White House National Security Council

Overview

The White House National Security Council is the president’s principal forum for considering national security and foreign policy matters with senior advisers and cabinet officials. Congress created it by statute in 1947 to give the president an interdepartmental body that could integrate domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to national security and help the armed services and civilian agencies cooperate more effectively (Congressional Research Service). The head of its staff, the national security adviser, has over the decades played an important and at times highly public role in policymaking (Congressional Research Service).

The spokesperson’s public role: the 2024 Putin-interview response

The Council speaks to the public through its spokesperson, and one of the clearest recent examples came in February 2024, when Tucker Carlson traveled to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin. The interview was Putin’s first formal sit-down with a Western journalist since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly two years earlier, and Carlson planned to broadcast it on his website and on X (Al Jazeera).

The White House objected before it aired. “On Wednesday, the White House said Putin should not be given an uncritical outlet to justify his war in Ukraine,” Al Jazeera reported, quoting National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby: “I don’t think we need another interview with Vladimir Putin to understand his brutality” (Al Jazeera). The Kremlin, for its part, said through spokesman Dmitry Peskov that Carlson got the interview because his approach was “in no way pro-Russian, it is not pro-Ukrainian – it is pro-American,” contrasting him with Western outlets Peskov called one-sided (Al Jazeera).

How the Council is organized

On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum NSPM-1, “Organization of the National Security Council and Subcommittees,” which states that the NSC, created by the National Security Act of 1947 as amended, exists to advise the president on the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to national security (The White House). Along with its subordinate committees and staff, the memo says, the Council is “the President’s principal means for coordinating Executive departments and agencies” in developing and carrying out national and homeland security policy (The White House).

The president chairs the Council. Its statutory members are the president, the vice president, the secretaries of state, the treasury, defense, and energy; the 2025 memo adds the Attorney General, the Secretary of the Interior, the White House chief of staff, and the national security adviser as designated members, with the Director of National Intelligence, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CIA Director attending as non-voting advisers (The White House). The national security adviser sets the agenda, sees that papers are prepared, and records and communicates the Council’s actions and presidential decisions (The White House). A single NSC staff inside the Executive Office of the President serves both the NSC and the Homeland Security Council, headed by one executive secretary (The White House).

The 2025–2026 leadership arc: from Waltz to Rubio

The Council’s leadership turned over sharply in Trump’s second term. Mike Waltz left the national security adviser post in May 2025 after the “Signalgate” episode, in which he and other senior officials used the commercial messaging app Signal to discuss a planned U.S. military strike in Yemen — and Waltz inadvertently added the editor of The Atlantic to the chat (USA Today). Trump then nominated Waltz to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the national security adviser job in an acting capacity (USA Today).

Rubio held the acting role for more than a year. On September 22, 2026, during a trip to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, Trump signed a commission making Rubio the full-time national security adviser (USA Today). That made Rubio the first person to serve simultaneously as secretary of state and national security adviser since Henry Kissinger, who held both posts from 1973 to 1975 under Nixon and Ford (USA Today). Trump has praised Rubio’s capacity for the workload — “When I have a problem, I call up Marco. He gets it solved,” he said when first giving him the acting role — while Rubio himself says he has “two jobs” and no plans for a 2028 presidential run (USA Today).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state the NSC’s current staff size or the full subcommittee roster under NSPM-1, because no full-read source confirmed those details. It does not name a current NSC spokesperson: John Kirby held the spokesperson title when he answered the Carlson–Putin interview in February 2024, but whether that distinct role still exists in the second Trump term could not be verified. It does not describe the internal deliberations behind the White House’s response to the Carlson interview, and it treats secondary reporting about NSC “streamlining” as unconfirmed. The Waltz-to-Rubio account follows USA Today’s September 2026 reporting; it does not go beyond what that article and the White House memorandum establish.