Apr. 30, 2025 |
Double government. Immediately after taking office, U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz sent around 160 National Security Council staffers to different government agencies. And earlier this month, the White House fired both the director and the deputy director of the National Security Agency. Now, CBS News reports, the White House is preparing to “rebuild” the National Security Council with staffers “staunchly aligned” with U.S. President Donald Trump. “Always, we’re letting go of people,” Trump says. “People that we don’t like, or people that we don’t think can do the job, or people that may have loyalties to somebody else.”
It all follows a similar purge at the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth replaced General C.Q. Brown with General Dan Caine as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Meanwhile, as Francis Fukuyama says in The Signal, Trump is pushing to replace career civil servants with political appointees across the entire federal bureaucracy.
What’s going on?
—Gustav Jönsson
