Opinion ID: 722513
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Structure of the NSC

Text: 22 We said in Meyer that a characteristic of the President's immediate staff is its lack of a firm structure. 981 F.2d at 1296. Here the district court correctly characterized the NSC as having a firm structure, a staff, and a separate budget, 877 F.Supp. at 700-01, making it less like (to quote the Conference Report again) the President's immediate personal staff or [a] unit[ ] in the Executive Office [of the President] whose sole function is to advise and assist the President. For its part, however, the Government contends that the NSC staff overlaps that of the President's immediate personal staff and that the structure of the NSC merely reflects and confirms its role as the personal instrument of the President; the organization and functions of the NSC staff are molded by each President, acting through his National Security Adviser, to reflect the priorities of that President. 23 President Clinton's National Security Adviser, Anthony Lake, implies, in a declaration submitted to the district court, that the NSC is not the self-contained structure it might seem from a glance at its organization chart. [319 U.S.App.D.C. 337] The NSC staff, he reports, operates within the White House as the President's foreign policy and national security staff ; indeed, he points out, several individuals occupy positions on the organizational charts of both the White House and the NSC. 24 Armstrong responds by emphasizing the hierarchical NSC organization chart, which, he argues, reveals an elaborate, self-contained structure and bureaucracy of the sort indicative of an agency under the analysis in Meyer. We agree. The NSC staff is not an amorphous assembly from which ad hoc task groups are convened periodically by the President. On the contrary, it is a professional corps of more than 150 employees, organized into a complex system of committees and working groups reporting ultimately to the Executive Secretary. There are separate offices, each responsible for a particular geographic region or functional area, with clearly established lines of authority both among and within the offices. The several points of tangency between the White House and the NSC staff noted by Mr. Lake do not intertwine the NSC with the President's immediate personal staff  in any way that obscures the line of perforation between the NSC and other units in the EOP; in fact, all of the individuals holding titles on both the NSC and White House staffs are in a non-substantive area, public affairs. 25 We conclude that the NSC has a structure sufficiently self-contained that the entity could exercise substantial independent authority. The remaining question is whether the NSC does in fact exercise such authority. We approach that question, as we did in Meyer, by considering how close the operation of the NSC is to that of the presidency, and by examining the nature of such authority as has been delegated to the NSC. 26