Michael Singh
Since assuming office, U.S. President Donald Trump has overseen an unprecedented assault on the federal government. Initially, his agent in this campaign was the tech mogul Elon Musk, who was running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Musk described DOGE’s mission as reducing the United States’ $36 trillion in federal debt and ending the “tyranny of bureaucracy.” After a very public rift between the billionaires last week, Musk is on the outs with Trump, but the goal of downsizing the federal bureaucracy remains deeply ingrained in the administration. At the end of May, for instance, in a move not apparently initiated by Musk or his staff, the Trump administration cut dozens of staff from the National Security Council, which advises the president on international affairs and coordinates the interagency policymaking process. This move, according to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also replaced Mike Waltz to lead the NSC, is intended to make the NSC hew more closely to “its original purpose and the President’s vision.” But, according to Axios, an anonymous official put it more bluntly: “The NSC is the ultimate Deep State. . . . We’re gutting the Deep State.”
Critics argue that such drastic cuts to the federal government will ultimately diminish U.S. influence in the world. Yet it is worth remembering that debates over the size and scope of the NSC and other parts of the national security bureaucracy fit squarely in a long-standing American political tradition. Indeed, the recent attacks on bureaucracy—and especially the national security bureaucracy—are reminiscent of the immediate aftermath of World War II.
With the U.S. victory in 1945, the shattering of the international order that preceded it, and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a military and ideological rival, midcentury American political and intellectual circles broadly accepted that there could be no return to Washington’s pre-war military readiness or its foreign policy of relative aloofness from global affairs. But precisely what a “new normal” should look like was hotly debated. Internationalists believed the United States should maintain a robust overseas role, while conservatives were skeptical of international intervention. From those debates emerged the U.S. national security state—the collection of government agencies and organizations that focus on protecting citizens from external threats.
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