Ever since NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte forged a consensus on massive spending hikes and flattered the United States president, Donald Trump has developed a newfound appreciation of the alliance. And many people at NATO breathed a sigh of relief.

But not everyone gave Rutte a hero's welcome when he came back from The Hague. The secretary-general is facing a barrage of criticism, some of it public, over what his team calls an "optimization" of NATO resources.

What might in normal times be described as a bureaucratic reshuffle, has created a different impression in the current trans-Atlantic climate. Some observers say Rutte is reconfiguring NATO to please the White House — and are doing so in ways that don't serve the alliance's broader or longer-term interests.

Dr. Gerlinde Niehus, who held many positions at NATO over 26 years, has taken the lead in lambasting the changes. She went so far as to say that Rutte is following the controversial Elon Musk-driven downsizing under the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE).

"Taking inspiration from the ill-conceived US 'DOGE' exercise, [the reorganization] is largely a sleek ingratiation aligned to US MAGA politics," Niehus wrote in a LinkedIn post, opinions which she later confirmed to DW directly. "Under the disguise of 'efficiency,' NATO HQ functions which could become the target of Donald Trump's........

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