2. Executive Office of the President · Notable
Consolidate the Homeland Security Council into the NSC
Printed page 52 2. Executive Office of the President
“The NSC staff will need to consolidate the functions of both the NSC and the Homeland Security Council (HSC), incorporate the recently established Office of the National Cyber Director, and evaluate the required regional and functional directorates. … The HSC has overseen pandemic response, and its incorporation is important.”
What has happened
- Done
NSPM-1 consolidated the two councils' functions into one staff on day one. Section A.5(a), headed "Staff Fusion", provides that "there is a single NSC staff within the Executive Office of the President that serves both the NSC on national security matters and the HSC when the Council is considering homeland security matters", headed by a single Executive Secretary under both the National Security Act and the Homeland Security Act. Section A.1(a) goes further: the Homeland Security Council no longer convenes as a separate body at all — "the NSC shall convene as the HSC on topic areas agreed to in advance" by the two Advisors. Pandemic response, which the Quote singles out, sits inside that arrangement. The order revokes the previous administration's NSM-2 and supersedes every earlier directive on NSC or HSC organization.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
Read NSPM-1 in full at whitehouse.gov. Judgment call: the previous administration’s NSM-2 also ran a combined staff, so a reviewer could argue this arrangement predates the window and belongs under “Already true” rather than a Status. We did not take that reading because NSPM-1 revokes NSM-2 outright, is this administration’s own act inside the window, and states the fusion and the convene-as-HSC rule in its own terms — a Status measures what this administration did, and it did this.
The Quote also mentions incorporating the Office of the National Cyber Director; that ask is tracked separately as #67, and it has not happened.
- Action
- transfer
- Object
- Homeland Security Council
- ID
- 66