Rep. Mike Waltz said the Trump team knows who it wants out in the agencies, saying, ‘we’re putting those requests in.’
President-elect Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), said in an interview published on Friday that officials in the National Security Council (NSC) are expected to resign one minute after Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
“Everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20,” Waltz told Breitbart News. “We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now. Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees they’re all going to go back.”
While he did not go into details about how the forthcoming Trump administration would accomplish this, Waltz said that he wants to make sure that employees in the NSC are “crystal clear“ on ”what the agenda is” for the forthcoming administration.
“It’s a pretty straightforward process,” Waltz said. “Because a good portion of the NSC are detailees, out from the agencies, our team knows who we want to bring in and we’re putting those requests out and we’re going to bring them in.”
The NSC involves a team of political appointees who are managed by the national security adviser, which will be Waltz, to oversee various intelligence officials assigned to the NSC who work in various agencies and departments across the federal government. The current national security adviser under President Joe Biden is Jake Sullivan, who had previously served in various capacities in the Obama administration.
“We essentially tee up options for the president, really elevate to him decisions through a process,” he told the outlet, adding that “some of those decisions will be made by his Cabinet that are fully in line with his agenda but some need to come to him.”
He added that “there was some difficulty in the first (Trump) administration” because some officials did not necessarily adhere to Trump’s decisions as commander-in-chief.
“That is everything from nuclear policy, cyber policy, pandemics—you’ve got the avian flu kind of bouncing around a little bit—and then the regional strategies that align with his agenda,” Waltz said. “The border, deportation, Remain-in-Mexico, really reintroducing American leadership into the Western Hemisphere again as you’ve heard from him on Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal.”
The Epoch Times contacted Trump’s transition team and White House for additional comment on Friday but received no replies by publication time.This week, Waltz appeared to preview some of the actions he might take soon after Inauguration Day, signaling that Trump’s recent comments about the United States taking over Greenland from Denmark appear to be serious.
During an interview with Fox News, Waltz was asked about Trump wanting U.S. control over the Arctic island.
“You have Russia that is trying to become king of the Arctic, with 60-plus ice breakers, some of them nuclear power,” he said on Thursday. “We have two, and one just caught on fire.”
Waltz added, “This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources. This is about, as the polar ice caps pullback, the Chinese are now cranking out ice breakers and pushing up there as well. So it’s oil and gas. It’s our national security.”
Greenlandic Prime Minister Mute Egede has stated that the island is not for sale. Greenland, which is part of NATO through the membership of Denmark, straddles the shortest route between Europe and North America and is strategically important for the U.S. military and its ballistic missile early-warning system.
In a wide-ranging news conference this week, Trump told reporters that he would not use military force in taking control of Greenland, which has been an autonomous territory overseen by Denmark for centuries and is also part of the European Union.
Reuters contributed to this report.