President Bush’s budget, announced yesterday, includes a hefty 4.2% increase for defense spending, bringing the defense budget to $380 billion a year. We’re all for funding the Pentagon, but while the president is reconfiguring federal spending to accommodate the war, he’d do well to look a little closer at his own operation — the White House’s National Security Council. It was back in February 2001 when a glowing front-page profile in the Washington Post of Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, (“With an understated steeliness, Card is endeavoring to fix the mistakes of earlier administrations” the Post panted), reported that Mr. Card “has substantially reduced the size of the White House staff, particularly that of the National Security Council.”

Well, just a few short months later — say, around September 2001 — it may have dawned on a few people over at the Bush White House that there actually might have been some use for some of those staff at the National Security Council. But more than a year later, as America prepares for the next stage in the war against the Axis of Evil, the NSC staff is still laden with Clinton administration holdovers and with personnel on loan from other agencies — particularly the Central Intelligence Agency.

There’s a long tradition of staffing the NSC with detailees from other arms of the government. Remember Colonel Oliver North of the U.S. Marines? Part of this may be a way for the White House to make its staff and budget look smaller than it really is. But we’re in a war, and with the billions pouring into the Pentagon, the president and Mr. Card ought to be able to peel off a million or so to install some NSC staffers who agree with the president’s policies.

Instead, the National Security Council bureaucracy is being staffed with CIA operatives and foreign service officers from the State Department. On the Iraq issue, there’s Ben Miller, a CIA staffer who recently helped arrange a meeting between Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and an Iraqi “opposition” group, the Iraqi National Accord, that is so infected with Saddam Hussein’s Baathist ideology that it reportedly tried to assassinate members of the democratic opposition group. Mr. Miller has been taking a role in the policy debate within the administration, arguing for a coup in Iraq instead of a democratic revolution.

On the Arab-Israeli conflict, the NSC staff includes Flynt Leverett, another loaner from the CIA. Mr. Leverett, who the Washington Post recently reported is on his way out of the NSC, has also been a participant in policy debates, pushing for the American “roadmap” to a settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

The CIA itself is not well served by these arrangements in the long run. The agency is already under fire for the alleged politicization of intelligence. Having staffers mix in like this only heightens that impression.

The president is not well served, either. At the level of the NSC staff, he’d be better off getting advice from those loyal to him and his policies rather than to a permanent Langley institution.