Trump Signs Commission Making Rubio Permanent National Security Adviser While He Keeps Secretary of State Job

President Trump has signed a commission permanently naming Secretary of State Marco Rubio as his national security adviser, according to a senior State Department official, a White House official and a senior administration official who confirmed the move to Fox News Digital.

Rubio already ran the National Security Council on an acting basis. Now it's official and, per Trump's own signals, could last indefinitely.

That makes Rubio the first person since Henry Kissinger to hold both jobs simultaneously. Kissinger became Richard Nixon's national security adviser in 1969 and added Secretary of State in 1973, a dual role that shaped U.S. dealings with the Soviet Union, the opening to China, and diplomacy around the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, according to Fox News.

How Rubio got here

Rubio was confirmed as Secretary of State on January 21, 2025, by a 99-0 Senate vote, according to Crypto Briefing. He stepped into the national security role after Trump removed Mike Waltz on May 1, 2025.

Waltz's exit followed the scandal known as Signalgate. Waltz had created a Signal group chat where senior officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance, discussed military plans against the Houthis in Yemen, according to The Hill. Crypto Briefing reported the breach happened when a journalist was accidentally added to that chat during discussions on Yemen operations in March 2025. Waltz didn't disappear from the administration. Trump nominated him as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, a post he holds now.

Rubio's résumé has only grown since. He served as acting USAID administrator and as acting Archivist of the United States from February to December 2025, according to Fox News. Trump has publicly praised his workload. "When I have a problem, I call up Marco. He gets it solved," Trump said last year, per The Hill.

Why the National Security Council seat was easy to hand him

One structural detail explains why this consolidation happened without a fight in Congress: the national security adviser job doesn't require Senate confirmation, according to Crypto Briefing. Secretary of State does. So Trump can hand Rubio the NSA title by commission alone, no hearings, no floor vote, no oversight from the body that already vetted him once.

Rubio earned his State Department post through the normal confirmation gauntlet. The national security adviser half of his job came from a presidential signature. Half of the most powerful foreign policy portfolio in the country now runs on zero congressional check. A reasonable critic, of either party, could look at that and ask whether concentrating that much unconfirmed authority in one person is a good long-term precedent, regardless of who's holding it.

Access, not just titles

According to Bloomberg's reporting as relayed by Traders Union, Rubio spends a significant chunk of his workday not at the State Department but in a West Wing office near the Oval Office. He's described as one of the few officials who can see Trump without an appointment. Traders Union reported he's built working alliances with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Vice President Vance, using that access to track Trump's thinking and avoid getting blindsided by abrupt policy shifts.

Traders Union also reported that Rubio has shifted from his earlier Senate-era positions on immigration, China, Russia, NATO and foreign aid to align with Trump's more transactional approach.

The political irony

Rubio and Trump tore into each other during the 2016 Republican primary. Trump mocked Rubio's height and mocked him for sweating on stage. Rubio fired back with jokes about the size of Trump's hands, according to Crypto Briefing. A decade later, Rubio has become, in Fox News's framing, the internet's "fixer" and the subject of memes about how many jobs one man can collect inside a single administration.

Rubio himself downplayed the drama angle in a Fox News interview, saying "everyone here is aligned behind the president" and that the team operates with "no drama, no games."

What's still open

No permanent, standalone successor for the national security adviser post has been named, according to Crypto Briefing, meaning Rubio's dual role isn't a stopgap anymore. It's the plan. Rubio has said he has no 2028 presidential ambitions at this time, telling Colombian outlet RCN, "I'm not a candidate for anything right now," as translated by NBC News. Whether that holds, and whether Congress ever pushes back on an unconfirmed national security post sitting permanently alongside a confirmed cabinet seat, remains unanswered.