WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security Council, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set strategy across a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues.
The result will be a “dramatically different” NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was established after World War II to advise the president on diplomatic and military matters, said national security adviser James Jones.
Jones, a retired Marine general, made it clear that he will run the process and be the primary conduit of national security advice to Obama, eliminating “back channels” that at times in the Bush administration allowed Cabinet secretaries and the vice president’s office to influence and make policy out of view of the others.
Jones said a presidential directive outlining the new structure will probably be completed this week.
New NSC directorates will deal with such department-spanning 21st-century issues as cyber security, energy, climate change, nation-building and infrastructure.
Many of the functions of the Homeland Security Council may be subsumed into the expanded NSC, although it is still undetermined whether elements of the HSC will remain as a separate body within the White House.
