Incoming National Security Advisor Mike Waltz told Breitbart News exclusively that every intelligence official from the various departments and agencies across the federal government currently detailed to the National Security Council (NSC) at the White House under outgoing President Joe Biden will be expected to vacate the premises by 12:01 p.m. Eastern on Inauguration Day when President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated again.
Waltz, in a phone interview earlier this week, told Breitbart News that he is making sure everyone understands that it’s “crystal clear what the agenda is.”
“Everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20,” Waltz said. “We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now. Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees they’re all going to go back.”
The way the NSC works is the National Security Advisor oversees a team of political appointees from the president who oversee a wide range of what are called “detailees”—people who work at the various agencies and departments across the federal government who are assigned, or detailed, to work at the White House for a period of time on the NSC in a portfolio in which they demonstrate expertise. These career intelligence officials come from places as wide-ranging as the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and report up to the political appointees atop each major portfolio in the NSC. The NSC has various issue-specific portfolios like counterterrorism and cyber policy as well as regional portfolios focused on things like the western hemisphere or the Middle East or Europe or Asia. The detailees then help coordinate back to the various agencies and departments so the whole federal government executes on the decisions that the president makes.
One of the major problems Trump faced in his first term came from inside the NSC with some of these detailees, as the person who spearheaded the first impeachment of Trump—Alexander Vindman—was one such person. Waltz told Breitbart News that he is taking very serious steps to ensure that there are no more Vindmans. From this point forward, he said, anyone who gets a detailee position on the NSC will be on board with the president’s agenda.
“The issue with Vindman wasn’t during transition—the issue with Vindman was he was already slated to transfer but didn’t come in until the summer or fall after,” Waltz said. “So that’s one, number two—the folks that we’re bringing in are 100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda. Hell, the entire world seems to be aligned with his agenda if you just look at the outreach from world leaders and everybody who wants to come to Mar-a-Lago. So, there’s a little bit of a difference in that everybody was reflexively just against him [the first time] just for the sake of it and the Trump Derangement Syndrome was out of control in 2017. Now, after seeing and feeling four years of progressive governance under Biden and seeing the world come unglued, we’re not even seeing the levels of resistance to his agenda—that’s just a broader point. But also the folks we’re bringing in, the key members of my team, have relationships out in these agencies and we know who is completely on board.”
Waltz’s interview with Breitbart News came after a previous Trump NSC political appointee named Josh Steinman had sent out a thread on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, warning that he was concerned about some of the staffing moves at the NSC. Waltz told Breitbart News in this interview that Steinman’s claims were wrong and could have been addressed quickly in a phone call rather than creating a public hullaballoo. Steinman does seem to have backed off of them since then, even reposting an X post from Waltz explaining that all of the Biden-era detailees will be removed on day one.
“It’s a pretty straightforward process,” Waltz told Breitbart News. “Because a good portion of the NSC are detailees, out from the agencies, our team knows who we want to bring in and we’re putting those requests out and we’re going to bring them in.”
The reason why the NSC is important is it is essentially the process vehicle through which the president can exercise his political muscles in the national security space. Waltz explained that in the interview, and laid out several major policy arenas from Western Hemisphere issues to the Middle East to the Russian war in Ukraine as places where the NSC will be very active in a second Trump term.
“We essentially tee up options for the president, really elevate to him decisions through a process,” Waltz said when asked to explain what the NSC does. “Some of those decisions will be made by his Cabinet that are fully in line with his agenda but some need to come to him—not the NSC staff but the actual statutory National Security Council. We’ll convene those. He’ll make his decisions. Then, where I think there was some difficulty in the first administration is we’re then charged with actually monitoring and helping the agencies and making sure the agencies actually execute his decision. That’s where they need to set their personal decision aside and whether they agree with it or not he’s the elected President of the United States and the Commander-in-Chief. That is everything from nuclear policy, cyber policy, pandemics—you’ve got the avian flu kind of bouncing around a little bit—and then the regional strategies that align with his agenda. The border, deportation, Remain-in-Mexico, really reintroducing American leadership into the Western Hemisphere again as you’ve heard from him on Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal. [Also, the focus will be on] bringing the war in Ukraine to an end and negotiating that, getting our people out of Gaza but then what does post-Gaza look like so another Oct. 7 doesn’t happen again? Then, there’s the next step of the Abraham Accords which I hope will be Saudi Arabia relatively soon. So, he’s ready to do a lot, he’s ready to take big swings and not accept the status quo but it takes a team he’s fully comfortable with and that is fully comfortable with him to execute and to pull all of that together. You take something like Cyber—we have to pull together DHS, FBI, DOD, NSA, the rest of the IC, and a whole slew of industry partners to have an effective Cyber policy. That’s going to take a team to do that.”
On cyber policy in particularly, Waltz previewed that the U.S. under a second Trump term may show more offensive capabilities as a deterrent against state actors.
“On Cyber, we’ve been playing a lot of defense and we keep trying to play better and better defense,” Waltz said. “One of the kind of doctrinal or policy shifts we’ll tee up for him is can we do better on offense? How can we change behaviors? If you cannot stop every one of these millions of attacks per day, how will we reestablish deterrence so that some of these actors particularly state actors like China and Iran stop trying so hard? I believe personally you can do that by demonstrating if you’re putting cyber time bombs in our ports and grid that we can do it to you too so let’s both not—mutually assured destruction—and take the temperature down on this a bit. That’s a case in point of where I think we may see a shift.”
But “a lot of” the NSC action this next few years he said would be undoing the damage of the Biden years and returning “to what’s working” including “a return to maximum pressure on Iran” which he said “was absolutely working and will drive them towards a better deal if that’s the direction he wants to go” and a “return to deterrence with Russia.”
Waltz was one of Trump’s first personnel announcements right after he won the presidential election, and since the National Security Advisor position does not require confirmation in the U.S. Senate he has been one of the most vocal and public figures among the incoming Trump administration since then. Other folks who are slated for Cabinet positions need confirmation by the Senate before they start regularly engaging publicly with the media, so Waltz and a few others have filled the void in the meantime. But most importantly, Waltz is fighting to get the right team in place at the NSC so Trump is ready to roll on day one, and added there has been “zero issue” in so doing.
“We’re getting the team in place with the political [appointees] and we literally just got the list of the folks that are currently there [the detailees from the agencies] and like I said they’re all going to be asked to go,” Waltz said. “We’re taking resignations at 12:01 and we’re going to put the president’s team in place. If anybody has any concerns it’s not like I’m brand new to this town. Give us a call and work with us, especially if you were on the team for years already. Everybody should be excited about this. The president’s ready to go and we’ve got really well-known people like Seb Gorka and others that everybody knows how to get a hold of and is no shrinking violet when it comes to taking it to the terrorists and keeping the country safe and being out there swinging for the president’s agenda. I’ve been out there number one in terms of appearances in the news swinging for the president. If anybody out there thinks I’m somehow now going to have a platoon full of Never Trumpers they’re full of it. It’s ridiculous.”
Waltz has also learned from some of the predecessors in this position, and views the role as a way to help the president execute his decisions.
“We’re getting strong people in place that are completely aligned with his policy. We know who we want to pull in from the agencies to fill that out in terms of detailees,” Waltz said. “It’s also going to be incumbent upon the Cabinet heads to one, I think, cut what is a bloated bureaucracy and then two make sure it’s in line with executing what the president wants to pull together. We’ll be pulling folks together at a working level, at a deputy level, and at a Cabinet level and then when it makes sense getting the president himself involved. I think part of what some of my predecessors struggled with was trying to conform him to this process. Sometimes he knows exactly what he wants to do and he’s already made his decision and that’s fine now it’s just executing.”
Trump, he added, has an advantage that really no other modern president has had in that even though he’s been out of office the past four years ahead of his return to the White House in two weeks that he has never stopped thinking about how to handle these major challenges for the nation.
“He’s not a year-one president where we have to present all these issues to him across all these agencies,” Waltz said. “He’s not even a year-five president. He’s a year-eight or nine president. He didn’t stop thinking about these things the last four years. So a lot of these things it’s a get-back-to-what-was-working, or let’s undo the things that the Obama and Biden team sent us in the wrong direction on and getting us back in the right direction. I think the final piece is we’re going to be much more outcome-oriented. I’ve asked the team to lay out for me in their various functions and regions what do they want to have done in four years? What do we want the world or their area to look like? What points or deals do we want to have done? Then, cut that timeline in half to two years or maybe even one year and we’re going to be all gas no brakes running a number of these deals simultaneously and not just accepting the Washington DC national security establishment status quo. He’s a disrupter and we’re going to be disruptive and innovative and not just accept things because that’s the way it’s always been.”