InsideDefense.com InsideDefense.com, March 2, 2001 -- In his first national security directive, President Bush has abolished his predecessor’s system of National Security Council working groups and replaced them with eleven committees that will oversee key policy areas for the new administration.
March 2, 2001
First Bush National Security Directive Reorganizes the NSC
National security presidential directive 1, which is unclassified, has not been released by the White House. Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, obtained a copy and provided it to InsideDefense.com.
According to Aftergood, the document “lays out the structure of national security decisionmaking in the new administration.” Structure, he adds, “can be as important as policy and can actually shape policy.”
The directive also “lays out the areas of particular importance” to the president, he says. Some of those areas -- homeland defense, proliferation and counter-proliferation, for example, are “obvious” in light of Bush’s public statements, according to Aftergood. Others, however, may be less so, he says.
Bush will keep the NSC’s principals committee, the senior interagency forum for national security policy discussions. This panel includes the defense secretary, the CIA director and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Also maintained is the NSC deputies committee, the sub-Cabinet forum for national security. Top Pentagon military and civilian officials are among its members.
Gone, however, are Clinton’s interagency working groups. In their place are 11 policy coordination committees, described in the directive as “the main day-to-day fora for interagency coordination of national security policy. They shall provide policy analysis for consideration by the more senior committees of the NSC system and ensure timely responses to decisions made by the president.”
The committees will be focused on the following topics:
Also, the NSC will feature six policy coordination committees for specific regions: Europe and Eurasia, the Western Hemisphere, East Asia, South Asia, Near East and North Africa, and Africa.
- Democracy, human rights and international operations.
- International development and humanitarian assistance.
- Global environment.
- International finance.
- Transnational economic issues.
- Counter-terrorism and national preparedness.
- Defense strategy, force structure and planning.
- Arms control.
- Proliferation, counterproliferation and homeland defense.
- Intelligence and counterintelligence.
- Records access and information security.
The Bush directive, which Aftergood says was signed sometime in mid February, replaces a host of prior presidential decisions.
In addition to shedding light on areas of interest and the decisionmaking structure, the directive also “tells you where you need to go if you want to talk to the right people,” Aftergood says. -- Daniel G. Dupont
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