Donald Trump has dramatically shrunk the White House National Security Council by firing a number of officials, placing others on administrative leave and ordering many secondees to return to their home agencies.
Several people familiar with the firings said the NSC, which is being run temporarily by secretary of state Marco Rubio, had retained some staff, mostly senior directors, while eliminating dozens of positions in the office.
The move, which one person described as a “liquidation”, comes three weeks after the president fired Mike Waltz as his first national security adviser, the top position at the NSC.
The officials who lost their positions were notified on Friday afternoon. The move followed weeks of speculation about an imminent purge at the NSC.
NSC chief of staff Brian McCormack emailed the officials shortly after 4pm to tell them they had 30 minutes to remove their belongings from their desks and to exit the NSC building next to the White House.
It was unclear if Alex Wong, the deputy national security adviser, had been dismissed. Laura Loomer, a right-wing conspiracy theorist who helped persuade Trump to fire Waltz, has also been gunning for Wong, who is a well respected official with hawkish views on China.
Three people familiar with the dismissals said Ivan Kanapathy, senior director for Asia, remained but his entire team, including his China staff, had been let go. Loomer had also urged Trump to fire Kanapathy, a former fighter pilot.
Robert O’Brien, who served as national security adviser in the first Trump administration, recently wrote an opinion article calling for the NSC to be cut to about 60 officials. The NSC, which traditionally has served as a co-ordinating office but has sometimes been used to centralise power in the White House, had more than 200 officials during the Biden administration.
“There is no question that the NSC in the Biden administration had become bloated and was high-handedly trying to implement foreign policy rather than doing its traditional role of co-ordinating the implementation by the rest of the national security establishment,” said Dennis Wilder, a former top NSC official in the administration of George W Bush.
“That said, there is a danger that a severely trimmed NSC will not have the executive firepower to ‘herd the cats’ of the national security system.”
Some supporters said the move would help Trump by reducing the number of officials from other agencies who might not support his “Make America Great Again” agenda.
One person close to the White House said Trump had learned a lesson from his first administration when he came to believe that many NSC officials were quietly blocking his agenda. “He was not going to make the same mistake again,” the person said.
But others questioned the impact that the purge would have on policy, and particularly the ability to referee disagreements across the government.
“While it might seem a hobbling bureaucratic move because the NSC’s purpose is to staff the president, its significance is about far more,” said one former NSC official.
“By whittling down the NSC staff to almost nothing, you kneecap the US government’s ability to generate foreign policy options, or to potentially act as a brake on Trump’s preferences. All that remains is presidential power.”
Trump also dismantled most of NSC directorate that oversaw technology and national security policy, according to several people. The president previously fired David Feith who headed the office, which was created during the Biden administration.
That directorate was instrumental in creating export controls that were designed to make it much harder for China to obtain advanced American technology that could help its military.
The NSC did not comment. But Brian Hughes, the NSC spokesperson, said he would remain and “continue to serve the administration”. The White House press secretary did not respond to a request for comment.
