953–1955) to create a professional staff for the NSC, Eisenhower and Cutler opted to establish a Planning Board to draft long-term policy papers on national security issues, but not diplomacy, which was strictly reserved for Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

    In truth, Eisenhower prioritized the planning process more than the plan itself and thus wielded the NSC as a venue for policy debate between the participating departments and agencies. To complement the Planning Board, he also established the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), which approved detailed operational planning and coordinated interdepartmental implementation of policy decisions.

1.     From Coordinator to Policymaker

    Today, the NSC does not resemble the council overseen by Truman and Eisenhower. It has become, first and foremost, a policymaking body rather than a coordinating organization meant to elevate important ideas and iron out differences between departments. The Trump administration has already affirmed that it will follow the trend of tasking the NSC with developing policy. President Trump’s NSCM-1 endows the NSC with the ability to develop “additional options besides those proposed by departments and agencies as necessary…to offer the President and other NSC principals and other senior officials a sufficiently broad menu of operationally feasible options for consideration, deliberation, and decision.”

    A broad mandate does not facilitate an effective strategy process. NSC staff are likely to generate policies without consulting the departments and agencies that will implement them. While the Trump administration’s move to shrink the NSC staff could be seen as an effort to create a more efficient policymaking process, the significant staff cuts, specifically to detailees from across departments, privilege policy creation for the NSC professional staff under the national security advisor. This may undermine the relationship between the traditional foreign policy, defense, and intelligence departments and agencies and the president, and relegate them to policy implementation. The intention to concentrate national security policymaking within a self-contained NSC staff further risks a policymaking process producing recommendations deemed politically viable for the president but which are infeasible due to a misalignment of ends, ways, and means.

    This is not a problem unique to the Trump administration. Previous NSCs have produced National Security Strategies (NSS) that are a laundry list of desires, with little explanation of implementation or prioritization among competing objectives, contributing to poor foreign policy outcomes. For example, the Biden administration’s NSS drastically expanded the list of supposed national security priorities to the extent of contradiction. It deemed authoritarianism the United States’ most pressing strategic challenge. Yet, U.S.-China relations, threats from Russia, terrorism, and climate change were also cited as national security imperatives. Pursuing actions to mitigate climate change by cooperating with China was simultaneously justifiable with the goals outlined in Biden’s NSS and at odds with the administration’s approach to countering authoritarianism. Thus, while Trump has made sweeping cuts to NSC staffing, the changes do not address the underlying issues afflicting the foreign policy strategy process that the NSC is meant to coordinate.

    However, all is not lost. The Trump administration can use this moment as an opportunity to reconceptualize the NSC process by resurrecting a tried, tested, and true model.

1.     Reforming the NSC

    The NSC’s changing role from an interagency coordinating body to a centralized policymaking directorate has not improved outcomes. The capture of foreign policy planning by the NSC staff has led to an atrophying of policy entrepreneurship at the department level, creating a process that too often results in competing imperatives, inadequate means to implement policies, and unclear desired ends. As such, the Trump administration would benefit from a narrowed NSC that facilitates the constructive exchange of policy ideas between the departments, as the interagency process was initially designed to do.

    Ultimately, the NSC should work closely with the relevant national security departments to source the best ideas and communicate how the president wants policies sequenced and aligned. The administration should encourage policy entrepreneurship at the department level, especially within the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning. Re-establishing an NSC Planning Board and Operational Coordinating Board would help facilitate long-term strategic planning and production of a more grounded NSS while allowing other elements of the NSC to respond to the inevitable crises that require interagency coordination.

    Truman and Eisenhower both recognized that policy ideas should come from the staff working on the issues, while the president should set strategic priorities. Both presidents wielded the NSC as an honest broker in the arena of policy debate and coordination. Today, the NSC has morphed into a gatekeeper of the policymaking process, creating agendas for the president and independently developing competing policy recommendations. The United States would be better off with an NSC that does neither and confines itself to a more limited role.