The blow-up over Ben Rhodes’ admission that he created an “echo-chamber” to sell the Iran deal is giving more ammunition to advocates for Congress significantly cutting the White House’s national security team.
Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, refused to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Tuesday, as the White House claimed that his conversations with the president are protected by executive privilege.
Republicans went on with the hearing without Rhodes, and one right-leaning national security expert cited Rhodes’ stature within the administration, plus high-profile complaints that the White House has micro-managed Pentagon and national security policy, as evidence that the National Security Council has grown too large and powerful.
Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute, who formerly served as a senior director on the NSC during the George W. Bush administration, reminded the panel that Obama’s former defense secretaries have publicly complained about an inner core of White House staff who consult with Obama while “everybody else is pretty much left out of the conversation.”
“Mr. Rhodes is part of that inner circle,” Doran argued.
If Congress wants to exercise it’s oversight control over the Obama administration’s over-reliance on White House aides to carry out its foreign policy, Doran argued that it should significantly cut the National Security Council staff. Obama’s NSC is estimated to have grown to roughly 350 to 400 under Obama from an estimated 200 under the last Bush administration.
“I think anyone on both sides of the aisle would see that the National Security Council created by statute in 1947 was created to be a coordinating body, not an operational arm of the government.”
“Under President Obama it has slipped into becoming an operational arm,” he continued. “I think when you look at the war room as described not by me but by Mr. Rhodes, this is an operational White House.”
In his opening statement, Doran said it “behooves Congress to clip the wings of the National Security Council.”
“Rhodes’ war room is not an isolated problem,” he said. “It is symptomatic of an NSC that, according to all three of Obama’s former secretaries of defense, has grown imperial in both size and ethos,” he said.
House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, has written a bill aimed at cutting the White House’s NSC “well below” its current level. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has said he too will include similar language in his version of the National Defense Authorization Act.
