Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep.

Here’s what’s on tap for the day: Trump fires much of the National Security Council, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be ready to accept a U.S. cease-fire proposal, and U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance embraces bitcoin.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep.

Here’s what’s on tap for the day: Trump fires much of the National Security Council, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be ready to accept a U.S. cease-fire proposal, and U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance embraces bitcoin.

Even with the level of personnel turnover we have come to expect from U.S. President Donald Trump across his two administrations, last week’s cuts to his National Security Council (NSC) were staggering in their scale and scope.

As NSC staffers prepared to head into the long Memorial Day holiday weekend on Friday afternoon, more than 100 of them reportedly received an email from the council’s chief of staff, Brian McCormack, saying they would not need to return and giving them 30 minutes to clear out their desks.

Key individuals ousted include those charged with overseeing the council’s work on the Middle East and Europe, as well as over a dozen staffers who worked on China.

This isn’t the first NSC shake-up of Trump’s administration, either. His chosen national security advisor, Mike Waltz, was abruptly reassigned to the United Nations earlier this month following the “Signalgate” fiasco—replaced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a double role—and around half a dozen NSC staffers were reportedly fired or reassigned back in early April.

Trump’s shrinking NSC presents a sharp contrast to the body’s outsized power under his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, whose national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, was one of the administration’s most prominent officials and drove many of its foreign-policy priorities.

Why the purge? The White House says that reducing the NSC’s size will help “facilitate more streamlined processes.”

The changes reflect Trump’s decision-making style, which is “apparently more informal,” Michael Allen, a former NSC official in the George W. Bush administration, told SitRep.

“[Trump] likes making decisions. Most of the time we hear of fewer NSC options and papers rising to the top, and more directives given from the top down,” Allen said. “Trump knows what he wants to do. He’s looking for the people at the National Security Council to implement what he wants.”

Trump also oversaw a significant reduction of the NSC back in 2020, toward the end of his first term in office, with then-National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien

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