What Trump's cuts to intelligence could mean for national security
Consider This from NPR
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4.1 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
This past Friday, at 4:30pm, start of a long holiday weekend, about half the staff of the National Security Council got emails asking them to leave by 5pm. Dozens of people abruptly dismissed.
The restructuring of the NSC as Secretary of State and National Security advisor Marco Rubio has characterized it — continues a trend in this second term for President Trump, of radical downsizing.
The Trump administration plans to cut thousands of intelligence and national security jobs across the government.
The US Government has long relied on scores of intelligence officials across the government to keep America safe. Trump wants many of them gone – what could that mean for security at home and abroad?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Richard Clark has thought a lot about how American national security decision-making can go wrong, because he's been there when it went wrong. |
| 0:10.0 | To the loved ones of the victims of 9-11, to them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting |
| 0:27.0 | you failed you. And I failed you. That is Clark, testifying in 2004 in a hearing of the 9-11 |
| 0:36.9 | commission, the official autopsy into the attacks of that day. |
| 0:41.1 | He'd been a senior advisor on the National Security Council with the informal title of Counterterrorism Tsar. |
| 0:48.3 | In his testimony, which was backed up by memos, Clark said he tried to impress upon President George W. Bush and his cabinet |
| 0:55.8 | the urgency of the threat posed by al-Qaeda. |
| 0:58.6 | My view was that this administration, while it listened to me, didn't either believe me that |
| 1:06.6 | there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though they were an urgent problem. |
| 1:12.3 | Clark resigned in 2003. And in those 9-11 hearings and in a book published around the same time, |
| 1:18.8 | Clark argued that Bush's security advisors had failed to get the right information in front of the president at the right moment. |
| 1:25.7 | He also described a president who was pressing for intelligence that confirmed his pre-existing beliefs. |
| 1:32.8 | You can hear it. |
| 1:33.5 | In this interview with WHOYY's fresh air, as Clark recounted a meeting with the president the day after 9-11. |
| 1:41.0 | He spoke to me in very firm, almost angry tones about the need for me to write a paper, about Iraq's role or links. |
| 1:52.6 | And I said, well, there aren't any significant links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. |
| 1:58.4 | The Bush administration disputed Clark's accounts at the time. |
| 2:04.6 | Two decades later, President Trump has been reshaping the national security apparatus around him on a near weekly basis. |
| 2:12.8 | Last month, he fired the general in charge of the National Security Agency, |
| 2:17.3 | a decision for which far-right |
| 2:19.2 | activist Laura Lumer appeared to claim credit. On Friday, he slashed staffing at the National |
| 2:25.0 | Security Council, the team of foreign policy experts who advised the president. And he has also made |
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