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of personnel with technical expertise and experience as well as an alignment to the President’s declared national security policy priorities. The NSC must then chart a course that articulates and achieves the President’s national security goals and objectives. The President should empower a strong NSC that not only has the power to convene the policy process, but also is entrusted with the full power of the presidency to drive the bureaucracy.

In organizing (by means of Presidential Directive*) an NSC staff that is more responsive and aligned with the President’s goals and empowered to implement them, the NSA should immediately evaluate and eliminate directorates that are not aligned with the President’s agenda and replace them with new directorates as appropriate that can drive implementation of the President’s signature national security priorities. In addition to realigning the staff organization to the President’s priorities, the NSA should assign responsibility for implementation of specific policy initiatives to senior NSC officials from across the NSC staff structure. These officials should develop, direct, and execute tangible action plans in coordination with multiple agencies to achieve measurable, time-defined milestones.

Aligning NSC staff to the President’s national security goals will provide clearer direction, a mandate for action, and a baseline of accountability that can be used to evaluate staff performance and the NSC’s overall progress. Accountable senior officials, themselves either political appointees or a minimum number of career detailees, who are selected and vetted politically and report directly to political staff should be the main day-to-day managers for interagency coordination and implementation of their assigned national security policy objectives. They should provide policy analysis for consideration by the broader NSC and relevant agencies and ensure timely responses to decisions made by the President. The accountable senior officials should be established at the direction of the NSA and draw on personnel and expertise from beyond the NSC, including OMB, the National Economic Council, and relevant federal agencies.

The NSC staff and principals should work in tandem with the National Economic Council and OMB at all levels, presenting a united effort to achieve the President’s goals and drawing on the latter’s statutory authorities to guide the bureaucracy. To accomplish national objectives effectively, foreign policy should fully incorporate the economic instruments of national power. National security policy must also include the prioritized allocation of resources. When policies are divorced from the resources required to implement them, they are stillborn—academic exercises that undermine our national security and leave departments and agencies to their own devices.

The accountable senior officials should be empowered to identify, recruit, clear, and hire staff who are aligned with and willing to shepherd the President’s national security priorities. NSC staff leads, under the direction of the NSA, should have the discretion to reduce the number of positions that need high-level clearances,

and the NSC should be adequately resourced and authorized to adjudicate and hold security clearances internally with investigators who work directly for the NSC and whose sole task is to clear NSC officials. If certain staff are determined not to need high-level clearances, the question becomes whether they should be part of the NSC at all.

The NSC should take a leading role in directing the drafting and thorough review of all formal strategies: the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, the Nuclear Posture Review, the Missile Defense Strategy, etc. In particular, the National Defense Strategy, which by tradition has evaded significant review, should be prioritized for White House review by the NSC and OMB. Both should also conduct reviews of operational war plans and global force planning and allocations with the Secretary of Defense to align them with presidential priorities and review all key policy and guidance intended for implementation by the heads of the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the Intelligence Community before they are authorized for distribution. The NSC should rigorously review all general and flag officer promotions to prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense matters, including climate change, critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarizing policies that weaken our armed forces and discourage our nation’s finest men and women from enlisting to serve in defense of our liberty.

The NSC staff will need to consolidate the functions of both the NSC and the Homeland Security Council (HSC), incorporate the recently established Office of the National Cyber Director, and evaluate the required regional and functional directorates. Given the aforementioned prerequisites, the NSC should be properly resourced with sufficient policy professionals, and the NSA should prioritize staffing the vast majority of NSC directorates with aligned political appointees and trusted career officials. For instance, the NSA should return a// nonessential detailees to their home agencies on their first day in office so that the new Administration can proceed efficiently without the personnel land mines left by the previous stewards and as soon as possible should replace all essential detailees with staff aligned to the new President’s priorities. The HSC has overseen pandemic response, and its incorporation is important.

In the end, change requires intervention, and the NSC staff should be appropriately recruited, manned, and empowered to achieve the President’s national security and foreign policy objectives and maintain robust policy analysis and discussion while minimizing resistance from those who have an agenda or who jealously guard their resources and autonomy at the expense of national security and sound policy development. This resistance and inertia can be inadvertently enabled by a small and unempowered NSC.

Additionally, the White House Chief of Staff and NSA must ensure that the NSC is functioning in tandem with the rest of the White House staff to benefit from