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Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
It's the End of the World (And It's Their Fault)
It's late morning on a Monday in March and I am, for reasons I will explain momentarily, in a private bowling alley deep in the bowels of a $65 million mansion in Utah. Jesse Armstrong, the showrunner of HBO's hit series Succession, approaches me, monitor headphones around his neck and a wide grin on his face. 'I take it you've seen the news,' he says, flashing his phone and what appears to be his X feed in my direction. Of course I had. Everyone had: An hour earlier, my boss Jeffrey Goldberg had published a story revealing that U.S. national-security leaders had accidentally added him to a Signal group chat where they discussed their plans to conduct then-upcoming military strikes in Yemen. 'Incredibly fucking depressing,' Armstrong said. 'No notes.' The moment felt a little bit like a glitch in the simulation, though it also pinpointed exactly the kind of challenge facing Armstrong. I had traveled to Park City to meet him on the set of Mountainhead, a film he wrote and directed for HBO (and which premieres this weekend). Mountainhead is an ambitious, extremely timely project about a group of tech billionaires gathering for a snowy poker weekend just as one of them releases AI-powered tools that cause a global crisis. Signalgate was the latest, most outrageous bit of news from the Trump administration that seemed to shift the boundaries of plausibility. How can Armstrong possibly satirize an era where reality feels like it's already cribbing from his scripts? The film was billed to me as an attempt to capture the real power and bumbling hubris of a bunch of arrogant and wealthy men (played by Steve Carell, Cory Michael Smith, Jason Schwartzman, and Ramy Youssef) who try to rewire the world and find themselves in way over their heads. This was an easy premise for me to buy into, not just because of Signalgate, but also because I'd spent the better part of the winter reporting on Elon Musk's takeover of the federal government, during which time DOGE had reportedly made a 19-year-old computer programmer who goes by the online nickname 'Big Balls' a senior adviser to the State Department. In order to keep the film feeling fresh in this breakneck news cycle, Armstrong pushed to complete the project on an extraordinarily short timeline: He pitched the film in December and wrote parts of the script in the back of a car while driving around with location scouts. When we met, Youssef told me that the 'way it was shot naturally simulated Adderall.' [Read: The 400-year-old tragedy that captures our chaos] By the time I met Armstrong—affable and easygoing both on and off set—he was unfazed by fact seeming stranger than his fiction. 'There's almost something reassuring about it,' he said. 'It's all moving so fast and is so hard to believe that it allows me to just focus on the story I want to tell. I'm not too worried about the news beating me to the punch.' Lots of his work, including Succession and some writing on political satires, such as Veep and The Thick of It, draw loose and sometimes close inspiration from current events. The trick, Armstrong told me, is finding a 'comfortable distance' from what's happening in reality. The goal is to let audiences bring their context to his art but still have a good time and not feel as if they're doomscrolling. For instance, one of the main characters in Mountainhead is an erratic social-media mogul named Venis (played by Smith), who's also the richest man in the world. But the comparisons to our real tech moguls aren't one-to-one. 'I don't think you'd think he's a Musk cipher, nor is he a Zuck, but he takes something from him and probably from Sam Altman and maybe from Sam Bankman-Fried,' Armstrong said. Mountainhead is Armstrong's first project since Succession. That show's acclaim—19 Emmy and nine Golden Globe wins—cemented Armstrong and his team of writers as the preeminent satirists of contemporary power and wealth. His decision to focus on the tech world can feel like a cultural statement of its own. Succession managed to capture the depravity, hilarity, and emptiness of modern politics, media, and moguldom existing parallel to the perpetual real-life crises of its run from 2018 to 2023. But while Mountainhead has plenty of Succession's DNA—sharing many of the same producers and writers, and some of the crew—it's much more of a targeted strike than the 39-episode HBO show. Rather than a narrative epic of unserious failsons, the film offers a relatively straightforward portrait of buffoonish elites who believe that their runaway entrepreneurial success entitles them to rule over the lower-IQ'd masses. In some ways, Mountainhead picks up where a different HBO series, Silicon Valley, left off, exploring the limits of and poking fun at the myth of tech genius, albeit with a far darker tenor. The tech guys weren't supposed to be the next group up in the blender, Armstrong told me. He was trying to work on a different project when he became interested in the fall of Bankman-Fried and his crypto empire. Armstrong is a voracious reader and something of a media nerd—on set, he joked that he's probably accidentally paying for dozens of niche Substacks—and quickly went down the tech rabbit hole. Reading news articles turned into skimming through biographies. Eventually, he ended up on YouTube, absorbed by the marathon interviews that tech titans did with Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, and the gab sessions on the All-In podcast, which features prominent investors and Donald Trump's AI and crypto czar, David Sacks. 'In the end, I just couldn't stop thinking about these people,' he told me. 'I was just swimming in the culture and language of these people for long enough that I got a good voice in my head. I got some of the vocabulary, but also the confidence-slash-arrogance.' As with Succession, vocabulary and tone are crucial to Mountainhead's pacing, humor, and authenticity. Armstrong and his producers have peppered the script with what he described as 'podcast earworms.' At one point, Carell's character, Randall, the elder-statesman venture capitalist, describes Youssef's character as a 'decel with crazy p(doom) and zero risk tolerance.' (Decel stands for a technological decelerationist; p(doom) is the probability of an AI apocalypse.) 'There was a lot of deciphering, a lot of looking up of phrases for all of us—taking notes and watching podcasts,' Carell told me about his rapid preparation process. When we spoke, all of the actors stressed that they didn't model their characters off individual people. But some of the portraits are nonetheless damning. Youssef's character, Jeff, the youngest billionaire of the bunch, has built a powerful AI tool capable of stemming the tide of disinformation unleashed by Venis's social network. He has misgivings about the fallout from his friend's platform, but also sees his company's stock rising because of the chaos. [From the April 2025 issue: Growing up Murdoch] 'One of the first things I said to Jesse was that I saw my younger, less emotionally developed self in the level of annoyingness, arrogance, and crudeness—mixed with a soft emotional instability—in Jeff,' Youssef told me. 'He reminded me of me in high school. I thought, These are the kind of guys who started coding in high school, and it's probably where their emotions stalled out in favor of that rampant ambition.' This halted adolescence was a running theme. On a Tuesday evening around 9 p.m., I stood on set watching five consecutive takes of a scene (that was later cut from the film) where Youssef jumps onto a chair while calling a honcho at the IMF, and starts vigorously humping Schwartzman's head. The mansion itself is like a character in the film. The production designer Stephen Carter told me it was chosen in part because 'it feels like something that was designed to impress your friends'—an ostentatious glass-and-metal structure with a private ski lift, rock wall, bowling alley, and a full-size basketball court. Carter, who also did production design on Succession, said that it's important to Armstrong that his productions are set in environments that accurately capture and mimic the scale of wealth and power of its characters. 'Taste is fungible,' Carter told me, 'but the amount of square footage is not.' They knew they'd settled on the right property when Marcel Zyskind, the director of photography, visited. 'He almost felt physically ill when he walked into the house,' Carter said. 'Sort of like it was a violation of nature or something.' The costuming choices reflected the banality of the tech elites, with a few flourishes, like the bright Polaris snowmobile jumpsuits and long underwear worn in one early scene. 'Jesse has them casually decide the fate of the world while wearing their long johns,' the costume designer, Susan Lyall, recounted. True sickos like myself, who've followed the source material and news reports closely, can play the parlor game of trying to decode inspirations ripped from the headlines. Carell's character has the distinct nihilistic vibes of a Peter Thiel, but also utters pseudophilosophic phrases like 'in terms of Aurelian stoicism and legal simplicity' that read like a Marc Andreessen tweetstorm of old. Schwartzman's character, Souper—the poorest of the group, whose nickname is short for soup kitchen—gives off an insecure, sycophantic vibe that reminds me of an acolyte from Musk's text messages. [Read: Elon Musk's texts shatter the myth of the tech genius] But Armstrong insists he's after something more than a roast. What made tech billionaires so appealing to him as a subject matter is their obsession with scale. To him, their extraordinary ambitions and egos, and the speed with which they move through the world, makes their potential to flame out as epic as their potential to rewire our world. And his characters, while eminently unlikable, all have flashes of tragic humanity. Venis seems unable to connect with his son; Jeff is wracked with a guilty conscience; Randall is terrified of his looming mortality; and Souper just wants to be loved. 'I think where clever and stupid meet is quite an interesting place for comedy,' Armstrong told me when I asked him about capturing the tone of the tech world. 'And I think you can hear those two things clashing quite a lot in the discussions of really smart people. You know, the first-principles thinking, which they're so keen on, is great. But once you throw away all the guardrails, you can crash, right?' By his own admission, Armstrong has respect for the intellects of some of the founders he's satirizing. Perhaps because he's written from their perspective, he's empathetic enough that he sees an impulse to help buried deep among the egos and the paternalism. 'It's like how the politician always thinks they've got the answer,' he said. But he contends that Silicon Valley's scions could have more influence than those lawmakers. They can move faster than Washington's sclerotic politicians. There's less oversight too. The innovators don't ask for permission. Congress needs to pass laws; the tech overlords just need to push code to screw things up. 'In this world where unimaginable waves of money are involved, the forces that are brought to bear on someone trying to do the right thing are pretty much impossible for a human to resist,' he said. 'You'd need a sort of world-historical figure to withstand those blandishments. And I don't think the people who are at the top are world-historical figures, at least in terms of their oral capabilities.' For Armstrong, capturing the humanity of these men paints a more unsettling portrait than pure billionaire-trolling might. For example, these men feel superhuman, but are also struggling with their own mortality and trying to build technologies that will let them live forever in the cloud. They are hyperconfident and also deeply insecure about their precise spots on the Forbes list. They spout pop philosophy but are selling nihilism. 'We're gonna show users as much shit as possible until everyone realizes nothing's that fucking serious,' Venis says at one point in the film. 'Nothing means anything. And everything's funny and cool.' In Mountainhead, as the global, tech-fueled chaos begins, Randall leads the billionaires in an 'intellectual salon' where the group imagine the ways they could rescue the world from the disaster they helped cause. They bandy about ideas about 'couping out' the United States or trying to go 'post-human' by ushering in artificial general intelligence. At one point, not long after standing over a literal map of the world from the board game Risk, one billionaire asks, 'Are we the Bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?' Another quips: 'I would seriously rather fix sub-Saharan Africa than launch a Sweetgreen challenger in the current market.' The paternalistic overconfidence of Armstrong's tech bros delivers the bulk of both the dark humor and the sobering cultural relevance in Mountainhead. Armstrong doesn't hold the viewers' hand, but asks them to lean into the performance. If they do, they'll see a portrayal that might very well give necessary context to the current moment: a group of unelected, self-proclaimed kings who view the world as a thought experiment or a seven-dimensional chess match. The problem is that the rest of us are the pawns. 'The scary thing is that usually—normally—democracy provides some guardrails for who has the power,' Armstrong said near the end of our conversation. 'But things are moving too fast for that to work in this case, right?' Mountainhead will certainly scratch the itch for Succession fans. But unlike his last hit, which revolved around blundering siblings who are desperate to acquire the power that their father wields, Armstrong's latest is about people who already have power and feel ordained to wield it. It's a dark, at times absurdist, comedy—but with the context of our reality, it sometimes feels closer to documentary horror. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
FBI investigating efforts to impersonate White House chief of staff Susie Wiles
The FBI is investigating an apparent impersonator who pretended to be the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in texts and calls to her contacts, including prominent Republicans. Wiles has privately informed colleagues that the contacts in her personal cellphone were hacked, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, and has been asking people to disregard messages and calls that aren't coming from her phone number. Wiles also has a government phone that wasn't affected by the hack. The impersonator texted one lawmaker for a list of people who should be pardoned, a request that was initially taken to be real. In another case, Wiles' impersonator asked for a cash transfer, according to the report. Related: The chaos Elon Musk and Doge are leaving behind in Washington Some requests came off as suspicious as they contained questions about Donald Trump that Wiles would know, and had broken grammar in other cases. But some said that they had engaged with Wiles' impersonator before they realized it wasn't her. Contacts who spoke to the Journal anonymously said that some of the calls came from a voice that sounded like Wiles, leading some to believe that an impersonator is using artificial intelligence to mimic Wiles' voice. Wiles served as co-chair of Trump's presidential campaign and was deeply embedded in Florida politics as a lobbyist before she joined Trump's team. In a statement, the FBI director, Kash Patel, said the FBI is investigating the matter 'with the utmost seriousness'. 'Safeguarding our administration officials' ability to securely communicate to accomplish the president's mission is a top priority,' he said. The White House has still been grappling with the fallout of the so-called 'Signalgate' scandal, when senior Trump officials discussed sensitive military plans on a Signal group chat in March that included Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. Earlier this month, Trump demoted his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, who mistakenly added Goldberg to the group chat. A government oversight group has since sued the Trump administration over the potential deletion of sensitive conversations, which could violate federal recordkeeping laws. The US president has largely dismissed privacy concerns and said that Signalgate was 'not a big deal'. Reporting has also revealed that the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has shared details about a Yemen strike on a separate group that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer.
Atlantic
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The First Film of the DOGE Era Is Here
It's late morning on a Monday in March and I am, for reasons I will explain momentarily, in a private bowling alley deep in the bowels of a $65 million mansion in Utah. Jesse Armstrong, the showrunner of HBO's hit series Succession, approaches me, monitor headphones around his neck and a wide grin on his face. 'I take it you've seen the news,' he says, flashing his phone and what appears to be his X feed in my direction. Of course I had. Everyone had: An hour earlier, my boss Jeffrey Goldberg had published a story revealing that U.S. national-security leaders had accidentally added him to a Signal group chat where they discussed their plans to conduct then-upcoming military strikes in Yemen. 'Incredibly fucking depressing,' Armstrong said. 'No notes.' The moment felt a little bit like a glitch in the simulation, though it also pinpointed exactly the kind of challenge facing Armstrong. I had traveled to Park City to meet him on the set of Mountainhead, a film he wrote and directed for HBO (and which premieres this weekend). Mountainhead is an ambitious, extremely timely project about a group of tech billionaires gathering for a snowy poker weekend just as one of them releases AI-powered tools that cause a global crisis. Signalgate was the latest, most outrageous bit of news from the Trump administration that seemed to shift the boundaries of plausibility. How can Armstrong possibly satirize an era where reality feels like it's already cribbing from his scripts? The film was billed to me as an attempt to capture the real power and bumbling hubris of a bunch of arrogant and wealthy men (played by Steve Carell, Cory Michael Smith, Jason Schwartzman, and Ramy Youssef) who try to rewire the world and find themselves in way over their heads. This was an easy premise for me to buy into, not just because of Signalgate, but also because I'd spent the better part of the winter reporting on Elon Musk's takeover of the federal government, during which time DOGE had reportedly made a 19-year-old computer programmer who goes by the online nickname 'Big Balls' a senior adviser to the State Department. In order to keep the film feeling fresh in this breakneck news cycle, Armstrong pushed to complete the project on an extraordinarily short timeline: He pitched the film in December and wrote parts of the script in the back of a car while driving around with location scouts. When we met, Youssef told me that the 'way it was shot naturally simulated Adderall.' By the time I met Armstrong—affable and easygoing both on and off set—he was unfazed by fact seeming stranger than his fiction. 'There's almost something reassuring about it,' he said. 'It's all moving so fast and is so hard to believe that it allows me to just focus on the story I want to tell. I'm not too worried about the news beating me to the punch.' Lots of his work, including Succession and some writing on political satires, such as Veep and The Thick of It, draw loose and sometimes close inspiration from current events. The trick, Armstrong told me, is finding a 'comfortable distance' from what's happening in reality. The goal is to let audiences bring their context to his art but still have a good time and not feel as if they're doomscrolling. For instance, one of the main characters in Mountainhead is an erratic social-media mogul named Venis (played by Smith), who's also the richest man in the world. But the comparisons to our real tech moguls aren't one-to-one. 'I don't think you'd think he's a Musk cipher, nor is he a Zuck, but he takes something from him and probably from Sam Altman and maybe from Sam Bankman-Fried,' Armstrong said. Mountainhead is Armstrong's first project since Succession. That show's acclaim—19 Emmy and nine Golden Globe wins—cemented Armstrong and his team of writers as the preeminent satirists of contemporary power and wealth. His decision to focus on the tech world can feel like a cultural statement of its own. Succession managed to capture the depravity, hilarity, and emptiness of modern politics, media, and moguldom existing parallel to the perpetual real-life crises of its run from 2018 to 2023. But while Mountainhead has plenty of Succession 's DNA—sharing many of the same producers and writers, and some of the crew—it's much more of a targeted strike than the 39-episode HBO show. Rather than a narrative epic of unserious failsons, the film offers a relatively straightforward portrait of buffoonish elites who believe that their runaway entrepreneurial success entitles them to rule over the lower-IQ'd masses. In some ways, Mountainhead picks up where a different HBO series, Silicon Valley, left off, exploring the limits of and poking fun at the myth of tech genius, albeit with a far darker tenor. The tech guys weren't supposed to be the next group up in the blender, Armstrong told me. He was trying to work on a different project when he became interested in the fall of Bankman-Fried and his crypto empire. Armstrong is a voracious reader and something of a media nerd—on set, he joked that he's probably accidentally paying for dozens of niche Substacks—and quickly went down the tech rabbit hole. Reading news articles turned into skimming through biographies. Eventually, he ended up on YouTube, absorbed by the marathon interviews that tech titans did with Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, and the gab sessions on the All-In podcast, which features prominent investors and Donald Trump's AI and crypto czar, David Sacks. 'In the end, I just couldn't stop thinking about these people,' he told me. 'I was just swimming in the culture and language of these people for long enough that I got a good voice in my head. I got some of the vocabulary, but also the confidence-slash-arrogance.' As with Succession, vocabulary and tone are crucial to Mountainhead 's pacing, humor, and authenticity. Armstrong and his producers have peppered the script with what he described as 'podcast earworms.' At one point, Carell's character, Randall, the elder-statesman venture capitalist, describes Youssef's character as a 'decel with crazy p(doom) and zero risk tolerance.' (Decel stands for a technological decelerationist; p(doom) is the probability of an AI apocalypse.) 'There was a lot of deciphering, a lot of looking up of phrases for all of us—taking notes and watching podcasts,' Carell told me about his rapid preparation process. When we spoke, all of the actors stressed that they didn't model their characters off individual people. But some of the portraits are nonetheless damning. Youssef's character, Jeff, the youngest billionaire of the bunch, has built a powerful AI tool capable of stemming the tide of disinformation unleashed by Venis's social network. He has misgivings about the fallout from his friend's platform, but also sees his company's stock rising because of the chaos. From the April 2025 issue: Growing up Murdoch 'One of the first things I said to Jesse was that I saw my younger, less emotionally developed self in the level of annoyingness, arrogance, and crudeness—mixed with a soft emotional instability—in Jeff,' Youssef told me. 'He reminded me of me in high school. I thought, These are the kind of guys who started coding in high school, and it's probably where their emotions stalled out in favor of that rampant ambition.' This halted adolescence was a running theme. On a Tuesday evening around 9 p.m., I stood on set watching five consecutive takes of a scene (that was later cut from the film) where Youssef jumps onto a chair while calling a honcho at the IMF, and starts vigorously humping Schwartzman's head. The mansion itself is like a character in the film. The production designer Stephen Carter told me it was chosen in part because 'it feels like something that was designed to impress your friends'—an ostentatious glass-and-metal structure with a private ski lift, rock wall, bowling alley, and a full-size basketball court. Carter, who also did production design on Succession, said that it's important to Armstrong that his productions are set in environments that accurately capture and mimic the scale of wealth and power of its characters. 'Taste is fungible,' Carter told me, 'but the amount of square footage is not.' They knew they'd settled on the right property when Marcel Zyskind, the director of photography, visited. 'He almost felt physically ill when he walked into the house,' Carter said. 'Sort of like it was a violation of nature or something.' The costuming choices reflected the banality of the tech elites, with a few flourishes, like the bright Polaris snowmobile jumpsuits and long underwear worn in one early scene. 'Jesse has them casually decide the fate of the world while wearing their long johns,' the costume designer, Susan Lyall, recounted. True sickos like myself, who've followed the source material and news reports closely, can play the parlor game of trying to decode inspirations ripped from the headlines. Carell's character has the distinct nihilistic vibes of a Peter Thiel, but also utters pseudophilosophic phrases like 'in terms of Aurelian stoicism and legal simplicity' that read like a Marc Andreessen tweetstorm of old. Schwartzman's character, Souper—the poorest of the group, whose nickname is short for soup kitchen —gives off an insecure, sycophantic vibe that reminds me of an acolyte from Musk's text messages. But Armstrong insists he's after something more than a roast. What made tech billionaires so appealing to him as a subject matter is their obsession with scale. To him, their extraordinary ambitions and egos, and the speed with which they move through the world, makes their potential to flame out as epic as their potential to rewire our world. And his characters, while eminently unlikable, all have flashes of tragic humanity. Venis seems unable to connect with his son; Jeff is wracked with a guilty conscience; Randall is terrified of his looming mortality; and Souper just wants to be loved. 'I think where clever and stupid meet is quite an interesting place for comedy,' Armstrong told me when I asked him about capturing the tone of the tech world. 'And I think you can hear those two things clashing quite a lot in the discussions of really smart people. You know, the first-principles thinking, which they're so keen on, is great. But once you throw away all the guardrails, you can crash, right?' By his own admission, Armstrong has respect for the intellects of some of the founders he's satirizing. Perhaps because he's written from their perspective, he's empathetic enough that he sees an impulse to help buried deep among the egos and the paternalism. 'It's like how the politician always thinks they've got the answer,' he said. But he contends that Silicon Valley's scions could have more influence than those lawmakers. They can move faster than Washington's sclerotic politicians. There's less oversight too. The innovators don't ask for permission. Congress needs to pass laws; the tech overlords just need to push code to screw things up. 'In this world where unimaginable waves of money are involved, the forces that are brought to bear on someone trying to do the right thing are pretty much impossible for a human to resist,' he said. 'You'd need a sort of world-historical figure to withstand those blandishments. And I don't think the people who are at the top are world-historical figures, at least in terms of their oral capabilities.' For Armstrong, capturing the humanity of these men paints a more unsettling portrait than pure billionaire-trolling might. For example, these men feel superhuman, but are also struggling with their own mortality and trying to build technologies that will let them live forever in the cloud. They are hyperconfident and also deeply insecure about their precise spots on the Forbes list. They spout pop philosophy but are selling nihilism. 'We're gonna show users as much shit as possible until everyone realizes nothing's that fucking serious,' Venis says at one point in the film. 'Nothing means anything. And everything's funny and cool.' In Mountainhead, as the global, tech-fueled chaos begins, Randall leads the billionaires in an 'intellectual salon' where the group imagine the ways they could rescue the world from the disaster they helped cause. They bandy about ideas about 'couping out' the United States or trying to go 'post-human' by ushering in artificial general intelligence. At one point, not long after standing over a literal map of the world from the board game Risk, one billionaire asks, 'Are we the Bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?' Another quips: 'I would seriously rather fix sub-Saharan Africa than launch a Sweetgreen challenger in the current market.' The paternalistic overconfidence of Armstrong's tech bros delivers the bulk of both the dark humor and the sobering cultural relevance in Mountainhead. Armstrong doesn't hold the viewers' hand, but asks them to lean into the performance. If they do, they'll see a portrayal that might very well give necessary context to the current moment: a group of unelected, self-proclaimed kings who view the world as a thought experiment or a seven-dimensional chess match. The problem is that the rest of us are the pawns. 'The scary thing is that usually—normally—democracy provides some guardrails for who has the power,' Armstrong said near the end of our conversation. 'But things are moving too fast for that to work in this case, right?' Mountainhead will certainly scratch the itch for Succession fans. But unlike his last hit, which revolved around blundering siblings who are desperate to acquire the power that their father wields, Armstrong's latest is about people who already have power and feel ordained to wield it. It's a dark, at times absurdist, comedy—but with the context of our reality, it sometimes feels closer to documentary horror.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's drastic NSC cuts spark debate: Does fighting the 'Deep State' put national security at risk?
As the White House trims over 100 aides from its National Security Council staff, some former officials and analysts are asking if the smaller team can meet the demands of a fast-moving and dangerous global security environment. Roughly half of the NSC's 350-person team will depart in what the White House is calling a "right-sizing" of a historically bureaucratic body composed largely of career diplomats – many of whom are seen as out of step with the president's agenda. Aides originally on loan from agencies like the State Department and the Pentagon are being sent back to their home departments. Political appointees placed on administrative leave have been told the White House will find other roles for them elsewhere in the administration. Some former NSC officials told Fox News Digital it's too early to tell whether the overhaul will result in a more efficient agency – or one ill-equipped to deliver timely intelligence for national security decisions. Trump Administration Plans To Overhaul National Security Council, Weeks After Waltz's Departure Privately, national security sources questioned whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is currently serving as interim national security advisor, might be paring back the agency to avoid internal power struggles once he returns to his original post. Read On The Fox News App Michael Allen, a former senior director at the NSC, said the staffing changes reflect President Donald Trump's desire for direct control over key decisions. "I think he wants people to bring decisions to him earlier than previous presidents," Allen told Fox News Digital. The NSC has charted rocky waters since it lost national security advisor Mike Waltz following the inadvertently publicized Signal chat. His deputy, Alex Wong, also recently departed the agency, and other aides who had a large impact on the administration's early foreign policy decisions were pushed out in Friday's restructuring. Eric Trager, the senior director for Middle East issues who traveled with envoy Steve Witkoff for some of his Iran negotiations, is out. So is Andrew Peek, senior director for Europe and Eurasia, who helped coordinate the approach to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Additionally, the restructuring will move Andy Barker, national security advisor to Vice President JD Vance, and Robert Gabriel, assistant to the president for policy, into roles serving as deputy national security advisors. "This happens naturally on NSCs, the kind of stasis we saw in the Biden administration is highly untypical," said Victoria Coates, former deputy national security advisor to Trump. She noted that President Ronald Reagan had six national security advisors over two terms as president, in addition to two acting NSAs. "For the president, he has legitimate concerns about the NSC from the first term, given what happened, and then, you know, there's no sugar-coating it: the situation with Signalgate was a problem for NSA Waltz," Coates went on. "The president is taking actions to get the NSC into a condition that he would have complete confidence in it." With a slimmer NSC, the president is expected to lean more heavily on Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for his daily intelligence briefings. "One thing that makes this administration unique is that it's the president himself and a small circle of advisors who truly matter and make decisions," said Brian Katulis, a former NSC official and fellow at the Middle East Institute. "They just don't see the need for ongoing interagency meetings like in previous administrations." Katulis added that the biggest risk isn't necessarily a lack of intelligence – but a lack of coordination. "Rather than gaps in intel or knowledge, what I'd worry more about is whether different agencies are singing from the same sheet of music," he said. Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House for comment on Friday's cuts and their intent. One-man Cabinet: Marco Rubio Went From Rival To Trump's Point Man, But Can He Handle It Others argue that the NSC has become bloated and is in need of a reset. "The NSC under Democratic presidents grows to 300, 400 people," said former Trump NSC official Alex Gray. "It becomes its own department." "When I was there, we took it down to about 110 people doing policy – and it could probably go down another 50 and still be effective," he said. "Do you want an NSC that formulates and directs policy, or one that gives the president advice, lets him decide, and then implements it? You don't need hundreds of people to do that." But the NSC is the primary agency tasked with making sure other agencies are in line with the president's agenda. "Rather than preparing options for him, they should take his direction and implement it," said Coates. But, she added, "if you take it down too far, it's not going to have the manpower to implement those directions from the White House into the departments and agencies which are always bigger and better funded than the NSC." "How many heads do you have to bash together to get them to do what the president wants them to do? Our experience was in the first term that we needed a fair amount of heft on our end to get them to do stuff they didn't want to do, like designate the IRGC as an FTO, for example," Coates added. Even with a leaner staff, the NSC remains responsible for managing critical global challenges – from Iran nuclear talks and the war in Ukraine to military competition with China. That puts added pressure on Rubio, who will bear the blame if any crucial intelligence slips through the cracks. "The big issue is the national security advisor needs to make sure the president has all the information he needs to make a decision," Allen said. Fox News' Diana Stancy contributed to this report. Original article source: Trump's drastic NSC cuts spark debate: Does fighting the 'Deep State' put national security at risk?
Time of India
3 days ago
- Politics
- Time of India
Pentagon rattled by leadership rift as Pete Hegseth's inner circle feuds - is the Defense Secretary's job on the line?
A man in Australia is in trouble for lying about medicine sales. Police took his 12 fancy cars, including Ferraris and Lamborghinis. He may go to jail if found guilty. The case is part of a big fraud investigation. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads FAQs Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads The Pentagon is said to be facing a 'Cold War' inside the department, but it's not about Russia. It's about drama and fights among top people. Two senior aides working for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are fighting, and it's causing big problems for the department, according to the reportsMany people working in the Pentagon told the paper that things look fine from the outside, but behind the scenes it's messy, with fights, inexperience, and missing staff. The Washington Post report said, 'There's a cold war that exists in between flash points,' and described how tempers often flare among Hegseth's main fight is between Eric Geressy and Ricky Buria , two of Hegseth's closest aides. Geressy is a retired soldier who once served with Hegseth in Iraq and mentored him. Buria used to be a military assistant to Hegseth but was later promoted to acting chief of staff, states believes Buria is trying to sideline other staff to make himself look better to the Trump team. Things got worse during the Signalgate scandal in March. Geressy was left out of meetings during a Pacific trip and blamed Buria for it. Geressy also said too many people in the Trump administration were using the Signal app, and claimed the White House saw Buria as arrogant. Geressy leads a team called JSIAG, which includes Special Forces and other government workers. They focus on fighting Mexican drug cartels, as mentioned by The Washington Post once gave Geressy the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery in combat. Buria is a former Marine Corps pilot and earlier worked with President Biden's Defense Secretary. In February, Hegseth fired Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short without saying why, and gave Buria her role, a three-star general's job. This sudden promotion of Buria made other top military officers the temporary assignment ended, Buria wanted to retire from the military and stay on as a civilian adviser, with support from Hegseth's wife, Jennifer. When Hegseth's previous chief of staff Joe Kasper quit in April, people started wondering if Hegseth could still manage his staff. Hegseth then made Buria the acting chief of staff, but it's not clear if the White House will approve him long-term, as per reportsBuria once called Trump and Senator Vance 'crazy' and 'dumb', according to a New York Post report. Trump said he didn't know who Buria was, and if it's true, 'we don't take him.'Geressy is tired of the chaos and thought about quitting, but he's stayed because he's loyal to Hegseth and his team, as per the CNN fights between Geressy and Buria show how unstable the Pentagon is, especially after Hegseth has had a number of scandals. Some defense officials say it's unclear how long Hegseth can keep his job unless he brings order to his staff. Around the same time Buria got promoted, Hegseth fired three senior officials, Dan Caldwell, Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll, saying they leaked info to the three fired officials said they were unfairly attacked and that the accusations were totally false. Hegseth's spokesperson, Sean Parnell, tried to downplay the drama, saying staff changes are normal in 'effective organizations.' Parnell also said Hegseth is focused on putting the right people in the right roles to carry out Trump's plans. He said the public doesn't care about 'palace gossip', but about real action from the Defense Department, as mentioned in the insisted Hegseth's team is united and working to focus on warfighting and getting results. After the firings, Hegseth hired three new senior advisers, Sean Parnell, Justin Fulcher, and Patrick Weaver. Fulcher came from the Department of Energy, and Weaver worked in Congress, the National Security Council, and Homeland Security, according to The Washington Memorial Day, Trump supported Hegseth, calling him a 'tough cookie' and praising his work for troops and veterans, saying he had 'gone through a lot.'He is accused of earning illegal money by making fake medicine he is found guilty, the government will sell the cars to fund crime prevention programs.
