Trump Is Operating With a Diminished National Security Council

President Donald Trump made some of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of his presidency with a skeletal National Security Council of fewer than 50 policy experts, according to multiple sources familiar with the office.

As the White House coordinated across agencies and with foreign counterparts ahead of its decision to strike Iran, it was relying on newly appointed experts to advise on critical crises, these sources said — including Wayne Wall, the newly appointed senior director of Middle East policy, who was in his role for just days before the U.S. military struck three nuclear sites in Iran, according to a person close to the NSC.

The agency has begun to restaff in some areas, as Bloomberg first reported and NOTUS confirmed, focusing first on Asia experts. A White House official said the NSC has been consistently restaffing since cuts were made at the office. But the lack of staff up to this point has raised major questions about how extensively the president has been briefed.

“This means that there’s big information gaps,” one person familiar with the NSC’s internal functions and in communication with current staff told NOTUS. “The president’s decision-making here is only partially informed by the professional cadre that monitors, tracks, has worked on these issues and has the institutional knowledge.”

The White House official told NOTUS that the president is intimately aware of all foreign policy and national security related matters, routinely briefed by experts and has chaired several National Security Council meetings.

“NSC continues to be right-sized and re-assessed. The President has great confidence in his entire national security team – which not only includes Secretary and National Security Advisor Rubio and the NSC team, but also State, DoD, intel agencies, and more. The Iran-Israel ceasefire is proof that the President’s national security team is achieving great victories and peaceful solutions,” the House official said in a statement.

The Trump administration is one that prides itself on operating leaner, and the president has favored an inner circle of loyal advisers over the NSC. Some have argued that current staffing levels at the council might be good enough to get the job done.

“The point of the NSC is not to be a shadow State Department or shadow Pentagon. The point is to coordinate,” Alexander Gray, who served as the NSC chief of staff during Trump’s first term, told NOTUS. “That doesn’t require this huge staff.”

A White House official said that a leaner NSC lends itself to better efficiency and coordination.

“What happens when you have too many cooks in the kitchen is that you get redundant or conflicting foreign policy. We want to make sure all foreign policy aligns with the president’s agenda,” they told NOTUS.

The scale and scope of the president’s actions on foreign policy, however, have increased the stakes of not having a staffed security council in place, policy experts and former NSC officials under Republican and Democratic administrations told NOTUS.

The president has levied widespread tariffs, and then paused them to negotiate dozens of “bespoke” trade agreements. He has claimed to negotiate ceasefire settlements between India and Pakistan and Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and thus far has failed to bring the war between Russia and Ukraine to an end. Most recently, the U.S. entered Israel’s war with Iran, carrying out strikes on three nuclear sites, before the president declared a ceasefire on what he’s dubbed “The 12-Day War.”

Those decisions were made without a full team of long-term career experts at the NSC, because many were asked to leave shortly after Secretary of State Marco Rubio began acting as the director, two sources told NOTUS. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters that planning for the strike took “months and weeks of positioning and preparation” to be ready when Trump made the order.

News of Wall’s appointment to direct Middle East policy broke twelve days before the strike. Wall is a former intelligence professional who worked with the military’s Defense Intelligence Agency and Central Command — when asked whether Wall was briefed or consulted ahead of strikes, the White House official said Wall was in the room for many principal-level discussions.

“Who is doing the coordinated contingency planning that takes into account all of our various instruments of power, so not just military options, but diplomatic and economic statecraft options?” Dilpreet Sidhu, an NSC executive secretary and deputy chief of staff under President Joe Biden, told NOTUS. “If you only have a couple dozen staff at the NSC, how do they do all that across multiple hotspots around the world?”

Two former NSC officials both in contact with current staff described the environment of the NSC as chaotic and siloed.

Trump’s small staff has made it more difficult to coordinate with outside entities, one of the sources said. At the start of Trump’s second term, foreign embassies and U.S. government agencies “had no idea who to contact” and encountered entire issue areas uncovered by the NSC, this source said.

The regional focus of the administration, Asia, which does not include the Middle East, was just recently allowed to restaff. Ivan Kanapathy, the senior director for the region, brought back at least three staffers that were previously removed during the Trump administration. Kanapathy’s team was described as the “most functioning,” while others lagged behind, one source said.

The two sources in contact with current NSC staff said the entire Western Hemisphere directorate is not staffed at all outside the recent appointment of Michael Jensen as senior director. Under previous administrations, these would be teams of 12 to 14 people focused on assessing information and advising the president on that region exclusively. The White House official told NOTUS that in addition to the appointment of a senior director, the directorate is currently being filled out.

They no longer have a spokesperson who is only focused on NSC-related issues.

“It’s shooting yourself in the foot” to not have a fully staffed NSC, Sean Savett, the former spokesperson for the NSC under Biden, told NOTUS. “And you’re shooting yourself in the foot from a communications perspective.”

The NSC grew in size between the first Bush administration and President Barack Obama’s. President George H. W. Bush had 50 people working in the office; President Bill Clinton had 100; President George W. Bush had 200; and Obama’s NSC had roughly 400 staff.

During Trump’s first term, the size of the office fluctuated, with reports of as many as 310 staffers at one point. Trump’s left office with just over 100 policy experts, according to Gray. Biden’s administration built the team back up to roughly 200 staff, a former Biden NSC staffer said.

Those in favor of a smaller NSC argue that when the office becomes too big, it becomes its own agency that looks to set policy instead of just supporting the president.

In Trump’s second term, many of the junior staff have been fired or left, including people whose job it was to manage travel, coordinate meetings and other logistics, a former official told NOTUS. The administration let go staffers at the beginning of Trump’s term under National Security Adviser Mike Waltz. After Waltz departed, more than 100 staffers were reportedly put on administrative leave.

Less staff means the NSC’s work will require more time from those involved, whether to coordinate their own travel, calendars and logistics, or just to balance staying informed by outside agencies with informing Trump himself.

“I think it really diminishes the capacity of the White House to shape the foreign policy of the administration, because you need a staff to be able to follow up with the interagency to make sure you implement what the president’s guidance is,” said Thomas Wright, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution and senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council during the Biden administration. “You also need a staff to generate options and to inform options, and then you also need staff to plan for contingencies and for different scenarios that would arise. It doesn’t feel like they have the capacity to be able to do that.”

Even though Congress itself was largely left in the dark about Trump’s strikes in Iran, Republicans on Capitol Hill have shown no concern for Trump’s staffing decisions at the NSC.

“This town, unfortunately, has become bloated beyond recognition,” Rep. Byron Donalds said. “That’s not to diminish people that were working at the NSC, but Washington has to follow the model that business has been going down for the last 30 years. Got to get lean, got to get far more efficient while still providing the services.”

Republicans in the Senate agreed.

“I’m not going to second-guess the number of employees they need,” Sen. Mike Rounds told NOTUS — though Rounds did say that “at a time like this,” having adept political leaders who can brief the president “may very well be the most important thing they can do.”

Oversight, however, is not a priority.

“I honestly, like, if you ask me right now, ‘Josh, what’s the full complement of NSC staffers?’ Like, I wouldn’t know,” Sen. Josh Hawley told NOTUS.

“I mean, I could call around and ask, but I just don’t,” Hawley said.

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John T. Seward and Violet Jira are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows. Jasmine Wright is the White House correspondent and a reporter at NOTUS.

This story has been updated to reflect the White House’s position that it has consistently restaffed vacancies at the NSC.