What Trump Can Learn From Nixon
Trump’s recent attempts to tighten agency spending—exemplified by Kristi Noem’s $100,000 contract‑review rule at DHS and Howard Lutnick’s identical threshold at Commerce—have created costly backlogs, echoing the bureaucratic micromanagement of the Nixon era. Nixon’s “administrative presidency” expanded White House staff to bypass cabinet secretaries, only to generate procedural overload, loss of strategic focus, and strained agency relations. The blog argues that both presidents learned the same lesson: aggressive top‑down controls can cripple policy execution. Modern officials must balance direct oversight with empowered cabinet leadership to avoid repeating history’s inefficiencies.
How the National Security Strategy Gets Made
In this episode, Santi Ruiz talks with former Deputy National Security Advisor Nadia Shadlow about how the U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) is crafted. Shadlow explains that the NSS is a multi‑party, coalition‑building document that articulates a president’s strategic goals,...