A House Republican proposal that started out as an effort to address Pentagon complaints of West Wing micromanaging has quickly turned into a fight between Congress and the White House over the size of each other’s national security team.
House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry plans to release a bill in the coming days to cut the White House’s National Security Council staff “well below” its current level. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Monday said he’s likely to include similar language in his version of the National Defense Authorization Act.
Reacting to that news, a senior administration official told the Washington Examiner Monday that some of the proposals Republicans on Capitol Hill are considering would reduce the NSC staff to less than the number of aides on the Senate Armed Services Committee, hampering the next president’s ability to form his foreign policy teams.
“Apparently, these lawmakers feel that they should have more national security staffers than the president of the United States,” the official told the Examiner. “Indeed, this effort would accomplish little beyond handicapping the next president by depriving that individual of resources needed to respond to an increasingly complex national security landscape.”
A spokesman for the Senate Armed Services Committee declined to comment on Thornberry’s proposal, which the chairman plans to offer as an amendment to the NDAA. The Senate version of the NDAA is still under committee consideration, and should be released in mid-May.
“We obviously haven’t completed the Senate version, but we work very closely with Congressman Thornberry,” McCain told the Examiner Monday afternoon. “It’s very likely we’ll be proposing something similar.”
A spokesman for House Democrats on the Armed Services panel also would not comment on a proposal that Thornberry has yet to release.
But a House committee aide told reporters late last week that Thornberry plans to address a litany of Pentagon complaints about West Wing micromanaging by capping the number of staffers “well below” the current estimated level of 350 to 400.
The NSC, according to the aide, is supposed to serve an advisory function for the president, but after it reaches a certain size, it’s acting more like it’s own executive branch department. If it’s functioning like a department, the rationale goes, then the Senate should confirm it’s director, and it should become subject to congressional oversight like any other department.
For more than a year, the White House has acknowledged that its growing staff may have become too unwieldy and could use some streamlining.
Last June, the White House announced a new effort to “reverse the trend of growth” through attrition to make sure the NSC staff, which some estimate had grown to 400, is “lean, nimble and policy-oriented.”
The White House on Monday said National Security Adviser Susan Rice led the “right-sizing effort,” which has resulted in roughly a 10 percent reduction in NSC staff since December 2014.
“This review also grappled squarely with the fact that the NSC staff has consistently grown over the past few decades under administrations of both parties,” NSC spokesman Ned Price said in a statement.
“More importantly, however, these measures will help to ensure the NSC staff, in coordination with the inter-agency, is best positioned to implement the president’s ambitious foreign policy agenda for our remaining time in office,” he added.
Price did not indicate the size of the current NSC staff, but members of Congress have estimated that it had grown to nearly 400 under the Obama administration, roughly twice the size it was at the end of the George W. Bush administration.
All three of Obama’s former defense secretaries have complained bitterly about meddling from NSC staff.
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in didn’t mince words in a Fox News interview in April.
“I told my combatant commanders and field commanders … if you get calls from … the president, that’s one thing,” he said. “But if you get a call from some White House or National Security Council staffer, you tell them to call me instead, and then tell them, by the way, go to hell … directly from the secretary of defense.”
Bush first tapped Gates to lead the department in 2006, and he remained in the position for two years after Obama took office when Leon Panetta replaced him in 2011.
The size of the NSC is difficult to track. The Brookings Institution has done some of the best research on its expansion over the years, and has compiled a chart showing how it has grown since its formation under President Truman from a size of about 20 staffers, to more than 110 during the Clinton years, to roughly 100 under Bush.
The Institution, however, appears to have quit tracking the NSC’s growth during the Obama administration.
Brookings’ Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow who specializes in U.S. defense strategy, told the Examiner he agrees with most “outsiders” that the NSC is too big, but said he wouldn’t try to reduce its staff through legislation before the next president takes office.
“I think that a more modest paring followed by a firm cap makes more sense than draconian change,” he said.
He suggested a 10-25 percent reduction, mimicking the levels in the George H.W. Bush administration in early 1990s, “but updated and modestly expanded relative to that baseline in light of today’s complicated world.”
