The Trump administration is carrying out a dramatic overhaul of the White House National Security Council, shrinking the nerve center of the American foreign policy machinery, according to five people familiar with the plans.

The plans involve slashing the number of staffers at the NSC to less than 150 from around 350 currently — and some of those cuts have already begun. The White House also plans to cut the number of NSC committees and for those that remain to meet less often, three of the people said. They, and others, were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive internal White House personnel matters.

In the past week, the White House has reinterviewed a large number of NSC staff to determine whether they should keep their jobs, two of the people said.

Notices went out to individuals late Friday afternoon after a 3:45 p.m. staff meeting, one of the people said. Another said that many of those affected by the firings had left town for the holiday weekend.

Some staffers have been told they are being put on administrative leave and others who were on temporary detail to the NSC have been told they are going back to their agencies, two of the people said.

NSC officials often wield outsized behind-the-scenes power in a presidential administration, directing and managing disagreements between the State Department, Pentagon and other agencies over major policy issues. Any shake-up could affect the internal deliberations that inform the president’s decision-making from competition with China to the Russia-Ukraine war to Iran nuclear talks.

The reinterview process has fueled new levels of uncertainty and anxiety within the NSC following the abrupt ouster of some top NSC officials last month, the people said. That came amid an internal turf war between fiercely pro-MAGA and more traditional factions of the Republican party staffing Trump’s foreign policy team.

Axios, which previously reported that cuts were coming, said Vice President JD Vance’s national security adviser, Andy Baker, will play a more prominent role in the NSC by serving as deputy national security adviser.

Spokespeople for the NSC and Vance’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The moves come as President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have reshaped the foreign aid and national security landscape — issuing sweeping cuts and mass layoffs at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department.

Earlier this month, Trump removed Mike Waltz from his job as national security adviser to nominate him to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations — a change that was generally seen as shunting him aside to a less powerful role.

Waltz’s nomination came after a wave of controversy including Signalgate, where Waltz inadvertently added a journalist to a sensitive secure discussion on the Signal messaging app regarding a March strike against the Houthi militant group in Yemen.

Rubio was tapped to serve as acting national security adviser while keeping his job as secretary of State. Administration insiders expect him to stay in the long-term, as POLITICO previously reported.

Rubio has repeatedly vowed to restructure the State Department to put it at the center of U.S. foreign policy making — addressing a longstanding complaint in the diplomatic corps across recent Republican and Democratic administrations that the NSC’s ballooning power was undercutting the State Department.

“The State Department had to change,” Rubio said during Senate testimony this week. “I’m telling you it was no longer at the center of American foreign policy, it had often been replaced by the National Security Council or by some other agency of government.”