National security directives are among the most important tools the President has for managing his administration and for conducting U.S. policy on national defense, foreign relations, intelligence, nuclear weapons and other matters of consequence.

At the end of last week, President Trump publicly issued his first three national security directives, designated National Security Presidential Memoranda (NSPMs).

NSPM-1 is entitled “Rebuilding the U.S. Armed Forces.” It requires a “readiness review”, and calls for a new Nuclear Posture Review and a Ballistic Missile Defense Review. In a nod towards legal and fiscal reality, it says “This memorandum shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.”

NSPM-2 is devoted to the “Organization of the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council.” It modifies the NSC structure towards something resembling a compromise between or a hybrid of the Obama and Bush NSC structures, and borrows language from the Bush directive. Notably, however, it elevates “the Chief Strategist,” i.e. Stephen K. Bannon of Breitbart News, to membership in the NSC Principals Committee [as an invited attendee, not a statutory member]. This is a striking departure from past practice that injects an extreme political perspective into the national security policymaking process. At the same time, the Trump directive diminishes the NSC role of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence.

NSPM-3 calls for a “Plan to Defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.”

The directives include a certain amount of sloganeering and chest thumping that is familiar in electoral campaign documents, but somewhat unusual in presidential directives. So, President Trump writes, in order to achieve “peace through strength,” US Armed Forces must be “rebuilt.” And “there can be no accommodation or negotiation” with the Islamic State.

But what is even more unusual is that the Trump White House released all of these directives and ordered publication of each of them in the Federal Register.  It is, one might say, an act of unprecedented transparency.

It is technically true that “any presidential determination or directive can be published in the Federal Register, regardless of how it is styled,” as a 2000 opinion from the Justice of Department Office of Legal Counsel stated.

But for the past several decades, national security directives “were not required to be published in the Federal Register, were usually security classified at the highest level of protection, and were available to the public [only] after a great many years had elapsed, usually at the official library of the President who had approved them,” the Congressional Research Service said in a 2008 report.

Likewise, the Government Accountability Office said in 1992 that national security directives “are… not required to be published in the Federal Register or any other public document.”

In fact, no national security presidential directive seems to have ever been published in the Federal Register. Even unclassified directives have only inconsistently been released or published on the White House website. The Bush Administration’s first National Security Presidential Directive became public through a leaked version sent anonymously through the U.S. mail and was never published by the White House. In the Obama Administration, former NSC records access manager John Ficklin tried to get authorization to publish a list and compilation of unclassified national security directives, but was unsuccessful.

So why, by contrast, are the first three Trump national security directives public documents that will, furthermore, be incorporated in the Federal Register?

One possibility is that this is the result of a drafting error.

An earlier version of NSPM-1 obtained by the Washington Post was captioned as a “presidential memorandum,” which is a familiar type of issuance that is often published in the Federal Register, and not as a “national security presidential memorandum”. In other words, whoever drafted the new Trump directive may have been using a template for an ordinary “presidential memorandum” rather than for a national security directive. (Further blurring longstanding distinctions, the new Trump directives NSPM-2 and NSPM-3 — but not NSPM-1 — are also included in the “presidential memoranda” section of the White House website. And each of them is confusingly labeled on the index page as a “presidential memorandum,” not an NSPM.)

Another possible explanation for the serial publication of these frequently unpublished documents is that public dissemination of the new Trump national security directives is a kind of performance. It may be that President Trump does not only want to wield the power of his office, but also to be seen doing it.

On October 14, President Obama signed Presidential Policy Directive 43 on the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba.

Aside from the substance of the directive on the future of US-Cuba relations, PPD-43 has several incidental features of interest.

First, it is a public document.

“The policy directive was notable because it was public instead of classified,” the New York Times said in an October 15 story.

That’s not exactly wrong, but it misses the larger point that even unclassified presidential directives are often withheld from public release. The White House web site has sections devoted to executive orders and presidential memoranda, but not to presidential directives. (Some unclassified directives are linked from the presidential memoranda section, while others are not available on the White House site at all.)

Second, it is striking that near the end of his second term, President Obama has issued only 43 presidential directives. By comparison, President George W. Bush issued 66 National Security Presidential Directives and 25 Homeland Security Presidential Directives, President Clinton issued 75 Presidential Decision Directives and President Reagan issued 325 National Security Decision Directives.

What, if anything, these differences mean requires further investigation. They could reflect differences in governing style, in organization of the policymaking process, or in the use of directives as an instrument of executive authority.

It is possible that some presidentially-initiated actions are being directed and executed using means other than formal directives.

For example, on September 21, 2016 President Obama ordered agencies to take certain actions concerning Climate Change and National Security. But instead of being issued as a Presidential Policy Directive, his Climate Change guidance was framed as a Presidential Memorandum.

Why?

The answer is unclear. An administration official said that Presidential Memoranda “can be used to direct agencies on the manner in which they do something they are otherwise (by law, executive order or presidential directive) authorized to do.” So maybe — the official couldn’t say for certain — the Climate Change memorandum directed the manner of execution but did not authorize any new activity. Had it done so, that would presumably have required a presidential “directive.”

The release of Presidential Policy Directive 43, following the release of PPD 41 last July, also indicates that there must be a PPD 42, the contents of which are currently unknown.

And on October 13, President Obama issued Executive Order 13744 on Coordinating Efforts to Prepare the Nation for Space Weather Events. The Order refers to a previously unidentified  Presidential Policy Directive 40 on National Continuity Policy that was signed on July 15, 2016. That directive has not been released.

The reference to PPD-40 was noted in “Obama expands his executive power beyond Earth” by Gregory Korte, USA Today, October 13.

The problem of secret law, which includes those presidential directives that define national policy and allocate government resources without public knowledge, was examined in a report entitled ”The New Era of Secret Law” by Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice.