The Purge: How the White House Broke the NSC and How to Fix It | Lawfare
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Julia Curlee
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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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>Things Fall Apart<br>THE WHITE HOUSE — JANUARY 22, 2025<br>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:<br>“Everyone’s fired,” he paused. “Except you.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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...