Imagine it’s back in November 2020: With the winner of the presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden still uncertain, the Department of Justice (DOJ) writes to election officials in Michigan to request “all ballots (including absentee and provisional), ballot receipts, and ballot envelopes.” If local election officials don’t comply, DOJ threatens to go to court to get the records. What would have happened?

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We avoided this question in 2020 — but only because DOJ refused Trump’s demands to seize election materials. There was no credible evidence of fraud, and partisan Trump loyalists had not fully consolidated control over the department.

Last week, more than five years after the 2020 election was certified, current DOJ officials delivered this exact request to election officials in Wayne County, home to Detroit.

And that’s a perfect illustration of why, when we look ahead to the 2026 election, we don’t expect it to play out just like 2020.

On the surface, the threat to the 2020 and 2026 elections looks similar: A would-be autocrat in the White House, facing the prospect of a sharp rebuke at the ballot box, laying the groundwork to try to overturn an unfavorable election.

But there’s a big difference between 2020 and 2026: This time, the entire apparatus of the federal government will be turned towards the goal of aiding Trump’s election interference. Even as the threat is more dangerous, though, we don’t need to let it succeed.

A fully weaponized executive branch

Although Trump was president in 2020, he hadn’t yet consolidated full control of the executive branch. As a result, in the 2020 election, the campaign to undermine and eventually overturn the result was run narrowly out of the White House, the president’s reelection campaign, and the Republican National Committee (RNC).

The core team was the president and a relatively small handful of acolytes, like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

Not only did the rest of the federal government not participate in this attack on our democracy, but most of its critical functions continued working to follow the law and protect free and fair elections. The 2020 effort was attempted from inside the government and failed because of institutional resistance.

For instance:

• The Department of Homeland Security, especially the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, was at the forefront of both cybersecurity and efforts to combat disinformation about the election.

• The FBI worked closely with local election officials and law enforcement across the country to help secure the electoral process and respond to threats.

• DOJ, famously, resisted the White House’s pressure to seize voting machines and worked in most cases to enforce the law and the Constitution.

2026 will be different.

Read more — Executive Override: How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it

As ProPublica documented in a crucial report this month, most of the people who worked within the federal government to protect the 2020 election are now gone, replaced with around two dozen election deniers. CISA has been gutted. Parts of the federal government that used to serve the public interest are now narrowly focused on protecting the president’s hold on power at all costs.

The Department of Justice is Exhibit A in the transformation of the federal government. In the weeks since Attorney General (AG) Pam Bondi’s firing, we’ve seen DOJ officials engage in an Apprentice-style competition to be Trump’s AG (with Acting AG Todd Blanche and Harmeet Dillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, in starring roles) and make desperate moves just to hang onto their jobs (FBI Director Kash Patel). Over the past week:

• Dhillon has doubled down on illegal and unprecedented demands that states turn over their confidential voter data (more on that later);

• Blanche has declared that Trump has a “right” to prosecute his enemies, while allowing Trump’s former personal attorney Joseph DeGenova to take a leading role in a purported prosecution of former CIA director John Brennan; and

• Patel has promised new “evidence” that the 2020 election was rigged.

That’s why I expect nearly every available lever of executive power will be deployed as part of this campaign to deceive the electorate about the security of their elections, to disrupt the electoral process, and to deny the results.

The groundwork is already being laid for this whole-of-government election subversion strategy.

Seizing voter data: A case study in weaponized government

How does control of government translate into election subversion? The administration’s dangerous and illegal effort to gain access to states’ confidential voter rolls offers a case study.

Let’s start with a refresher on how elections should work: In the U.S., states — not the federal government — are responsible for running elections. They register voters, maintain voter lists, and have processes for verifying the eligibility of every voter. Over the years, in order to promote the right to vote, Congress has taken steps to ensure that states maintain accurate voter rolls and certain uniform standards for voting eligibility. However, Congress has never authorized the federal government to take over responsibility for vetting voter rolls. And, although the Constitution gives Congress the power to make laws involving election administration, under our Constitution and laws, the president has zero role in state election administration — including voter registration.

Despite this, heeding the president’s command to “nationalize elections,” the DOJ Civil Rights Division has contacted nearly every state and the District of Columbia over the past year to demand their complete voter files, which are filled with sensitive personal information for every voter, such as Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and political party affiliation. During the same period, DOGE worked (unlawfully) to integrate Social Security data into an existing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) database used by a handful of states to check voters’ citizenship status.

The Trump Administration says they want all this data to stop ineligible voters from registering and casting a ballot. But election fraud of any type is extremely rare, in no small part because states already have checks in place to ensure that only eligible voters register, and state and federal laws (including immigration law) impose heavy penalties for illegal voting.

So what is the data grab really about? As my colleagues Izzy Gray and Sara Chimene-Weiss explained earlier this year:

There’s a common phrase in the research world: “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.” In short, with enough manipulation, you can make a dataset say whatever you like.

This is exactly what the Trump administration wants to do: accumulate enough voter data that it can torture this data into confessing the predetermined conclusion that, should the president’s preferred candidates lose, it will have been because of fraudulent votes from ineligible voters.

They will do this by mixing and matching the states’ voter data to other federal databases, including the expanded SAVE database, in ways that are almost certain to result in false allegations of voter fraud. For example, they will try to match the state voter data to names of alleged noncitizens in the inherently flawed SAVE database. But we know that SAVE data is often out-of-date — for instance, continuing to identify Americans as non-citizens long after they have obtained their citizenship.

But even false voter fraud allegations will serve the administration’s purposes: baselessly creating doubt and confusion about election security; disenfranchising eligible voters; and creating a false narrative to justify further election power grabs. Each lays the groundwork in service of their ultimate goal: to prevent or overturn the results of future elections that do not go the administration’s way.

The good news? Most states didn’t go along with this scheme: Only 12 states voluntarily complied with DOJ’s request for voter data.

That’s when the federal government turned the heat up on this effort. In January, at the height of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, then-AG Bondi attempted to leverage the violence being wrought by DHS agents to blackmail Minnesota officials into turning over their voter rolls. That effort was also unsuccessful — Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon stood strong.

But DOJ isn’t backing down — to date, DOJ has sued a total of 30 states in a quest to force them to hand over confidential voter information.

How we can resist an elections takeover attempt

I don’t say any of this to be alarmist: Even though President Trump has consolidated power in the executive branch to an unprecedented extent, the institutions of our election system can survive this assault. But it will require all of us to take action to defend them.

The ongoing efforts to thwart DOJ’s voter-data crusade illustrates how it can be done.

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First, we all — including the news media — need to tell the truth about what the administration is doing. There is no meaningful amount of fraud in our electoral system, and the voter-data grabs aren’t a serious attempt to find it. Instead, the true purpose is to confuse voters about the trustworthiness of our electoral system, kick eligible voters off the rolls, and cast doubt on election results that don’t go the administration’s way.

Second, officials need to stand up to the federal government and provide the checks and balances the framers intended. The bipartisan resistance to voter-data grabs is a model: In addition to uniform resistance from Democratic leaders, red-state officials like Utah Lt. Gov. Deirdre Henderson have vocally objected to the administration’s efforts to insert themselves into state election processes. And career civil servants who specialize in privacy-protection have resigned from government over this and other data grabs.

Third, voters need to stand up for their own rights when state officials fall down on the job. That’s why five voters from states that turned over their data to DOJ, along with Common Cause, filed suit this week to stop and undo DOJ’s efforts to create a national voter database. Plaintiffs — represented by my colleagues at Protect Democracy, along with our co-counsel at Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington, the American Civil Liberties Union and its DC affiliate, and Harvard’s Democracy and Rule of Law Clinic — lay out a compelling claim that our Constitutional delegation of powers over elections, as well as laws protecting individual privacy (among other provisions), bar DOJ from creating a national voter registration database.

Fourth, courts must hold the line against federal intrusion into state elections. So far, they are doing so — all of the five district courts that have ruled so far have held that the federal government lacked the right to confidential voter data.

That’s a lot of work, by a lot of people, to fend off just one of the ways the administration is weaponizing the federal government against our elections. Over the coming weeks, we’re going to dive deep into every aspect of the threat — and then, more importantly, get into how you can help. Because while it’s true that the threats aimed at our elections are greater than they’ve ever been, together we can and will prevent them from succeeding.

This is part two in our Executive Override series on threats to the 2026 election and how to combat them. You can see all editions in this series here. If you’re not subscribed, make sure to do so to get future editions in your inbox.

The investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell hits a dead end

The Department of Justice announced that it was dropping its investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, privately acknowledging that they had no evidence Powell committed any crimes. This news comes as President Trump’s nominee, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh, vowed that monetary policy would remain “strictly independent” and that Trump never asked him to pre-commit to lower rates during his confirmation hearing. Dropping this investigation clears the way for Warsh to be confirmed as the new chair.

Because of Warsh’s nomination, though, democracy advocates should continue to monitor the independence of the Fed in the months to come. The Iran war has driven energy prices higher, pushing inflation to its fastest pace in nearly two years, which only makes the independence of the Fed more important.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

Last Sunday, Viktor Orbán conceded defeat. 16 years of authoritarian rule in Hungary ended with a phone call to the man who beat him.

Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party won 138 out of 199 seats — a two-thirds supermajority — on nearly 80 percent turnout, the highest in Hungary’s post-communist history. Orbán called the result “painful” but “clear.”

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What makes Sunday’s result so important is not just that the opposition won. It’s how they won — and what they did to prepare for the possibility that they wouldn’t be allowed to.

Hungary’s elections are mostly free, but not fair. Orbán’s party had redrawn every district to maximize its advantage. In 2022, Fidesz won a two-thirds supermajority with just 54 percent of the vote. The opposition needed to clear roughly a five-point structural handicap just to win a bare majority. Orbán controlled nearly all broadcast media. His allies owned hundreds of private outlets. Russian intelligence operatives were actively working to tip the scales. This all built on a long-term effort to change the rules, eliminate meaningful electoral competition, and consolidate power in ways MAGA saw as a model for what they could do here.

The Hungarian opposition didn’t respond to any of this by being quiet about it. They did the opposite. Magyar accused Orbán of “treason” for inviting Russian agents to interfere. He called the government the “Orbán mafia.” He told voters that the election was “a choice between East or West, propaganda or honest public discourse, corruption or clean public life.”

And then they prepared — openly, systematically, and relentlessly — to defend the vote.

Tisza deployed a remarkable 50,000 election monitors to vote-counting committees in polling stations across the country. In a country of 9.5 million people, that’s about one out of every 200 Hungarians. For the U.S. to do the same, per capita, it would take about 1.7 million observers.

Tisza also built its own fraud-reporting system so voters could flag irregularities in real time. Transparency International Hungary convened organizations from across the region to share best practices for detecting manipulation. And six opposition parties withdrew from the race entirely, clearing the field so the contest would be a straight two-way fight that gave Tisza a chance to overcome the system’s built-in handicaps. The Socialists said explicitly that an electoral system amounting to “legalized cheating” could only be overcome by uniting behind a single candidate.

Hungarians named the threats, they built the infrastructure to counter them, and people showed up to do their part.

It’s time for the United States to do the same.

2026 isn’t like 2020

Back in 2020, anyone paying attention could predict that the sitting president might not go quietly into the night. One might have been able to hypothesize the myriad ways the administration might try to interfere in the election, but no one knew how far they would take things.

This time around, it’s different.

As those who have been following this newsletter or read our Executive Override report know, there is no doubt that the Trump administration is preparing to use every tool in its toolbox to try to maintain its lock on power. There’s no one left inside the White House to check that impulse. And the experience of recent elections has made clear to the public the extent to which Trump will go to cling to power and the range of ways he may do so. There’s no downplaying the threat anymore.

Read our report on the 2026 elections

To be clear: None of that means Trump’s attacks on the midterms will succeed. The administration’s strategy requires inducing many collaborators to break the law, keep eligible Americans from voting, and throw out lawfully cast votes. Their transparently malicious approach may have — in tipping their hand to the American people — already doomed them from the start. But it does focus our strategy not just on careful preparation but also on loud, open defiance.

They’re not being subtle about their intentions, so we shouldn’t be subtle about them either.

Why the midterms matter so much

To appreciate the nature of the threat, it helps to understand why Donald Trump even cares about the midterms. After all, in 2018, he didn’t do much to help Republican congressional candidates politically, let alone consider breaking the law and the Constitution to try to keep them in office against the will of their voters.

Unfortunately, Trump learned from that experience.

For the first two years of his first term, the Republican-controlled Congress enabled Trump: They confirmed his nominees, funded his priorities, and ignored his corruption. But when Democrats regained the House in 2018, they reclaimed the power of oversight — and they used it. Many of the most significant abuses of his first term, such as attempting to coerce Ukraine into making up political dirt about Joe Biden, were exposed and stymied by an opposition Congress.

Turns out that, if you want to build an autocracy in America, you need a legislature that’s willing to sacrifice its own power for you to do so. That’s much more likely when your copartisans are in control. Congress should be one of the greatest bulwarks against tyranny. In 2020, that system worked as designed.

And that’s why Trump is so focused on the midterms now: If he manages to rig, overturn, or otherwise mess with the midterm elections such that he decides the next Congress, not the voters, he won’t just have protected his ability to set policy; he will have essentially removed the Constitution’s most important check on his power going forward.

That also explains why the key question this November is not just which party controls Congress, but whether the voters actually get to choose. Yes, if the president’s party retains power in Congress because that’s what the voters choose, it will bolster his efforts to cement himself in power. But Congress as an institution will still exist, and still theoretically be capable of pushing back. The status quo, in effect, will stay the same.

But if the president effectively overrides the congressional elections, picking control of Congress over the objections of the voters, then Congress will cease to be an independent branch of government.

How to explain the dangers

In the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections, talking about threats to fair elections was a difficult balancing act. On one hand, we knew the threats were coming; on the other, the scope was uncertain and the risks of speaking too loudly were real. You don’t want to hand an authoritarian a roadmap. You don’t want to undermine responsible actors inside the system who are doing their best to hold the line. You don’t want to deter people from participating. And you don’t want to cry wolf so loudly that the public tunes you out.

None of those considerations apply anymore.

The administration isn’t working from a hidden playbook. It’s broadcasting its intentions from every available platform. The president has publicly demanded to “nationalize the voting” in states he doesn’t control. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has sued more than 20 states for refusing to hand over voter data. The FBI has raided election offices. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — which once helped local officials defend against foreign election interference — has been gutted, with roughly 1,000 staff gone in a year.

As our Executive Override report details, this isn’t a collection of unrelated provocations. It’s a strategy — and it has three parts: deceive, disrupt, and deny.

Deceive the public by manufacturing the appearance of fraud where none exists. Use federal task forces and investigations to produce “findings” that cast doubt on election integrity. Flood the zone with so much noise that ordinary voters don’t know what to believe.

Disrupt the mechanics of voting itself. Use executive orders to try to sow chaos and mess with voter registration systems. Deploy federal agents — or threaten to deploy them — near polling places, creating the conditions for voter intimidation even if no one is formally turned away. Drive experienced election officials out of their jobs through harassment and the threat of politically motivated prosecution.

Deny the results if, despite all of the above, the voters still deliver an outcome the administration doesn’t like. Use the conspiracy theories and the manufactured “evidence” as a pretext to contest, delay, or overturn results through litigation, certification refusals, or outright defiance.

If everyone does their part, we can defeat the strategy

Still, even with all that, America’s election system has an enormous structural advantage. Elections in this country are run not by the federal government but by officials across all 50 states, more than 3,000 counties, and roughly 175,000 individual precincts. That radical decentralization, under normal circumstances, can be a headache. But under these circumstances, it’s an incredible source of strength.

No executive order can take over all of those precincts. No single DOJ investigation can intimidate every county clerk in every state. The president can tweet — or Truth — whatever he wants; he still can’t count the ballots. The Constitution makes that clear, and so far the courts have largely agreed.

Many of those advantages are things the Hungarian people did not have last week. But still, just like in Hungary, our elections need people willing to defend them.

That means state election officials who refuse to hand over voter data to corrupt fishing expeditions. It means local clerks — Republicans and Democrats alike — who follow the law even when the pressure to bend comes from the most powerful office in the world. It means state legislators who protect their states’ electoral processes rather than caving to White House demands. It means judges who continue to apply the law, as they’ve mostly done throughout this administration (with some notable exceptions). It means civil society organizations and litigators prepared to swiftly respond to abuses as soon as they happen. It means protestors prepared to take to the streets at key moments to defend their right to representation.

In short, it means all of us.

We can only be prepared if we’re honest about what’s coming. And then, together, we can Defeat the Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy.

Next week, we’re going to get into what we expect — starting with all the ways this election will be different from 2020. But before then, we want to hear from you. Drop in the comments or shoot us an email with what you’re most worried about or what you’re doing to protect elections where eligible voters can cast their ballots and have them counted.

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Authoritarian Action Watch updates

Trump is facing court resistance in his effort to corrupt elections

Since President Trump signed an executive order in March that purports to create federal voting lists that can be used to control who receives a mail-in ballot, the order has been challenged in court multiple times. Those challenges, when taken with the news that the administration’s attempts to consolidate state voter files are facing roadblocks in court, are a reminder that the courts still play a robust role in defending our right to vote.

Trump’s attempts to tilt our elections are far-reaching, however, and not all of them need to succeed to undermine voters’ confidence in the system. Between the mail-in executive order, the demands for state voter file data, and Trump’s declining approval rating, the administration seems to be gearing up to attack the safety of our elections on multiple fronts.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

This Sunday, Hungary heads to the polls for a showdown between Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, an elected strongman, and Péter Magyar, a former government insider turned opposition leader. The results will have implications not just for Hungary, but for the global fight against authoritarianism.

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On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance flew to Budapest to campaign for Orbán. Behind the seal of the vice presidency, Vance implored Hungarians not to oust their leader for the sake of “western civilization.”

Orbán is a primary architect of the modern playbook for dismantling democracy from within. Since 2010, his ruling Fidesz party has rewritten the constitution, stacked the judiciary, gutted civil society, attacked universities, and co-opted independent media to consolidate power.

After 16 years, these power grabs have left Hungary poorer than most of its neighbors, its standards of living degraded by state-sponsored corruption. Hungary is both the model for the autocracy that Donald Trump aspires to build and the cautionary tale for what our country could look like if he succeeds.

And yet, despite his work to entrench himself in power, Orbán seems likely to lose this election.

For well over a year, public polling has consistently shown the main opposition party, Tisza, leading Fidesz. Right now, polls put Tisza 10 points up — an unprecedented lead for the opposition in the Orbán era. Reports indicate some in Trump’s orbit are already nervous about what an Orbán defeat would mean for their own political futures.

This Sunday’s election, then, is a bellwether for the United States. In the best case scenario, it may show how the voters can dislodge even entrenched authoritarian leaders. More ominously, though, it may instead preview what efforts to deny election results and cling to power could look like here.

Two outcomes to watch for.

Scenario one: The end of the Orbán era

The last truly free and fair election in Hungary was back in 2010.

Since then, Orbán and Fidesz have repeatedly tweaked election laws and doled out government favors to protect their parliamentary supermajority. The opposition and its supporters are under no illusion this weekend will be a fair contest.

But here’s the thing: Those built-in advantages can only take an unpopular leader so far.

Our contacts in Hungary describe the mood on the ground as somewhere between “intense” and “excited.” For the first time in a long time, the opposition has a real shot. Many Hungarians, especially young people, are tuning into politics for the first time — hopeful, but also clear-eyed about what the government might do next to retain its grip on power.

With Péter Magyar at the helm, Tisza has managed to break through the government’s propaganda machine and electoral chicanery. Unlike Orbán’s flailing campaign — bogged down by government corruption and a weak economy — Magyar has barnstormed the country, pulling even disillusioned Fidesz supporters into the Tisza tent. He’s refused to engage in Orbán’s divisive tit-for-tat culture wars, focusing instead on building a grassroots anti-corruption movement that has caught the government off guard and galvanized youth support. Polls show just one in five young people now back Orbán.

This momentum among the youth has sent Fidesz (ironically, a Hungarian acronym for “the Alliance of Young Democrats”) scrambling to respond. Not only are they calling in favors from Vance and Trump, but also from other global far-right figures like France’s Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders.

As Laszlo Gendler writes in The Unpopulist:

Orbán has been reduced to pleading with parents on the campaign trail to drive home the stakes to their adult children. Fidesz is no longer in any meaningful sense an “Alliance of Young Democrats” — and hasn’t been in a long time. In fact, it has become the very political machine it was originally created to dismantle.

[Read Gendler’s whole piece: If Orbán loses Hungary’s election, it will dispel the air of invincibility around strongmen]

If polls — and Orbán’s desperation — are any indication, Magyar has a very real chance of not just winning, but of turning the page in Hungarian politics to a new era. If that happens, Hungary will join Poland and Brazil as a template for democratic revival.

For the United States, this suggests a clear pro-democracy political playbook to emulate:

1. Build a multigenerational political campaign that leverages grassroots anti-corruption energy and a genuine reform agenda.

2. Construct a broad-spectrum opposition singularly focused on voter discontent with the regime and refuse to engage in the autocrat’s culture-war narratives.

3. Unite behind a singular, charismatic leader with credibility to bridge disparate opposition factions.

Scenario two: Hungarian autocracy refuses to go quietly

There are already signs, however, that Fidesz has no plans to lose gracefully.

Last weekend, Orbán claimed that explosives were found near a pipeline carrying Russian natural gas through Serbia into Hungary, alluding to Ukraine’s alleged involvement. In response, Magyar criticized the government for fomenting a “false flag” intended to incite paranoia ahead of the election. Orbán has already deployed the military to energy facilities he baselessly claims are under Ukrainian threat, with additional domestic deployments or even an “emergency” election declaration still possible. On election day, voter intimidation, vote buying, and other irregularities are all plausible as Fidesz throws everything at the wall.

(Any of that sound familiar?)

Plus, as Americans have learned all too well in recent elections, the race isn’t likely to be over on election night.

If the results are neck-and-neck, hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots could determine the final results, and Tisza is likely to gain when those ballots are counted. But absentee ballots won’t be counted until later next week — opening a window for the government to preemptively declare victory or cry fraud, setting off a legal battle that could drag on for months.

Any protracted legal fight will only benefit the Orbán government, which wields the resources and institutional power of the state. In any event, Tisza probably needs to lead by at least 5% nationwide to win a simple parliamentary majority and overcome the government’s extreme gerrymandering. And even then, winning a narrow majority of seats would likely not be enough for Tisza to form a stable government.

Or Fidesz may attempt other ploys to hold onto power beyond what we can foresee. It’s a long time between now and May 11, when a new parliament must legally be seated (though, in the event of contested results, this new parliament might initially include only those whose elections have been finalized).

If Orbán attempts to deny and overturn a loss at the ballot box, Hungary may instead offer a preview of threats to come in our own elections.

Watch closely for: How government power and emergency declarations can be weaponized against vote counting processes; how Orbán may seek to get allies in the judiciary to disqualify opposition voters; and the role of state-sponsored disinformation about election results.

Also watch the degree to which the United States government is willing to endorse an attempt by Fidesz to steal the election. If Donald Trump and JD Vance throw their weight behind an effort to overturn Hungary’s election results, it would place the U.S. on the same side as the Kremlin and reaffirm Trump’s general antipathy to democracy — both at home and abroad.

For more on what the administration might have planned heading into our own November midterms, read our report: Executive Override: How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it.

Hungary’s most important lesson: Resilience

To be clear: The U.S. isn’t Hungary.

Yes, Trump and his allies will be watching Sunday’s results to see what they might be able to bring stateside, and so we should do the same. But in the United States, democracy still has several key advantages that Hungarian democracy lacks.

Here, courts and laws regularly check the executive branch. Here, our elections are run by the states, not directed by the federal government. Here, our media remains (for the most part) free and independent from the White House. Here, Donald Trump has had less than two years to entrench himself in power, not 16 like Orbán.

On Sunday, the Hungarian people face a far more daunting task than we do in the United States this November (or even in 2028). And yet they remain unbroken. That resilience may be the most important lesson as we look to Budapest as a bellwether.

Hungary has survived autocracy before.

In 2024, after Trump was re-elected, journalist Kati Martin wrote an essay in The New York Times reflecting on the hope that the United States once symbolized for her parents as journalists imprisoned in Soviet-era Budapest.

In his dank Budapest prison cell in the mid-1950s, my father imagined he heard Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. Though no one in my family had ever set foot in the actual New World, just knowing it existed brought my father solace during his nearly two-year incarceration.

Locked up in Soviet-occupied Hungary’s notorious Fo Street fortress, my father was blessedly still unaware that his wife — my mother, a reporter for United Press International — ­occupied a nearby cell. Nor did he know that his two small children, myself and my older sister, were living with strangers paid to look after them by the American wire services, my parents’ employer. Their crime was reporting on the show trials and jailing of priests, nuns and dissidents that Stalinist satellites of the postwar era used to clamp down on dissent.

The whole essay is marvelous and sobering. Gift link here: Why I’m not giving up on American democracy.

Now it is our turn, in the United States, to look to the Hungarian people as an example. This Sunday, look to Budapest for hope and for solace. And, above all, for resilience.

A party- and candidate-centered approach to proportional representation

As any electoral system nerd knows, there’s an inherent tradeoff between systems that focus on political parties and those that focus on individual candidates. At Protect Democracy, we tend to believe that a lot of the problems in our system come from weaknesses in political parties — but it’s true most Americans are more comfortable with candidate-centric elections.

A new primer by FairVote and Protect Democracy examines one of the electoral systems that bridges the two: Party Preferential Voting.

It’s what Australia calls “above the line” voting, and it’s yet another option for jurisdictions looking for ways to significantly improve our system for translating votes into seats.

Check out the rest of Protect Democracy’s work on proportional representation here.

“On Tuesday, President Trump attacked the soul of the American military.”

Worth a read: David French’s essay on why Trump’s threatening to command the armed forces to commit crimes against humanity is devastating to the institution of the military.

The instant I read Trump’s post, my thoughts turned to a very different quote: “The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed. It is the very essence and reason for his being.”

Who do you think said those words? A chaplain? A pope? A woke professor who doesn’t appreciate Pete Hegseth’s constant evocation of “lethality?”

No, they come from one of America’s fiercest warriors, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, speaking after the end of World War II, during the military tribunal he organized to hold Japanese leaders accountable for their own horrific war crimes, including the sack of Manila in 1945.

…

Trump’s post was a declaration by an American president that he intended to commit war crimes so grave that they could, if fully carried out, constitute a crime against humanity. As terrible as that is, Trump’s putative orders also threatened to break the moral backbone of the American military and trigger one of the most serious constitutional crises in American history.

Read the whole thing.

Authoritarian Action Watch updates

The president’s threat to commit war crimes in Iran represents an aggrandizement of his own authority, and is testing the bounds of civil-military relations. Alongside his move to circumvent Congress in paying DHS employees, and Secretary Hegseth’s interference with military appointments, this is a perilous moment for the balance of power in the federal government.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

You may have noticed: There are a lot fewer news stories about the Trump administration dramatically killing federal programs these days. From the original memo freezing funds to DOGE cancelling contracts and paying federal employees not to work — there’s simply less noise and drama over spending abuses in 2026 than there was in 2025.

But that doesn’t mean the abusive cuts have stopped. Instead, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has often shifted to killing programs quietly. If the DOGE cuts were like putting federal programs up for public executions, these days the abuses happen more like knives in a back alley.

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What do those back-alley knifings look like?

Take the Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Program. This program invests in community financial institutions to provide loans, and financing to areas in need of capital to support the development of affordable housing, and investments in farmers and small businesses, among others. Advocates estimate that every dollar in federal money leverages $8 in private capital that goes toward investments like more affordable housing.

The program is backed by a bipartisan caucus of legislators, and a coalition of groups that include a range of different types of organizations from banks to community lenders to housing advocates.

But the most important person when it comes to spending money in the Trump administration is OMB Director Russell Vought — and Vought hates this program.

That’s why OMB is killing it.

Since Vought took over OMB, not a penny of the $578 million of the 2025 or 2026 appropriations Congress passed for the CDFIs has been made available for the Treasury Department to spend.

To do so, OMB is using an obscure part of the budget process called apportionments to murder the program through small cuts — though rather than a thousand cuts, in this case it only takes five.

How to kill a program in five cuts

Each year after the president proposes a budget and Congress passes spending bills, it’s OMB’s job to apportion the funds, issuing documents for each account telling agencies how much money they can spend and how fast.

Until they get an apportionment, an agency generally cannot spend funds — even if they know the money is coming, even if they know Congress passed a law sending it to them, they still have to wait for an apportionment.

And that is how OMB made its first cut — it left the agency waiting. In fact the agency is still waiting — almost a year later.

In 2025 Congress passed a law providing $324 million for the CDFI program, $35 million for Treasury to spend in fiscal year 2025 to administer the program, and $289 million for Treasury to spend on funds for community banks and developers to actually help people do stuff.

In the apportionment process that normally happens, once Congress passes the bill, OMB apportions the funds, making the $35 million available for Treasury to spend in the current fiscal year, and transferring the remaining $289 million to an account that lasts for two years. This gives the agency a little more time and flexibility to spend those hundreds of millions of dollars responsibly.

What happened in 2025 was different. OMB apportioned the $35 million for program administration. And it transferred the $289 million to an account from which the money can be spent for two years, 2025 and 2026. But then OMB never apportioned the $289 million in program funds. To this day they are just parked in that two year account, aging in place.

Last year, advocates attempted over and over again to persuade the administration to release the money. They sent this letter about the benefits of the program and the communities it serves. They organized this letter from over a hundred Republican members of the House and Senate.

But still no apportionment of the 2025 funds. Advocates have continued to press. The Treasury Secretary recently stated he would spend the CDFI money if OMB released it. And given the amount of time it takes for the agency to complete its review of applications, if OMB doesn’t release the money soon, the 2025 funds will expire at the end of September without being spent.

Not only has OMB refused to release the 2025 funds, it has taken steps to hold back more.

There are at least three other accounts that have some funds that have gone to support CDFIs and their work, all three of those accounts collect proceeds from various mandatory funding streams. The money in those accounts is available indefinitely, rolling over year after year, and the lion’s share of those funds have been apportioned in the past for the CDFI program.

But over the last six months, these three accounts had almost all of their funds apportioned into Category C, and not a penny was made available to Treasury for the CDFI program.

Technically Category C is a way to apportion money for future fiscal years. You can see how it would come in handy if Congress passed a big pot of money for something like a moonshot research program, OMB can use Category C to structure the spending. So for example if an agency was still spinning up an office to manage the funds, you could give them time to get ready before sending them billions of dollars to manage and spend.

But over the last year OMB has started using Category C for more than money management. OMB has started using Category C to hold back funds that Congress told them to spend. And because funds apportioned in Category C cannot be spent in the current fiscal year — those apportionments effectively act as a cut.

Category C is a sneaky way for OMB to unilaterally make cuts it could not get Congress to agree to in the law.

And that is how OMB made three more cuts to the CDFI program — by preventing even a single penny of the CDFI Program account, the Emergency Capital Investment Fund or the Capital Magnet Fund from being spent on the CDFI program this year — accounts that used to provide tens or hundreds of millions for the program.

In the last few weeks, advocates have been raising the alarm that between the 2025 money it impounded and the rollover funds it froze in Category C, OMB is holding up more than a billion dollars that could be used for CDFIs.

Two weeks ago, OMB responded by making a fifth cut — pulling the same move with the fiscal year 2026 appropriations for the CDFI program.

Just a few months ago Congress passed a law on a bipartisan basis providing $324 million for the CDFI program, $35 million for administration and $289 million for the program itself.

And once again, OMB apportioned the administrative funds, but transferred the $289 million to another account, an account for which there hasn’t even been a public financial report yet, let alone an apportionment.

To the extent that anyone thought OMB would have more respect for full year appropriations bills passed on a bipartisan basis, this incident ought to put such hopes to rest. If OMB wants to kill your program, shame over breaking the law won’t stop it from trying.

Spending abuses are illegal, regardless of how sneaky

But hey, you’re thinking, this sounds illegal.

Yes! It is.

And sure, the CDFIs could sue. But that’s going to take time. And they’ll have to convince a court that it’s an emergency to force OMB to apportion it now — even though the 2025 money isn’t going to expire for six months — so that Treasury has time to take in applications and review them and decide which CDFIs get what funds. And if they can’t convince a court to force OMB to get the money out sooner than later, some or all of that $289 million will expire.

In the meantime, the CDFI program, much like someone who has been stabbed five times in a back alley, is vulnerable and at risk for more attacks.

While CDFIs fight to claw back this money either in federal court or the court of public opinion, OMB can propose a rescission of these funds that would send this money back to the Treasury. Or a legislator looking for an offset to fund their pet project might use some or all of the billion bucks sitting in these accounts to pay for something else. And if either of those things happens it won’t matter if the CDFIs win their case, because the money will already be gone.

So, you ask, is OMB really just going to get away with it? Is this like the perfect money murder?

Maybe, though there is one way they might get caught.

When Congress passes spending laws it attaches all kinds of conditions. A few of those conditions are called ‘general provisions’ and they apply to all the appropriations across all the agencies.

For years, one of these general provisions has prevented agencies from using any funds to implement cuts in the president’s budget unless or until Congress agrees to those cuts in an appropriations law.

And right now OMB appears to be violating that condition — a condition which applies to OMB’s own funding. By holding back the money for a program Congress funded but the president wanted to eliminate in 2026 OMB is basically doing what Congress says it cannot use funds to do — going rogue and unilaterally implementing the president’s budget.

And the law that enforces these kinds of conditions is a scary one — the Antideficiency Act — it imposes personal liability on the officials that violate it.

Here’s the kicker — the statute of limitations for this law is five years. So what can CDFIs and Congress do?

They can put OMB officials on notice that they may be liable, and they can keep a record of who has been responsible for what. Because if a future DOJ can prove an official violated the Antideficiency Act knowingly and willfully, they won’t just be liable for administrative penalties.

For the crime of money murder, they could face up to two years in jail.

Authoritarians often thrive on chaos. Since first taking office in 2017, Donald Trump has defined almost every news cycle, and he’s often created so much news that it can be hard to distinguish signal from noise.

The chaos is the strategy.

Even for those of us whose work involves following government and democracy, it can be difficult to keep up with every development. When people can’t keep track of what’s happening and what it means for the things they care about, they’re more likely to throw up their hands in defeat. Modern authoritarians don’t want us to be able to understand the entirety of what’s happening to our democracy. That’s why they disguise their assaults in a flurry of actions, scandals, and outrages.

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That misdirection is part of a larger effort. Authoritarianism works through a cycle of fear and acquiescence. One by one, would-be dictators convince everyone who would stand in their way to voluntarily surrender. To obey in advance.

In this effort, autocrats take advantage of a fundamental aspect of human psychology: When we feel uncertain, we feel afraid. When we feel overwhelmed, we’re more likely to retreat — to back away and try to protect ourselves from dangers unseen or unknown. By flooding the zone, Donald Trump and his supporters are trying to break down our rational faculties and scare us into a sense of panic and confusion.

Over the past year and a half, we’ve seen this pattern play out across law firms, universities, media companies, and more. When the attacks feel overwhelming, targets are much more likely to simply crumple.

That’s where our new tool comes in.

Because no matter how bad things may be, objectively, clarity is always better than confusion. Understanding the specific contours of threats makes it much easier to get our heads around what needs to be done. And to steel ourselves against coming attacks.

The Authoritarian Action Watch is designed with the explicit goal of helping every American better understand what recent news developments mean for American democracy. In that clarity, they can find their own sense of resolve.

A new tool for discerning signal from noise

The Authoritarian Action Watch is designed to answer one question: How are we doing, as a democracy? To do that, it offers users an overall snapshot that works a little like a weather report. It’s not based on an absolute scale (the temperature can always get hotter), but a directional one that tells you how much worse or better things have gotten over the past few weeks.

To generate that snapshot, we rely on the Authoritarian Playbook, which describes the seven tactics authoritarians rely on all over the world to consolidate and hold power. For each of these tactics, Protect Democracy’s experts analyze events in the news, and determine what they mean for the trajectory of American democracy.

Is this good news, bad news, or, as is often the case, a mix of both?

This tool is designed to illustrate the way our democracy is moving at a given moment, but it also seeks to explain why the Trump administration is making some of the moves it’s making. You might learn, for example, that deployments of ICE and CBP agents to cities across the country are not only about immigration enforcement. Instead, they’re part of a larger strategy aimed at quashing dissent, stoking violence, and ultimately making Americans feel less free to exercise their rights, including their right to choose their leaders.

Even as we analyze the actions of the Trump administration and what they mean for our democracy, we also want the Authoritarian Action Watch to offer signals about all the ways the democracy movement is pushing back. Over the first year of Trump’s second term in office, it often felt like authoritarianism was ascendant, and there was very little standing in its way. What we saw over the course of that first year, though, was that regular Americans are ready to take a stand to protect the ideals this country has always stood for, albeit imperfectly.

So even as we track domestic deployments, acts of executive entrenchment, and attempts to capture the media, the Authoritarian Action Watch will also highlight the actions of people with far less power than the president and his administration who are nonetheless standing up to defend democracy. This tool will capture the parents who are part of school drop-off caravans in Minneapolis, the state legislators who are bucking their own party on crucial votes, and the grand juries who are standing in the way of weaponized indictments. These are crucial reminders that this fight is not already lost.

We believe the Authoritarian Action Watch can be a useful tool for helping you understand what all of us are living through. The coming months and years will be some of the most trying for our democracy in decades. This tool should help us understand every twist and turn, and then, help us do something about it.

Explore the Authoritarian Action Watch

In February, Ansley Skipper and Ben Berwick wrote about a “three-headed monster heading for our elections.”

The combined forces of the Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) are shaping up to be the Trump administration’s election subversion Chimera (that’s the fire-breathing lion-snake-goat hybrid creature from Greek mythology) in 2026.

Ben and Ansley’s argument was, essentially, those three agencies represent the apex of the administration’s powers over law, violence, and propaganda. And so they form a powerful wedge that can — and will — be directed at the midterms.

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In the two months since, two of the three heads of those agencies have been fired.

Kristi Noem was ousted from Homeland Security on March 5 and Pam Bondi was fired as Attorney General effective yesterday. The third head, Tulsi Gabbard at ODNI, is on the rocks as Trump polls his advisors on replacing her, The Guardian reports.

There are three ways to read this turnover in the Chimera triumvirate:

1. This is a positive development because it shows how badly Donald Trump’s efforts to entrench himself in power are floundering. In desperation, he is firing the people who were tasked with punishing his perceived enemies and protecting his party from future accountability at the ballot box.

2. This is a dangerous development because the president will now hand the Chimera to new leaders even more willing to abuse power, people like Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche who was Trump’s personal lawyer and point person for retaliatory prosecutions.

3. This is a sideshow — it matters much less who is in charge of the Chimera than whether our system can stop it. Bondi and Noem’s shortcomings weren’t that they were insufficiently zealous (by all accounts, both were willing to go to whatever lengths to please the White House). They came up short because the legal system and the American people successfully pushed back on their abuse. None of that changes with new leadership who will now face the same substantial obstacles.

What does it mean when an autocrat fires his enforcers?

As usual, it’s hard to know if Trump’s setbacks are truly victories for democracy.

Yes, it’s good news that Noem and Bondi (and potentially Gabbard next) failed in the task the president set out for them: to bring vengeance to his enemies.

But Bondi and Noem were failing to translate the weaponization of their departments into the revenge Trump was hoping for. That’s not a bad thing. And now they’re gone. If the White House is able to install new leadership even more willing to break the law, then they may be able to get their entrenchment agenda back on track.

Or it may not matter either way. The question of who leads the Chimera may be immaterial to whether it succeeds.

When the authoritarian fires his enforcers, should we celebrate? Should we be worried? Should we even care?

The truth is: It’s kind of all three. All of those interpretations are true. Bondi’s firing, like Noem’s before her, is a clear indicator that authoritarianism is losing. At the same time, new leadership may find new ways to succeed. And most of all, the functionaries in charge of the effort to undermine elections aren’t as important as what the rest of our democracy does in response.1

Bondi and Noem didn’t simply fail. They were defeated by a legal and political system that refused to allow them to politicize justice, weaponize law enforcement, and corrupt elections. The pushback is working! But just as there is no superhuman autocratic henchman who can magically entrench the president in power through force of will, there’s also no silver bullet to prevent that entrenchment from happening.

All of us, collectively, need to be even more on guard to protect the election from the three-headed Chimera — especially now that it’s going to have new leaders.

Read more: Executive Override: How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it

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How to protect the midterms from the Chimera

So how do we stop the new-look DOJ, DHS, and maybe ODNI (as well as the rest of the federal government) from successfully meddling in the midterms?

Same strategy as before. Everyone in the United States who believes in free and fair elections needs to be committed to these four things.

First, fight the Chimera at every step. Legal, political, communications, and protest strategies need to push back against every abuse. (For instance, as Barb McQuade writes, the Senate now gets a do-over confirming an Attorney General who will uphold the rule of law.)

Second, make the midterm elections the loudest celebration of democracy in American history. Federal agencies like DOJ, DHS, and ODNI can only corrupt the election on the margins; they’re likely powerless against overwhelming turnout.

Third, defend the integrity of the results. Together, we can make them unquestionable and widely accepted.

Fourth, enforce a peaceful transfer of power from this Congress to the next one.

For more recommendations on how different groups — from local officials to civil society to citizens and voters — can do all those things, read Executive Override, our 2026 election report.

Push back against DOJ overreach, today

The Department of Justice published a proposed rule that would allow the Attorney General to intercept and indefinitely delay state bar investigations of current and former DOJ attorneys. This would effectively place an entire class of government lawyers above the disciplinary framework that governs every other member of the bar.

Some of our partners have developed a template for anyone interested in submitting their own public comment opposing this dangerous proposed rule. (Also see: Protect Democracy’s guidance on what makes an effective public comment.)

Individual, personalized comments carry significant legal weight — agencies must respond to every substantive comment, and the record created now will shape any future litigation. The deadline to submit comments is April 6, 2026.

Submit a comment

Protect Democracy sues DHS over warrantless home entry memo

One example of fighting the Chimera: Yesterday, Protect Democracy and partners sued DHS — on behalf of immigrants and U.S. citizens in Minnesota whose homes were searched — over a secret internal memo directing ICE agents to enter and search homes without a warrant.

Read about the lawsuit in The New York Times here and read our statement here.

Said Kristy Parker in the Times:

The Constitution creates a system where we don’t give law enforcement officers — just because they wear badges — unbridled power to seize people on the street or go in their houses… They do have power when they have proper cause to do it, but the Constitution requires them to go outside of the executive branch to another branch of government to have their case assessed, so that there’s some sort of reasoned, neutral inquiry.

This constitutional requirement is especially robust when it comes to the government entering people’s homes. Doing so has long required government agents to get a judicial warrant. That’s not what DHS has been doing. And so our clients are suing.

Is it safe to use Signal?

Sharing information is key to collective action, and in the modern fight against authoritarianism, that usually means communicating online.

Signal has become a critical messaging platform for protesters in Minneapolis and other coalitions across the country. Following reports of groups being infiltrated, though, it’s also fair to wonder whether Signal is safe to use.

In a new piece for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Adam Goldstein shares guidance on whether Signal is a safe tool. Thankfully, Signal is quite safe, even if it’s not foolproof. As he puts it:

Don’t commit crimes, because you’ll get caught. That’s got nothing to do with Signal though. Signal’s fine.

Read the full piece →

For more on how coalitions can operate safely and securely, read Protect Democracy’s guide →

A time of Major Questions

This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could fundamentally change how citizenship works in the United States. Regardless of the outcome, it’s a startling reminder both of how much power the Court claims to wield and of the fragility of the Court’s legitimacy as it weighs how much to empower an autocratic White House.

The Court does not have to be this way. This week, friend of Protect Democracy Jesse Wegman (a former member of the New York Times editorial board) launched a new Substack with the Brennan Center all about the Supreme Court. Major Questions will analyze everything from major decisions to ways reformers can reestablish the Supreme Court’s independent role in our democracy (as well as its standing with the American public). It’s immediately a must-read for me.

Subscribe to Major Questions.

How you can help:

Protect Democracy advisor Rachel Kleinfeld has a wonderful new piece on the concrete way every American can fight for democracy between elections. The big takeaway? It’s all about eroding institutional support for authoritarianism:

The number one thing regular people can do is figure out where they are in relation to a pillar of support [for authoritarianism] — think businesses, professions, religious groups, or community organizations and start doing things that might persuade those people or organizations to step away.

As Kleinfeld writes, this is an exercise in empathy, and often a difficult one. But it’s also among the most effective ways to break up authoritarian consolidation.

Read the full piece →

Explore Protect Democracy’s database of ways to help →

The White House is pressuring Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, the omnibus voter suppression bill that aims to swing the midterms by mass-disenfranchising voters.

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To say Trump is obsessed with this bill is perhaps an understatement. Just this week, the White House has fomented airport chaos by blocking TSA funding as leverage to try to jam the SAVE America Act through, told senators to skip Easter to pass it “for Jesus,” and argued “we won’t have a Country any longer” if it fails. (All while voting by mail himself in Tuesday’s special elections in Florida.)

The SAVE America Act is going to fail. It doesn’t have anywhere close to 60 votes to clear the filibuster. So why is the president pushing so hard?

Trump is obsessed because, at its core, the SAVE America Act is not just an election subversion strategy in itself. It is also part of a pretext for a much broader strategy to undermine the midterms.

Today, Protect Democracy released Executive Override, a new publication documenting how the Trump administration is deploying the full machinery of the federal government against the 2026 midterm elections. The report describes a coordinated strategy already underway to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories; tilt the electoral playing field and manipulate election outcomes; and, if necessary, try to overturn unfavorable results.

Read the report

This strategy does not require Congress to pass any laws. In fact, the central goal is for the White House to override Congress and states. To do so, the administration plans to use the lies promoted by the SAVE America Act: that elections are rife with fraud and that harsh anti-voter measures by the federal government are a necessary response. As my colleague Alexandra Chandler puts it:

“You didn’t pass the legislation that would have solved this fake problem, and therefore the election results are not valid.”

In other words, Trump is pushing the SAVE America Act not just on a distant hope of disenfranchising some voters. He is, much more immediately, hoping to use its failure to override the electoral process entirely.

The three prongs of the White House’s Executive Override strategy

Over the coming months, we should expect the federal government to attack the midterms in a variety of ways. It’s a three-part plan to try to ensure that the president effectively picks the next Congress, not the voters.

First, deceive: The administration has institutionalized election denialism as official federal policy, using law enforcement and intelligence powers to manufacture the appearance of fraud — including a Jan. 2026 FBI raid on a Fulton County, Georgia election office and the seizure of voting machines in Puerto Rico — while dismantling the agencies that protect elections from real threats.

Second, disrupt: Federal investigative and prosecutorial power is being used to target political opponents, civil society organizations, and nonpartisan election officials. The administration has also created conditions for voter intimidation through the possibility of deployment of ICE agents near polling locations and the use of force against protesters.

Third, if necessary, deny: The administration is positioning itself to contest, delay, or overturn results it doesn’t like through post-election law enforcement action, pressure on certification officials, bad-faith litigation, and potential defiance of court orders.

We don’t know exactly how this strategy will manifest in the months ahead (I suspect Trump and his allies don’t either — they’re going to improvise a lot) but just for example, here are three news stories just from this week that clearly fit into the plan:

• In California, one of the president’s allies — a sheriff who just so happens to be running for governor — seized more than 650,000 ballots from last year’s redistricting election based on an “audit” from a group of citizens. (Not clear yet if the federal government is involved, but it’s a textbook example of casting doubt on elections.)

• In Washington, D.C., Trump’s allies on the Supreme Court expressed extreme skepticism towards mail-in voting, hinting at unfounded conspiracy theories about security and integrity.

• In Oklahoma, the state government handed over its voter rolls — including sensitive personal information — to the DOJ as part of the administration’s demands for data on all voters.

That’s just recent days. Expect stories like this every week between now and when the next Congress is sworn in next January. All of them will fit into this overarching strategy — and they aim at the same goal: overturning elections if the president’s allies lose.

What can we all do about it?

The good news is that this strategy, while genuinely dangerous, faces enormous obstacles. And we are far from powerless.

The Executive Override report identifies five major roadblocks standing in the administration’s way. These are the pillars of American democracy that make it much harder to corrupt and steal legislative elections in the United States than it was in Russia, Hungary, or Venezuela.

None of them are invincible — but together, they’re formidable.

Our elections are decentralized. There is no federal election system. Elections are run entirely at the state and local level, with very little role for the federal government. That means Trump and his allies aren’t seizing control of the machinery from the inside. Even from the White House, they’re attacking it from the outside-in. That’s a much harder thing to do. Still, state and local election officials need to have a clear understanding of the likely threats before the pressure arrives, making concrete plans for how to respond when it does, and building solidarity with counterparts across their states and communities so that no one faces that pressure alone. [Read more here →]

Civil society is ready. Far more so than even in 2020, a wide range of nonpartisan organizations, civic groups, and private sector leaders are prepared to defend free and fair elections. The pro-democracy coalition is bigger and more organized than it has ever been — but it only works if it stays active. All of us need to speak out, organize, and act, using whatever credibility and reach we have to protect civic participation and make clear that attacks on our elections will not go unanswered. And yes: Be prepared to attend large protests if a critical moment demands it. [Read more here →]

The justice system remains a real check — for now. Courts have been one of the most effective counterweights to the administration’s power grabs, and that resilience extends to election law. But “fairly resilient” is not the same as invulnerable, and the legal community as a whole needs to be ready — from grand jurors who scrutinize the evidence to magistrates who decline to rubber-stamp deficient warrants to judges who apply the law rigorously when election subversion moves fast. The judiciary doesn’t defend itself. The legal profession has to defend it. [Read more here →]

The media can connect the dots. Independent journalism — including social and new media — remains capable of covering this story honestly. That matters enormously. The administration’s strategy depends on individual abuses of power being seen as isolated incidents rather than parts of a coordinated whole. Journalists, influencers, and creators need to be prepared to connect those dots: establishing clear protocols for covering government disinformation, linking specific actions to the broader strategy, and shedding light, not spreading fear. [Read more here →]

And finally: We the People. At its core, the Executive Override strategy seeks to rob all of us of our ability to elect our own legislators. That is not something the vast majority of Americans are going to accept quietly.

But we’re going to have to show up. Counter disinformation. Vote. Help others vote. Strengthen community connections. Volunteer as poll workers. Be prepared to mobilize peacefully if a critical moment demands it. (If you want practice, the next No Kings protest is this Saturday.)

Democracy only survives if we’re active participants in it — that’s always been true, and it’s never been more urgent than right now.

Read the report

Want to learn more? Join us on March 31st at 1 pm ET / 10 AM PT to dive deeper into this critical analysis and how we prevail together

Protect Democracy’s acting chief impact officer Ben Berwick and All Voting is Local co-founder and chief executive officer Hannah Fried will dig in to the report, the systems and strategies in place in key races across the country, and why we must face these threats together.

Register here

ICE is not legally allowed to backfill TSA

The administration claims to have found an end-run around the partial government shutdown: sending ICE agents to airports to do crowd control.

This is, of course, as stupid as it sounds (ICE agents have no training on airport security). But just as importantly, it’s against the law. Congress didn’t fund ICE to do airport security — and unlawful spending abuses like these set a dangerous precedent for the future.

Protect Democracy has a new explainer of why: DHS funding is no blank check — and doesn’t permit ICE to backfill TSA

The use of ICE for crowd control at airports — a role that has nothing to do with its authorized immigration enforcement mission — is an alarming and drastic repurposing of federal agents to create a standing security force seemingly deployed at the whim of the President.

The Constitution recognizes the danger of having a “standing army” answerable only to the executive and unaccountable to the Congress. That’s why it limits funding for the Army to no more than two years. While this limit has been largely ignored for the last century, recent questions have been raised about whether Congress should once again take up this important check against executive branch abuses of authority.

President Trump has already shown his eagerness to deploy uniformed military forces for domestic policing operations. Now that those efforts have largely been rejected by courts, it is troubling to see him turn to ICE — newly equipped with military-grade equipment — as an all-purpose civilian law enforcement force.

Read the whole thing →

FCC Chair Brendan Carr has ordered the American media to rally around the flag of war.

Citing Donald Trump’s anger over Iran War media coverage, Carr threatened to revoke broadcast licenses unless broadcasters “correct course before their license renewals come up.” He did not specify which outlets the FCC is threatening, directing his aim at the media generally.

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This threat is as outrageous — and un-American — as it sounds. So much so that Republican former FCC commissioners, chairs, and senior staff called on Congress to step in and stop Carr’s abuses. Here is the full statement from former FCC Chairs Mark Fowler (a Reagan appointee) and Alfred Sikes (an H.W. Bush appointee), and former FCC Commissioner Rachelle Chong (a Clinton appointee), along with former FCC Chief of Staff Jerald Fritz:

While this weekend’s threats by Chair Carr weren’t his first, they represent a notable escalation of attacks against news media, which are especially concerning in an election year.

In a democracy, the government does not get to decide what is news and how to cover it. Chairman Carr knows better. In 2019 he rejected the idea that the FCC could police speech in the name of the “public interest.” The Constitution as well as the Communications Act forbid it. We filed a formal petition last fall with the FCC explaining why the First Amendment forbids the use of the news distortion policy — or any FCC power for that matter — to correct alleged bias in the news. Chairman Carr has failed to take any action on that petition. Instead he has continued his unconstitutional pattern of threatening to strip broadcast licenses from stations whose news outlets report news in a way he or the President doesn’t like.

Because Chairman Carr has shown he is uninterested in following the Constitution, Congress should act. Congress should investigate the FCC’s interactions with media companies and legislate to remove or narrow the regulatory powers Carr is abusing — including the oft-cited news distortion policy. The recent oversight hearings held by the Senate Commerce Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee were good starts. But there is much more to be investigated, including the details of how the Chairman’s abusive regulatory coercion has affected media companies seeking to merge. Or, as the Chairman has shown himself to be constitutionally unfit to hold the office, Congress could consider more serious remedies. It is past time to stand up to this intimidation. The future of free speech and the free press in this country are at risk.

The emphasis is mine, but the indignation is clearly theirs.

It’s hard to overstate how far over the line of the First Amendment you have to be before former FCC chairs and commissioners, traditionally some of the most careful and staid voices in Washington, start calling you “constitutionally unfit to hold the office.”

They also aren’t the only Republicans criticizing Carr. Conservatives like Sen. Ron Johnson and even Marjorie Taylor Greene are also raising alarm, including with worries about the censorship precedent he could be setting for future administrations.

If anything, though, Carr’s behavior is even more dangerous than it looks.

Carr and Trump aren’t just aiming for censorship (although they are hoping for that too); they’re also trying to use the threat of censorship to destroy the robust tradition of independent, fact-based American journalism altogether.

Direct censorship through the FCC is extremely difficult

If you go to the FCC’s website, you’ll find a helpful explainer page (which, unlike other FCC pages, does not appear to have been tampered with under the current administration).

On that page, the FCC itself is clear: “The FCC is barred by law from trying to prevent the broadcast of any point of view.”

What Brendan Carr is doing is illegal. It is illegal for the FCC to even threaten to use its regulatory power to coerce or censor speech.

Specifically, the Communications Act — as the FCC’s web explainer helpfully cites — states that:

[Nothing in the law] shall be understood or construed to give the Commission the power of censorship over the [broadcast] communications or signals transmitted by any [broadcast] station, and no regulation or condition shall be promulgated or fixed by the Commission which shall interfere with the right of free speech by means of [over-the-air] broadcast communication.

If Carr were to follow through on his threats and attempt to strip licenses for disfavored coverage, there are many technical, legal, and practical barriers.1 But most of them boil down to this: Such transparent censorship would almost certainly be reversed by the courts. Immediately.

Here’s the Supreme Court’s position as of 2024, as summarized by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Moody v. NetChoice, LLC:

[O]n the spectrum of dangers to free expression, there are few greater than allowing the government to change the speech of private actors to achieve its own conception of speech nirvana.

Read more: The FCC’s News Distortion Policy should be rescinded.

So why is Carr threatening censorship when doing so is so plainly illegal?

The broader goals are intimidation, self-censorship, and a drift towards media capture

Like anyone who makes similar threats, Carr clearly hopes he will never have to try to follow through.

Instead, the goal is to get media outlets to engage in what’s called “anticipatory obedience” — to obey in advance.

This is a vicious cycle. The more editors, producers, executives, and owners feel threatened by administration officials, the more they will be inclined to check their own coverage.

Brendan Carr doesn’t just want to censor specific outlets or stories. He wants every outlet and every journalist to worry about how the FCC is going to react to every word they write or say. He wants to be in the back of every reporter’s head. To have them temper every headline just to make it “more defensible.” To hold back on controversial stories for more sourcing. To scrap some altogether. To promote pro-administration voices in the name of “balance.”

To think first of politics, not of truth.

The more outlets check their coverage, the more the administration becomes unchecked. And the greater its power to threaten others.

On and on the cycle spins. Over time, as the media drifts from bias to outright capture, eventually the once-free press looks anything but.

As my colleague Rachel Goodman told a congressional spotlight hearing last month:

[The ultimate goal is the] “Hungary model” of media capture, in which a nominally independent media regulator, who in fact is completely aligned with the president or the ruling party, exerts financial and administrative pressure on independent media in an effort to destabilize their business and, ultimately, eliminate the independent media company. In Hungary, when Fidesz achieved its supermajority in 2010, one of the first laws it passed was a media law, justified as a needed “corrective” to left wing bias in the press. Like the FCC, Hungary’s new media authority is authorized to revoke broadcasting licenses and approve or prohibit mergers, and it has used these powers to penalize media critical of the government and encourage the expansion and consolidation of pro-government media. The Hungary model has been deployed in de-democratizing societies around the world; when Poland’s Law and Justice party held the government from 2015 to 2023, it similarly deployed regulatory power to weaken critical media through antitrust investigations, licensing decisions, and retroactive taxation.

We’re already seeing what this looks like at CBS, at the Washington Post, at the Los Angeles Times. CNN may be next if Trump-friendly Paramount succeeds in buying Warner Bros. Discovery. (Note: Carr has openly praised the deal and pledged to swiftly approve it; state regulators have a different view.)

Elections are the target — but remember: Carr’s power is illusory

All of this, like everything else the administration does, should be understood as aimed squarely at future elections.

Importantly, the goal is not just to distort the news that voters are hearing before elections so that they are more inclined to vote for the president’s political allies (although it certainly is that too). The scarier implication is what a captured media could mean if and when the autocratic faction attempts to undermine or overturn future election results.

Instead of headlines like these?

Carr and others in the administration would want you to instead see ones like this.

Here is the good news: The United States is not Hungary. Brendan Carr’s power may be easily abused, but — at least when it comes to censorship — it is also largely illusory. Every single outlet can, indeed they must, respond to Carr’s threats with something that echoes that statement at the top from former FCC leaders:

That the FCC has absolutely no business censoring speech.

That Carr’s abusive threats make him constitutionally unfit for the office he holds.

And that the free press in this country will continue to put facts above politics long after Carr is gone from the FCC.

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The SAVE America Act strategy, explained

This week, the Senate has been ensnared by Trump’s efforts to ram through the SAVE America Act, a Frankenstein’s monster of deliberate voter suppression and disenfranchisement measures that would wreak havoc on America’s elections process. It would, among other things, require a passport or birth certificate to register to vote, impose highly restrictive ID requirements on in-person and mail voting, target elections officials with steep criminal penalties, and potentially disenfranchise the 69 million married women who have changed their last names.

The law is and has always been doomed to failure. So what’s the big deal?

The Atlantic’s Russell Berman and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez explain (with an assist from my colleague Alexandra):

The most pressing question about the SAVE America Act is not whether it’s going to pass, but why Trump and his allies are so determined to see the Senate put up a bill that’s doomed to fail…

Voting-rights advocates have a theory. “It’s a pretext for the next authoritarian escalation,” Alexandra Chandler, who oversees the elections team at the advocacy group Protect Democracy, told us. Chandler and others we interviewed see the Senate’s high-profile debate as one episode in a broad, sustained, coordinated effort by the White House to seed doubt in American elections ahead of what Republicans believe could be steep losses this November. This, she said, would follow a pattern that Trump set both before and after his 2020 loss: before the election, manufacture a crisis upon which he can then blame defeat. “When his allies lose elections, it’s a talking point,” Chandler said: “You didn’t pass the legislation that would have solved this fake problem, and therefore the election results are not valid.”

The whole article is a must-read: A serious Senate debate about an unserious bill (gift link)

What else we’re tracking:

• “What if we make the House bigger?” Highly recommend this conversation on Highway to Hill with Aubrey Wilson and Anne Meeker of POPVOX Foundation on House expansion and proportional representation in practice.

• Sweden’s Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, one of the most prestigious academic institutions studying democracy, has an alarming new report on the United States: “Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country.”

• Similarly, Freedom House is out with their Freedom in the World 2026 report. Global freedom declined for the 25th straight year (the U.S. is now less free than Poland, Mongolia, and Romania). Still, they write, “even in this especially challenging moment, there are reasons for optimism.”

• Appointing JAGs to prosecute regular civilian cases undermines military and violates law — Admiral James McPherson and Protect Democracy’s Zach West explain the troubling new trend for Law.com.

• I highly recommend this essay from Protect Democracy advisor Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic on Donald Trump’s increasingly irrational foreign policy: Everyone but Trump understands what he’s done.

On January 23, Colleen Fagan stood in a parking lot in Maine and watched federal agents conduct an immigration operation. Fagan, who would tell you with great pride that she is a “lifelong Mainer,” didn’t interfere. She didn’t block anyone. She recorded what she saw — something Americans have an unambiguous constitutional right to do.

A masked man started recording her back. She asked why.

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“Cause we have a nice little database,” he sneered. “And now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

Two days earlier, Elinor Hilton was observing ICE agents outside of a Home Depot when agents similarly started filming her.

“He said ‘We’re putting you on a domestic terrorist watch list, and if you keep coming to things like this, we’re going to come to your house later and arrest you,’” Hilton recounted in an interview.

Protect Democracy is suing on behalf of Hilton, Fagan, and other Mainers who have faced similar intimidation attempts. (Read more: Hilton v. Noem et al.)

The same tactics have also been documented in Oregon and Minnesota. Federal agents in multiple cities have surveilled and intimidated community members who observed immigration enforcement operations. The coordination is too consistent to be coincidental.

We don’t know exactly how and to what extent the Trump administration is already surveilling American citizens as the president seeks to intimidate and retaliate against critics. We do, however, know that many in our government are hell-bent on developing unprecedented tools, systems, and databases to keep watch on those they see as “enemies from within.”

The surveillance we’re already seeing in places like Maine may just be the beginning.

If the president gets his way in the months ahead — especially in his administration’s ongoing campaign to control the AI industry — we could be entering a new and Orwellian era for domestic surveillance.

The Anthropic fight is over the future of surveillance and democracy

Earlier this week, AI company Anthropic filed suit against the Defense Department for designating the company a security threat.

On the surface, the dispute concerns the Trump administration’s attempt to essentially take over the company “by force and coerce them into maintaining a product for uses they fundamentally oppose,” as Ian Bassin and Nicole Schneidman explained last week: A steel mill the president might not be able to seize.

In a larger sense, though, this fight is over the future of artificial intelligence in our democracy. The Defense Department attempted to force Anthropic to provide AI technology without agreeing that it would not use the technology for two use cases:

• Mass domestic surveillance.

• Lethal autonomous weapons without a human operator.

Anthropic refused to provide its technology without the Defense Department agreeing to these limitations. And so the federal government is attempting, in retaliation, to destroy Anthropic.

Shortly after Anthropic filed their lawsuit, a group of 37 AI scientists and researchers at competitors OpenAI and Google — including Jeff Dean, the chief scientist of Google’s AI division — filed an amicus brief supporting Anthropic’s position. (Disclosure: My colleagues at Protect Democracy are counsel for the brief.)

Remember, these are people who work for Anthropic’s competitors in the most intense corporate arms race in modern history. And they stood up to defend Anthropic and the red lines that it has drawn against the federal government.

The entire brief is worth your time, but I especially recommend the section on surveillance. Here are the most important parts:

At its core, AI-enabled mass surveillance means the ability to monitor, analyze, and act on the behavior of an entire population continuously and in real time. The devices and data streams required to do this already exist. As of 2018, there were approximately 70 million surveillance cameras operating in the United States across airports, subway stations, parking lots, storefronts, and street corners. Every smartphone continuously broadcasts location data to carriers and dozens of applications. Credit and debit cards generate a timestamped record of nearly every commercial transaction Americans make. Social media platforms log not just what people post, but what they read, how long they browse, and what they posted before deleting it. Employers, insurers, and data brokers have assembled behavioral profiles on most American adults that are already, in many cases, available for government purchase without a warrant. What does not yet exist is the AI layer that transforms this sprawling, fragmented data landscape into a unified, real-time surveillance apparatus. Today, these streams are siloed, inconsistent, and require significant human effort to connect. From our vantage point at frontier AI labs, we understand that an AI system used for mass surveillance could dissolve those silos, correlating face recognition data with location history, transaction records, social graphs, and behavioral patterns across hundreds of millions of people simultaneously.

The mere existence of such a capability in government hands — even if never activated against a specific individual — changes the character of public life in a democracy. Behavioral scientists and legal scholars have long documented what is sometimes called the “panopticon effect”: when people believe they may be observed, they modify their behavior as if they are always being observed, regardless of whether anyone is actually watching. The journalist thinks twice before calling a source inside the military, knowing the call could be logged and crossreferenced. The activist softens her public messaging, calculating that visibility now carries risk it didn’t carry before. The academic researcher avoids certain search terms — not because the research is wrong, but because she doesn’t want to surface in a database. None of these people have been targeted. None have been punished. But their behavior has already been constrained, and with it the democratic functions they serve — a free press, political organizing, open intellectual inquiry — have been quietly degraded. These chilling effects require no abuse, only the awareness that the capability exists.

History offers ample warning. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which ran from 1956 to 1971 and was exposed years later, demonstrated how domestic intelligence powers justified by security concerns were systematically turned against civil rights leaders, journalists, and political dissidents. The program did not merely surveil its targets. It fabricated evidence, sent anonymous letters designed to destroy marriages and careers, tipped off employers, and worked to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It operated for fifteen years before Congress learned of its existence. AI does not merely replicate those dangers — it multiplies them by orders of magnitude, automating at national scale what previously required hundreds of human operatives.

Further enhancing the risk terrain for AI’s deployment in this context, the Pentagon operates under a legal framework oriented toward external threats and warfighting, not domestic civil life. The Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878 in direct response to the use of federal troops to police American civilians during Reconstruction, reflects a constitutional tradition of keeping military power categorically separate from domestic governance.6 When the Pentagon acts domestically, it is operating in legal territory it was not designed for, with oversight structures that were not built to catch domestic abuses. That is in part why the bulk data collection programs by the Pentagon’s own National Security Agency (NSA), revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, were so shocking and produced measurable chilling effects on lawful speech and inquiry. A study published in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal found statistically significant drops in traffic to Wikipedia articles on terrorism-related topics following the Snowden revelations, likely as ordinary people adjusted their online behavior in response to awareness that their searches were potentially being monitored.

The harms from building this infrastructure are not easily undone, as we understand in our field. Data collected on a population does not expire. A database of location records, behavioral profiles, and social graphs built today will still exist years from now, accessible to whoever controls it under whatever political conditions prevail then. That data would feed into an AI-powered surveillance infrastructure that, once constructed, tends to expand rather than contract. Agencies find new uses for existing capabilities, authorities get quietly reinterpreted, and the political cost of dismantling something already built is almost always higher than the cost of letting it continue and grow.
…

We do not suggest that the Defendants intend to misuse such capabilities. We suggest that the question of intent is the wrong question. Democratic governance does not rest on the good intentions of those in power. It rests on structural constraints that make abuse difficult regardless of intent. AI-enabled mass domestic surveillance, deployed without transparent legal constraints and independent oversight, removes those structural protections in ways that no amount of good faith can replace.

[Read the whole brief.]

Six ways to keep the genie of AI-powered mass surveillance in the bottle

Despite what the masked agent told Colleen Fagan, Trump has probably not yet managed to weaponize domestic surveillance to its maximum potential.

The main legal safeguards that protect you from surveillance — the Fourth Amendment, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the Privacy Act — are all still relatively intact. But none of these were designed with the immense surveillance capabilities of AI in mind.

Here are six strategies that can help ensure further dangerous lines do not get crossed:

First, legal vigilance — Courts and litigators must firmly stand up for First and Fourth Amendment rights, not just in cases like these where surveillance is directly at issue, but across all of the federal government’s ongoing attempts to intimidate and retaliate against critics. And the courts must uphold the industry guardrails that shore up vulnerabilities in the law when it comes to constraining AI-powered surveillance capabilities. Plus, the government’s targets — like Colleen Fagan and Elinor Hilton, like Anthropic — must refuse to be intimidated and instead have the courage to take their government to court to stand up for their own rights, including in the case of private companies’ right to self-imposed guardrails that on the technology they are developing.

The Temporary Restraining Order hearing for Hilton v. Noem et al., the Maine ICE lawsuit, is scheduled for March 16. Read the full complaint and motion here.

Anthropic v. U.S. Department of War et al. will likely be heard in the coming weeks.

Second, solidarity and collective action — As with Anthropic, the Trump administration will continue to use a divide-and-conquer strategy to build surveillance capacity. Instead of targeting everyone at once, they will continue to pick out individual targets — whether it’s a company or a person — and try to intimidate them.

When someone is targeted, either by intimidation or surveillance, all of us must rush to their defense.

That’s exactly what the senior researchers at OpenAI and Google did when their competitors came under attack. We must all be ready to do the same.

Third, democratic oversight — While courts can protect individuals from the effects of surveillance and intimidation, our democratically elected representatives are the ones who must provide oversight and accountability to ensure that the federal government is staying within the law.

Last week, an impressive list of 35 national security, business, civil society, and technology leaders wrote to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees urging them to uphold their oversight responsibilities as well as to “establish clear statutory policy governing the use of artificial intelligence” on autonomous weapons and surveillance.

Until Congress acts, our freedoms will never be safe. Read their whole letter here.

Fourth, security — If you’re someone that the Trump administration might consider to be a political enemy (and really, even if you’re not), now is the time to review your digital and information security practices. How easy would it be for a malicious government actor to get their hands on your private information?

For tips on how to keep your digital house in order, I recommend Protect Democracy’s new operational security best practices (this document is for coalitions specifically, but it’s useful for everyone).

Fifth, data protections — Surveillance is only as good as the data it has access to, and data access breaches can be catastrophic (for instance, the former DOGE-er who allegedly stole Social Security info on a thumb drive to take to his next job). By focusing on data weak points, we can protect against some of the worst abuses.

Last month, Nicole Schneidman and Edison Forman wrote about how to weaken ICE’s surveillance apparatus by protecting DMV data and interrogating companies that share automated license plate recognition (ALPR) data with ICE.

Read more: When ICE’s surveillance machine comes for Americans.

Sixth, public outcry — All of the above are important and effective, but they pale in comparison to the effect of widespread public outcry. If the American people firmly and loudly reject mass government surveillance, if they protest and confront their elected officials and even vote them out if necessary, then I feel confident that we will never have to live under mass domestic surveillance regime.

But if we shrug our shoulders, perhaps thinking there’s nothing we can do? Then I’m not so sure.

Did that video at the top of the agent talking about a “nice little database” of domestic terrorists make you angry?

If so — don’t keep it to yourself.

A week ago, the president unilaterally launched a full-scale war to kill Iran’s leadership and overturn the Iranian regime.

Our country’s founders would be horrified. The Constitution was designed to prevent an unchecked, imperial leader from dragging the country to war on a whim. Congress was supposed to share warmaking powers with the president to prevent exactly this scenario. (Read about why: The founders gave the first branch war powers for a reason.)

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Our constitutional system of checks and balances over warmaking is functionally dead. With Congress abdicating on Iran, the president is unbound and acting like it. Donald Trump wants you to believe he is already an imperial ruler able to shape the world to his whim.

So are we — and our democracy — already screwed?

No.

The president’s projection of strength, his bravado in starting this war, is not just hubris. It is an illusion. In truth, this administration is currently weaker than it has ever been. And many of the most critical guardrails in our democracy — especially those around elections — are still (relatively) intact. Instead of the hard work to continue consolidating power, Trump instead just gambled his presidency on a quagmire in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the authoritarian project, which had been stalling since last summer, is suddenly facing the most pronounced string of losses yet (for my whole list, read to the end).

We are still so far from safety. It’s still going to take all of us to ensure that democracy endures over the next three years. But, big picture, authoritarianism is losing.

The spectrum of hard and soft guardrails

How can Trump be so unchecked abroad and still not have consolidated autocratic power at home? It’s because not all limits on presidential power are the same.

Our democracy, like any democracy, has a whole bunch of guardrails. Some are hard and some are soft.

I think of soft guardrails as the things that a president “must not,” “traditionally does not,” and “legally isn’t allowed to” do. We often say a president “can’t” go to war without Congressional approval, unilaterally shutter agencies, or usurp the power of the purse — but really we mean he’s not allowed to do those things. They are against norms, against the law, or even against the Constitution. But unless there’s someone to stop him, semantically speaking, he can do them; the president can violate the Constitution.

Soft guardrails matter, but they’re the first thing to go on the slide to dictatorship.

Hard guardrails are actual barriers, not just rules. In order to abuse power, a president needs to literally have the manpower, resources, and capacity to carry out the abuse.

Or, alternatively, hard guardrails can be countervailing actors in a system able to firmly push back. The courts, the civil service, Congress when it does its job. States passing laws to protect their citizens. Protestors expressing their First Amendment rights who refuse to be intimidated.

Think of it as a series of defensive barriers that get increasingly less permeable as you go from “he’s not allowed to do that” to “no, he actually can’t do that.” An authoritarian obstacle course.

How far an autocrat is able to go from left to right, how far he’s able to get through the increasingly hard barriers, is ultimately up to all of us.

In the United States, we’re still only maybe halfway through the spectrum. Many of the most important hard guardrails are — as of March 2026 — still at least somewhat intact.

There are still many practical barriers to Trump interfering in elections

Consider the many hard guardrails that prevent a president from interfering in elections.

First, the federal government — which is the only thing the president has direct control over — has a very limited role in election processes. Elections are, per the Constitution, run at the state and local level.

Donald Trump cannot order your local elections officials to do anything because your local elections officials do not work for him. He cannot force them to break the law and he cannot fire them if they refuse. If the president tries to issue an order instructing local officials to interfere in an election, they will be legally required to ignore that order — same as you would be if the president tried to issue an order telling you to interfere in the election. And if they break the law, they could face criminal charges under state law (the consequences of which the president, who can only grant pardons for federal crimes, has no power to shield them from).

Yes, there are some areas where the federal government, by law, plays a role in elections. But it’s mostly defining baselines on security, setting standards on voting rights, and providing funding. Practically speaking, the president cannot nationalize, cancel, or otherwise upend an election because there is simply no pathway to him doing so.

To be clear, the White House may (and almost certainly will) still abuse the power that it does have to try to meddle in the elections process. Trump may try to do outlandish things, like unilaterally ban mail-in voting or mass-disenfranchise voters. He might even succeed in some of them. But it’s still a long, uphill battle for him to tilt or rig the elections against the opposition.

It is possible for an autocrat to overcome hard guardrails. It’s just… well, hard.

And if he does, I believe we can collectively ensure that other actors and institutions — the courts, the press, the business community, law enforcement, and yes, even Congress — push back. It’s one thing for the president to abuse his power to topple a foreign dictator, it’s quite another for him to attempt to end representative government in the United States. I’m not saying courts and Congress would never go along with election subversion schemes (after all, 147 members of Congress violated their oaths in voting to overturn the 2020 election), but it’s far less of a done deal than it is with something like war powers.

It’s not a done deal because of the last and hardest guardrail:

All of us.

In an autocratizing country (like ours), the last and hardest guardrail is convincing the public to go along.

That may sound contradictory — isn’t the point of authoritarianism that public opinion no longer matters? Yes, that’s true to a degree, but only after an autocrat has consolidated power. Before, it’s the opposite. Until it’s too late to turn back, modern competitive authoritarians desperately need to convince the populace to accept their authoritarian project.

It is still not too late for the United States. And Donald Trump is losing public opinion. Here is FiftyPlusOne’s tracker:

The White House is losing everywhere

Perhaps because of this deteriorating political standing, the White House lost across the board this week:

• Under mounting public pressure and outrage, Trump was forced to fire one of his key officials: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

• In the face of the Defense Department’s efforts to weaponize AI for domestic surveillance and autonomous weaponry, leading artificial intelligence company Anthropic told the administration to pound sand — and was promptly rewarded by becoming the top-downloaded app.

• Faced with the growing reality that the unconstitutional campaign against law firms had failed, the DOJ raised the legal white flag (then, in an even more loser-like move, tried to backtrack on surrendering — presumably after the White House got mad).

• Five Republicans on the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Bondi as part of the growing Epstein Files inquiry.

• We learned that the Justice Department also tried and failed to — incredibly — indict Joe Biden for using an autopen.

• Lindsey Halligan, the loyalist lawyer who has become the face of Trump’s efforts to bring criminal cases against his enemies, is under investigation by the Florida Bar and could lose her license to practice law.

• On the heels of the White House’s devastating tariff loss at the Supreme Court, a federal judge ruled that companies are entitled to tariff refunds.

• Tuesday’s primary elections, far from showing a demoralized or cowed opposition, saw Democratic voters swamping their Republican counterparts almost everywhere. In Texas, significantly more people voted in the Democratic primaries than the Republican one, including in most of the districts that were targeted by the new gerrymander.

• The effort in Florida to declare CAIR, one of the largest Muslim advocacy groups, a terrorist organization — one of those classic authoritarian tactics to target civil society — crashed headlong into the First Amendment.

And that’s all before the potential consequences of another disastrous war in the Middle East set in.

None of us know exactly where any of this is going. Likely it ends in some pretty dark places.

But this is not what consolidated autocracy looks like.

Welcome Checks & Balances to Substack!

Our friends at the Society for the Rule of Law have a new must-read newsletter. They’re an essential voice for principled conservatives, libertarians, and those without a clear ideological bent — all standing up for democracy.

Read Checks & Balances here.

What else we’re tracking:

• Read my colleague Jennifer Dresden’s letter to the editor of The New York Times on the real reason why gerrymandering, widespread in the U.S., is so rare in other countries. (Hint: it all comes down to the electoral system.)

• A group of 30 defense and policy experts are calling on Congress to investigate the “dangerous precedent” of abusing the Pentagon’s supply chain risk designation to blacklist one of America’s leading AI companies.

• Read this excellent article from The Upshot on how the White House has abused spending power hundreds of times: Trump keeps finding new ways to withhold money even after 198 lawsuits.

• The Supreme Court appears to be questioning some of the bedrock principles of the Voting Rights Act, the law that protects minority representation in the United States. Michael Later, Alicia Menendez-Brennan, and Farbod Faraji explain what needs to happen if the justices take such a damaging step: The Supreme Court questions the future of the Voting Rights Act — Proportional representation should be our answer. (You should also read the Brennan Center’s Jesse Wegman on how we got here: Chief Justice Roberts’s vendetta against the Voting Rights Act.)

How you can help:

Security is one of American civil society’s greatest weaknesses. Basic shortcomings — from failures to safeguard internal communications to lax device security — could leave a significant portion of American advocacy coalitions vulnerable to politicized retaliation or attacks by autocratic actors.

Protect Democracy’s new guide to operational security for coalitions summarizes basic security best practices for all advocacy coalitions and groups. It also includes key resources for understanding and responding to government investigations.

Please: Send this resource to anyone you know who works in advocacy or civil society. They may not think — or know — that they need these. Send it just in case.

See all of Protect Democracy’s toolkits for civil society facing government attacks here.

Recent observers of the Supreme Court are coming to terms with an ugly truth: a majority of the justices seem to be re-considering the legality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). In the pending landmark case Louisiana v. Callais, the Court may decide that this key safeguard against race-based voting discrimination can no longer be enforced.

The stakes of this impending decision are even broader than they appear.

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What many court-watchers may not fully realize is that further weakening Section 2 of the VRA not only undermines voting rights, but also debilitates a vital power-sharing system: compelling political majorities to include political minorities. To protect our democracy from this looming winner-take-all threat, we must consider a structural alternative — proportional representation.

End of an era?

For decades, Section 2 of the VRA protected voters of color from having their voting power diluted. It helped create “majority-minority” districts, ensuring that Black voters — who historically make up 20% to 40% of most Southern states — were no longer perpetually shut out of government by white majorities.

Callais threatens to dismantle this framework. The lawsuit centers on Louisiana, where Black residents make up one-third of the population, yet the state drew only one majority-Black congressional district out of seven. During arguments, several justices signaled that the majority-minority districts that have served as the primary remedy for Section 2 violations are no longer a valid solution to racial discrimination in voting.

However, as articulated in a recent Yale Law Journal essay, Callais Confusion, Power-Sharing, and the Inevitability of Proportional Representation, dismantling Section 2 destroys a key mechanism for ensuring that our democracy accurately reflects the racial and political diversity of our society.

Since the founding of the republic, constitutional scholars have warned about the threat that unchecked majorities pose to our political rights. For 60 years, the VRA has served as one of the few electoral mechanisms to protect against the “tyranny of the majority” and prevent large political factions from invading the rights of other citizens.

If Section 2 is struck down, it will be the end of an era. One in which the VRA was a key tool to ensure not just the right to vote, but the right for your vote to matter. Our efforts to ensure that every vote is meaningful reflect what voting rights scholar Lani Guinier called “second-generation fights.”1

The first generation fight got rid of poll taxes and literacy tests so that Black voters could finally cast a vote. The second generation wins made those votes count.

The proportional solution

If the Court continues dismantling our established voting rights regime, how do we ensure that political minorities still have a seat at the table? We look to a solution already used by 20 of the world’s 24 presidential democracies: proportional representation.

In short, proportional electoral systems ensure that the share of seats a party gets is aligned with its share of votes. So rather than 51% of voters get 100% of the power and 49% get nothing, all coalitions of voters (provided their group meets a minimum threshold) receive seats proportional to their votes.

We can achieve this by replacing our existing single-seat, winner-take-all system with multi-seat proportional districts and ballot structures that allow voters to pool their voting strength. So rather than 4 districts each electing one member of the majority, one district elects 4 representatives. If a minority of voters vote together and constitute 25% of a district, they elect one representative. If another group constitutes 50%, they elect two. Everyone’s vote counts equally.

Proportional representation is a great system in its own right: a large body of research demonstrates its effectiveness, especially its ability to better represent the full demographic and ideological diversity of society.2

Proportional systems also have a unique advantage when applied to the U.S. context: It is possible to achieve fair representation for voters of color without race-conscious districting. In fact, proportional representation makes gerrymandering functionally impossible if enough seats are elected per district. That also means that the practice of drawing district lines around racial groups is not necessary to secure representation for racial and ethnic minorities.

Because proportional representation is a race-neutral electoral system on its face, it doesn’t require the government to choose in advance who will get representation. This means it could withstand scrutiny from the Court’s majority, who have grown increasingly averse to race-conscious policies.

We need a new path forward

Proportional representation is not a consolation prize for the demise of the Voting Rights Act. The VRA was implemented after a long, bloody fight for recognition of full humanity and citizenship by and for people of color in the United States, and it served as a powerful tool to enforce those rights for the last 60 years.

What will come next must be informed by the VRA’s history and its powerful defense of rights for all Americans, especially those long excluded from power.

Proportional representation should be part of the answer. In the tradition of many generations of civil rights reformers, we must continue their tireless work and begin anew to secure democracy for all.

We are living through the most significant and consequential democratic backsliding episode in world history.

The United States is the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, and most established democracy ever to be seriously threatened by autocracy. Our current backsliding has been much steeper than any other recent example. This is all, quite literally, unprecedented.

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Still, the United States is not exceptional, and so many of the threats facing our system of government directly mirror those faced by other democratic systems. Would-be autocrats may speak different languages and channel different politics, but their playbook tends to look remarkably similar. As such, we at Protect Democracy rely heavily on the writers and thinkers who have studied not just what authoritarianism looks like but also what it takes to survive an autocratic assault.

More often than not, that means we find ourselves reading Vox, whose journalists, writers, and editors have been on the threats-to-democracy beat since long before most publications even dared print “the A-word.” Some months ago, we started talking with their editors about the most important question right now: “How does the United States escape the threat of permanent authoritarianism after a second Trump administration?”

Eventually, those conversations led to Vox’s remarkable new series, published over the last two weeks: America after Trump: How democracies fall — and how they can come back.

As Swati Sharma, Vox’s editor-in-chief, writes in the introduction to the project:

This package takes as its starting point that global democracy is in a bad way — but that the diagnosis, while serious, isn’t terminal. America can learn from the example of other democracies that have also faltered, but ultimately succeeded. It can learn from its own past, which tells us that democratic reform not only is possible but inevitable. And it can learn from ideas given new life by our predicament, as we search for a path out of this anti-democratic cul-de-sac.

To be clear: Protect Democracy helped support this project with a charitable grant, but Vox had full discretion over the content of the reporting. They took this high-stakes question and sent their reporters around the world in search of answers, wherever they might lead.

The big thing we asked in return is to be able to share gift links to everything they found with all of you. Those links are below.

This may be one of the more important journalistic projects of the decade. Please do take the time to read, listen to, and watch the entire series — and share widely.

How one country stopped a Trump-style authoritarian in his tracks

By Zack Beauchamp

For this article, Zack Beauchamp traveled to Brazil to understand why that country’s experience with a Trump-like autocrat turned out so differently and what the United States can learn. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro looks and acts a lot like Trump. But Brazil’s Supreme Court and Congress effectively constrained Bolsonaro, preventing an effective takeover by the would-be dictator. Zack finds the important difference was that, in Brazil, public officials faced radically different incentives. Most relevant for the U.S., a multiparty system “prevented the emergence of US-style extreme partisanship — producing a legislature and judiciary primed to protect their powers against an aggressive executive.”

As he writes:

This gives us some real insight about how to fix American democracy going forward: to pass reforms that alter the incentives for legislators in particular, giving them good self-interested reasons to prefer systemic stability over partisan loyalty.

Read the whole piece.

The Brazilian playbook for defending democracy

By Jolie Myers

This episode of Today, Explained explores the fall of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and what it proves about Trump-style authoritarians.

What American democracy can learn from 1930s Finland

By Nate Krieger

In this video, Nate Krieger explores the remarkable story of a radical, far-right authoritarian movement that failed to secure power. It’s a story of how early and collective action won out against violence and extremism — and of the importance of unelected officials to manage the guardrails of democracy, the nonpartisan structures that maintain a healthy democratic system.

The House of Representatives is too small

By Dolly Li and Jordan Winters

In this video, Dolly Li and Jordan Winters explain why the U.S. House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 seats for more than a century — and how the growing imbalance between the size of the country and the size of our legislature may explain why many Americans feel Congress doesn’t represent them.

If you’ve ever wondered how we could actually accommodate a bigger House, Protect Democracy answered this question with actual architectural renderings. See what the House of tomorrow would actually look like.

Read more: Where will they all sit?

How to stop a dictator

By Zack Beauchamp

In this article, Zack Beauchamp looks at lessons from Brazil, South Korea, Venezuela, Colombia, Poland, and more and finds that the answer is remarkably simple: “People with political influence and platforms need to work to make the threat to democracy more legible to more people.”

Key takeaways:

• Democratic survival in the face of threats like Trump is determined in large part by how obvious the threat to democracy is. The more people recognize that an elected leader is trying to destroy democracy from within, the less likely it is that said leader will succeed.

• Evidence from Brazil, South Korea, and Poland — all democracies that defeated a would-be authoritarian government — show that the legibility of threat to key segments of society was critical in mobilizing the pushback that decided democracy’s survival.

• This has important implications for the United States going forward. Instead of sidelining the issue of democracy, as some political pollsters suggest, those concerned about the issue should foreground it — working hard to illustrate how Trump’s behaviors threaten core freedoms people cherish.

Read the whole article.

You got your democracy back. Now what?

By Jolie Myers and Noel King

For Today, Explained, Jolie Myers and Noel King traveled to Poland to understand what happened when that country voted in an authoritarian government a decade ago. In the first episode, they look at Poland’s struggle against an authoritarian party and how, “against considerable odds, they booted out the authoritarians and got their democracy back.”

Then, in the second episode, they look at the challenges facing Poland’s current pro-democracy government as it seeks to unwind a significant backsliding event. They find that, after a period of democratic backsliding, governments that want to restore democratic rule face an “illiberal trilemma” wherein they seek to unwind authoritarian rule legally, quickly, and effectively — but it’s very difficult to achieve all three.

Listen to both episodes.

Did the Constitution doom American democracy?

A conversation with Zack Beauchamp and Matt Yglesias

In this interview, Zack Beauchamp talks with Matt Yglesias about Matt’s 2015 article, American democracy is doomed. That essay effectively predicted much of what has happened over the following decade. The crux of the argument: “Presidential systems, the late political scientist Juan Linz found, had a tendency to break down, the strict separation of powers breeding irresolvable conflict between the executive and legislative branches that tended to end in coups, or something like them.”

It’s a fascinating conversation about some of the structural challenges at the core of our crisis which — paradoxically — offer some hope for renewal. If, that is, we can change some of those structures.

Read the whole interview.

US democracy has repaired itself before. Here’s how we can do it again.

By Lee Drutman

Finally — the hope. In this essay, political scientist Lee Drutman takes a contrarian but fundamentally convincing position:

The question is not whether reform is coming. It’s what kind of reform… Gridlock may look like stability; it is actually brittleness. Eventually, it will crack. In some places, it already has. A new generation will pick up the pieces and build something new. In some places, they already are.

By changing how the parties work, Lee argues, the coming era can be more than a rebound. It may be a quintessentially American era of rebirth and renewal.

Key takeaways:

• American democracy has been dramatically remade roughly every 60 years: the 1770s, the 1830s, the 1900s, the 1960s. Each time, reform came when ambitious insiders recognized the old order was dying and switched sides before it collapsed on them.

• Today’s dysfunction matches the historical preconditions almost exactly: Institutional trust near historic lows, and both parties fighting the last war while new pressures accumulate with no political home.

• The question is not whether reform is coming but what kind. Previous eras tried to work around parties and got hollow institutions captured by whoever was already organized. The next reform needs to change how parties themselves work.

Read the whole essay.

Multiple American presidents have at some point discovered the same temptation: the strategic industry too important to national security to leave in private hands. The modern version of this story has a three-act structure that begins with Harry Truman, reaches a surprising climax with Donald Trump, and may be approaching its denouement with artificial intelligence.

The arc traces a question long disputed: What happens when a president decides a private industry is too vital to national security to operate beyond his control? Truman tried brute force with the steel industry and was told he couldn’t. Trump found cleverer mechanisms and, so far, has succeeded. But AI may represent something new — an industry where the legal tools available to the executive branch are real and formidable, and yet where exercising them might not produce the desired outcome — and may reveal something profound about where future power lies.

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In short, AI is not like a steel or munitions industry. It’s not just capital, infrastructure, and processes that can be captured and taken over by the government. It’s not even just companies like Anthropic or others. Instead, the power at the center of the AI industry today is a small number of leading AI scientists.

If the Trump administration tries to take over their employer by force and coerce them into maintaining a product for uses they fundamentally oppose, those researchers are likely to simply walk away or find other ways to frustrate the government’s goals. Unlike a steel mill, they cannot be forcibly commandeered into the U.S. national security apparatus. This means the present contest between the Defense Department and Anthropic has contours unlike prior showdowns between the president and industry.

When Harry Truman seized the steel industry

In April 1952, with a steelworkers’ strike threatening Korean War production, Truman issued an executive order seizing the nation’s steel mills in the interest of national defense. Two months later, the Supreme Court struck the order down. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, Justice Jackson’s concurrence established the enduring framework: Presidential power is at its “lowest ebb” when the president acts against the will of Congress, which had previously considered and rejected seizure authority. The case seemed to establish a firm principle: The president cannot commandeer private industry without congressional authorization, even when national security is genuinely at stake.

But notice what Youngstown quietly assumed. The constraint on Truman was juridical, not operational. No one argued the government lacked the practical capacity to run steel mills — in fact, it had done so during World War II. If the law had been on Truman’s side, the mills would have been seized and run. For 70 years, that assumption held: The only meaningful check on presidential power over industry in the context of national security was the legal one.

U.S. Steel under Biden and Trump

When Japan’s Nippon Steel bid $14.9 billion for U.S. Steel in late 2023, both Republicans and Democrats opposed the deal. In the final days of his administration, President Biden blocked the deal, citing national security concerns. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump had vowed to do the same, but after being sworn in, he reversed course — but with a twist. He ultimately approved Nippon’s investment in U.S. Steel as part of a deal that gave the U.S. government a more extraordinary level of control over a private corporation than almost any president had sought or achieved since Truman tried and failed.

The restructured deal for U.S. Steel’s purchase, finalized in June 2025, required Nippon to make $11 billion in new investment, install an American CEO and a majority-American board, and — most remarkably — create a “golden share” granting the U.S. government (the filed paperwork actually names Donald Trump specifically) a board seat and veto power over corporate decisions the president deems relevant to national security. By September, Trump had already exercised it to block a plant closure in Illinois.

The legal architecture was creative. Through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), Trump used authority that Congress had actually granted, setting conditions on a voluntary transaction rather than seizing property. Under Justice Jackson’s framework, he was arguably operating within congressionally granted presidential power.

But even the “golden share” model rested on the same assumption as Truman’s intervention: that with the right legal authority, the state could keep the furnaces burning. Truman’s 1952 order was sparked by a looming strike, but he wasn’t seizing the mills to suppress the workforce. In fact, the steelworkers largely supported the move, seeing the federal government as a more favorable arbiter than the steel executives.

In that era, the struggle was ultimately over the governance of the machinery, not the coercion of the men. Because the workers were willing to keep the mills running under federal stewardship, Truman’s gamble was a matter of law. At the end of the day, when it came to steel, the fundamental thing being fought over was control of the plants, not the workforce.

Either way, the Anthropic-Defense Department showdown will end very differently

In the summer of 2025, the Pentagon signed a contract worth up to $200 million with Anthropic, maker of Claude — the first frontier AI model authorized on classified U.S. networks. By early 2026, the partnership was in crisis. The Pentagon demanded that four of its AI providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI — allow their tools to be used for “all lawful purposes,” including weapons development, intelligence collection, and battlefield operations. Three showed flexibility. Anthropic drew two bright lines: no mass surveillance of Americans, no fully autonomous weapons.

The confrontation came to a head this week. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon for what officials described, without diplomatic softening, as a “shit-or-get-off-the-pot meeting.”

Hegseth reportedly issued his ultimatum. Amodei arrived and, by all accounts, was cordial and unmoved in roughly equal measure. He thanked Hegseth for his service. He reiterated Anthropic’s red lines. He left.

Within hours, Hegseth’s ultimatum leaked. Anthropic has until Friday evening to grant the military “unfettered access” to Claude. If it refuses, the Pentagon will pursue one of two paths: declare Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — effectively blacklisting it from the entire Pentagon contracting ecosystem — or invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) to compel the company to give the government unfettered access to its products on the government’s terms.

“The only reason we’re still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now,” a DOD official told reporters. “The problem for these guys is they are that good.”

That last sentence is the most important one in this story.

But let’s start with the Pentagon’s threat, which is internally inconsistent. Designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk” suggests that the company or its product are too unsafe to be within the federal government’s procurement chain. Whereas invoking the DPA suggests Anthropic’s product is so essential that the government must be able to use it. Needless to say, that’ll be a difficult split-perspective to sustain in court.

But that doesn’t mean the Pentagon can’t use these tools to cause Anthropic serious harm.

The national security apparatus can designate companies as posing unacceptable risks to U.S. information and communications technology supply chains. Such a designation would not merely void Anthropic’s Pentagon contract; it would require any company with Pentagon contracts to certify that Claude is not used in their government contract work. Amazon, Google, and Palantir, among hundreds of other Pentagon contractors, would face the choice of dropping Claude or losing their own government business.

The specific legal challenges would be novel, and Anthropic would have strong arguments that it is arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act: The law was designed to address security threats, not to punish domestic companies for safety policies the government finds inconvenient. But national security deference is powerful, and courts might well allow the designation to stand pending full litigation, meaning the practical damage could be severe and durable regardless of the ultimate legal outcome. The government doesn’t need a clean legal win to make this hurt.

At the same time, the Pentagon could well end up losing this game of chicken. Not only could it lose access to Claude, but other tech companies could decide maintaining Claude in their own workflows is more important than their access to government business.

Either way, expect a prolonged, high-stakes standoff.

The DPA, on the other hand, authorizes the president to require companies to accept government contracts, prioritize government orders, and allocate materials. It has been used to ensure that manufacturers produce ventilators, semiconductors, and military equipment. What it has never been used to do is compel a company’s workers to build and maintain products against their own judgment or even their conscience.1

The statute was written for mines, farms, mills, and factories, not laboratories. “Accepting a contract” means something intelligible when applied to a widget manufacturer; it is considerably more ambiguous when applied to a model that requires thousands of researchers making millions of incremental decisions to build and maintain. Even if the government could compel a license to the current version of Claude, a model frozen in time may be worth little given how rapidly the technology evolves. What the Pentagon needs is ongoing cooperation, which the law does not obviously authorize compelling.

There is also a hard statutory wall that goes to the heart of what the government actually needs: The DPA expressly exempts employment contracts from its compulsory authority. Congress, when it wrote the law, drew an explicit line between commandeering production and conscripting labor. The government can perhaps compel a license to Claude’s current weights; it cannot, under the DPA’s own terms, compel the engineers to keep building the next version. That is not an oversight. It reflects a constitutional judgment, embedded in the statute, about the limits of compelled labor — a judgment the Thirteenth Amendment places beyond Congress’s power to override in the first place. Any legal theory that tries to reach the engineers directly through some other authority runs into that amendment head-on.

Ordering Anthropic to maintain and update a product for uses it objects to also raises First Amendment concerns; it looks less like commandeering a factory and more like compelling a publisher to rewrite its editorial standards under threat of nationalization. The government can seize a building. It cannot conscript a mind. An effort to essentially do so will likely face serious questions from courts.

Artificial intelligence is about people, not companies

Which underscores the fundamental difference between AI companies and steel companies: that the obstacles to government control are more than just legal.

For the government to succeed, it doesn’t just need the courts to agree, but it will ultimately need Anthropic’s leading scientists and engineers — or if it tries to substitute in Google or OpenAI or xAI, their scientists and engineers — to design and maintain a product they may ethically object to supporting.

And here’s what Silicon Valley already knows, even if Washington hasn’t caught up: Especially in the field of AI where the leading scientists and engineers themselves are among the most concerned about the product’s ultimate capabilities, those people will walk or potentially find other ways to frustrate the government’s goals.

We’ve seen it happen in vivid, documented detail — and the story starts with Anthropic itself. Dario Amodei and several of his colleagues founded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI over concerns about the company’s approach to safety and the pace of AI development. That departure wasn’t an anomaly. It was the first chapter of a pattern that has only accelerated since. When OpenAI’s direction drifted further from its founding safety principles, the departures didn’t trickle — they cascaded. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist, left in May 2024. Jan Leike, who co-led the Superalignment team, followed days later, writing publicly that safety had “taken a backseat to shiny products.” By August 2024, Fortune reported that nearly half of OpenAI’s AGI safety researchers had quietly resigned. Researcher Daniel Kokotajlo walked away from $1.7 million in equity — the vast majority of his family’s net worth — because he’d lost confidence the company would behave responsibly. Most recently, just weeks ago, OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig quit in a New York Times op-ed over the company’s move toward advertising, warning that ChatGPT’s archive of intimate user conversations created manipulation risks that “we don’t have the tools to understand, let alone prevent.”

And it isn’t only OpenAI. Mrinank Sharma, the head of Anthropic’s own Safeguards Research team, resigned the same week with a public letter warning that “the world is in peril” — a stark signal that even inside Anthropic, the researchers most responsible for its safety culture are watching closely and willing to leave when they feel values are being compromised.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They are a live, recurring pattern showing that the researchers who build these systems have values and they act on them. If Anthropic caves to the Pentagon’s pressure, it risks triggering the same dynamic from the inside out. A $200 million contract for a company valued in the hundreds of billions is recoverable. Losing the people who made Claude the current leader in the field is not.

There’s also a concern that goes beyond engineers simply refusing, and that’s engineers who might decide they have an ethical duty to prevent the kinds of misuses Anthropic is trying to hold the line to prevent. You might call this the Galen Erso problem, named after the fictional scientist in the Star Wars movie Rogue One who, forced by the Empire to build a weapon, embeds in it a fatal flaw unknown to his employers. It’s a safe bet many Anthropic engineers are familiar with Galen Erso, a sort of cult hero in the tech sci fi fan circles from which many come. Like Erso’s situation, if the government essentially bullies frontier labs into enabling unethical things, the risk that those engineers respond by trying to sabotage or just frustrate the product in some way — and doing so in service of what they see as a higher ethical mandate — is nonzero.

The national security establishment has all manner of protocols to prevent situations in which someone might feel pressured or incentivized to act in a manner inconsistent with the government’s interests. By doing what the Pentagon is presently doing, they are arguably creating just that situation. And that says something profound about where the real power presently lies.

The Anthropic-Defense Department fight could reorient our understanding of where power lives

For most of the twentieth century, the hierarchy between government and strategic industry was not in doubt. Governments could tax, regulate, nationalize, and seize. The assets that mattered — steel, oil, uranium — existed in physical space, subject to physical control. AI sits somewhere between those old categories and something genuinely new. The government has real and formidable tools: the DPA, supply chain designation authority, export controls, and the ability to shape the market through the sheer scale of federal procurement. None of those tools are illusory, and it would be a mistake to conclude that because AI is cognitively complex, the government is necessarily powerless.

But the government’s tools are better suited to controlling access to AI than to controlling what AI does — and the distinction matters enormously.

Cutting Anthropic off from federal contracts would hurt the company and might, over time, accelerate the adoption of more compliant alternatives. It would not give the government full control over Claude. Invoking the DPA might compel cooperation but would do so through legal mechanisms whose scope is untested, against a company that would litigate vigorously and could draw on the most sophisticated legal talent in the country. And whatever mechanism the government eventually chose, it would ultimately find itself not in a standoff with a corporation but with a specific group of highly skilled scientists who have already demonstrated, repeatedly and at personal cost, that they will choose their values over their paychecks.

Hegseth walked into the Pentagon meeting with a deadline and two threats. Amodei walked out having conceded nothing. The deadline is tomorrow. The real deadline — the moment at which AI becomes so central to military operations that the government’s dependence is total and its leverage is gone — may already be in the past.

The blast furnaces never got a vote. The scientists do. Anthropic and its peers understand that. It’s not clear the Pentagon does, but it’s soon likely to find out.

Last night, in the same place where five years ago a violent mob and 147 members of Congress attempted to overturn a free and fair election, the president laid the groundwork for the Next Big Lie.

President Trump’s State of the Union address was full of falsehoods on nearly every issue (you can find some version of a fact-check by most major outlets today), but buried nearly an hour into the record-length speech was a litany of untruths about American elections. Sowing doubts about the election process is the first step in the president’s strategy to interfere with this year’s midterm elections to ensure his party maintains power, regardless of how the American people vote.

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Here are the five major lies the president told about our elections, debunked.

One: ‘Cheating’ is rampant in our elections

This lie about American elections might be the single most consistent position that the president holds. At least since 2012, Donald Trump has called elections that he and/or his preferred candidates lost “rigged,” “stolen,” and a “sham.” Sometimes a conspiracy between the FBI and social media companies is the primary culprit. Other times, mail-in ballots draw his greatest ire. 2020 was a bit of an “all of the above” or “throw spaghetti at the wall” style strategy. In 2026, his primary fixation — the Next Big Lie — is widespread non-citizen voting.

Just to be clear, he’s been wrong every time.

According to an election fraud database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation (the authors of Project 2025), from 1982 to 2024, there were only 1,546 “proven instances of voter fraud.” In 2020 alone, dozens of courts reviewed allegations of fraud and dismissed them for lack of evidence.

Multiple bipartisan audits and hand recounts in multiple battleground states confirmed the accuracy of the results.

Undermining public trust in elections with blatant lies like this lays the groundwork for the president to attempt to use the power of the federal government to change the rules and tilt the electoral playing field in his favor to guarantee his preferred outcome in November.

Read more: Elections are the essential remaining pillar of our democracy.

Two: ‘Illegal aliens’ vote in our elections

Sixty-eight. That’s the number of noncitizens who voted between 1982 and 2024, according to the American Immigration Council’s review of the Heritage Foundation data. 68 out of over one billion total votes cast during that time. That’s below 0.0001%.

According to a Brennan Center report, in the 42 jurisdictions they studied, the total number of undocumented immigrants who were referred for investigation for illegal voting in 2016 was just 30 — 0.0001% of votes cast that year.

There’s just no evidence to support the president’s claims. But that’s beside the point for Trump. He’s searching for a pretext to interfere in election administration, stifle political activity, and silence voters so that he can control who holds office, regardless of who wins the election.

Read more: Free speech, ICE, and free elections in 2026.

Three: Mail-in voting is ‘crooked’

Ever a favorite target of the president, mail-in voting remains a convenient, secure way for Americans to vote. Take it from a recent Brookings Institution report:

We find that mail voting—universal vote-by-mail in particular—has substantial benefits for election administration and tens of millions of U.S. voters. As part of this analysis, we corroborate prior research that mail voting is secure and find low overall mail voting fraud, particularly in universal vote-by-mail voting systems.

To put a finer point on it, cases of mail-in voting fraud account for only 0.000043% of all mail ballots cast. That’s four in 10 million.

Most Americans want every eligible voter to be able to vote and have their vote counted. Most of us support absentee and early voting, and many of the president’s own voters rely on these options to cast their ballots.

Despite President Trump’s vague reassurances last night, restricting absentee voting primarily impacts military voters, seniors, voters with disabilities, and rural communities who rely on mail voting to make their voices heard. And all of us benefit from early voting options. Eliminating ballot drop boxes and limiting in-person early voting would create longer lines and more chaos on Election Day, which could turn away even more voters.

Four: The SAVE America Act is ‘common sense, country-saving’ legislation

This sweeping “election integrity” bill is an effort by an increasingly unpopular president and party to pick and choose who gets to vote in a desperate attempt to stay in power.

Instead of preventing rampant non-citizen voting (which, as I discussed above, isn’t real), the impact of this legislation would be to make it harder for law-abiding citizens to vote, requiring all of us to find or pay for expensive documents, made even more complicated for anyone who has changed his or her name — including the vast majority of married women — to register to vote. And the registration process itself may become prohibitive for many voters; the bill could effectively end or severely limit automatic, mail-in, and online registration methods.

Americans deserve simple, accessible systems that allow every eligible voter to participate in our democratic process and have their vote counted.

Right now, roughly 21 million eligible citizens do not have immediate access to the specific documents this bill requires. For many Americans, obtaining these documents requires time, travel, and money. And it’s important to note that this legislation will disproportionately impact Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and immigrant communities.

When viewed alongside this administration’s ever-escalating attacks on free and fair elections, it becomes clear that the SAVE America Act is part of a coordinated effort to silence voters who the president expects to vote against his party.

Moreover, because the bill is unlikely to pass over a Democratic filibuster, its failure may also be used as a pretext to attack future election results. An equally dangerous scenario for the SAVE America Act isn’t just that it could pass and disenfranchise millions of voters. It’s also that it could fail — and have that be used to try to invalidate everyone’s votes.

Read more: Trump’s elections Chimera.

Five: Voting is a privilege

Of all of the falsehoods uttered by the president last night, this one may have upset me the most (lots of competition for this, I know), even if it largely flew under the radar for most commentators.

Voting isn’t a privilege; it’s a constitutionally protected right of American citizens. Full stop.

When President Trump called voting a privilege, he said the quiet part out loud. If the government views voting as a privilege that it can pick and choose upon whom to bestow, no American’s right to vote is safe — even those who don’t expect to be impacted by the president’s current disenfranchisement efforts.

This year, on the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding based on the principle that citizens have a God-given right to choose their own leaders, we have the opportunity to reflect on the struggle and sacrifice that have expanded the right to vote. The Women’s Suffrage and Civil Rights movements. The bloodshed on battlefields and on American streets. The leadership of activists, soldiers, teachers, union organizers, brave citizens from all walks of life. And in this reflection, we can find inspiration to keep going as we take up this mantle.

This year, we are engaged in a struggle to defend that most fundamental right of Americans to govern ourselves. Last night made clear that the challenge we face is steep, but I have no doubt that we will win.

The U.S. Department of Education’s recent decision to investigate the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE) didn’t make many national headlines, but perhaps it should have.

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For over a decade, NSLVE has been the gold standard for nonpartisan research into college civic learning and engagement. This investigation — thinly veiled as a concern for student privacy — threatens to dismantle an essential academic framework. By centering on alleged violations of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) — the federal privacy law carrying the same institutional peril as a HIPAA violation in medicine — the department is launching a calculated assault on the right of universities to measure their own civic and educational outcomes.

Is measurement a crime?

American universities are required by law (the Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended) to help students register to vote. But the effort to engage students in democracy on campus is driven by more than just a legal mandate. Many institutions explicitly name civic knowledge and democratic participation as central to their educational mission. Just as a chemistry department uses exams to measure a student’s subject matter expertise, a university must use data to measure a student’s mastery of participation in our democracy. Before NSLVE, which was launched in 2013, colleges and universities had no empirical way to measure the success of their civic engagement efforts. NSLVE has bridged this gap and provides data-driven insights to over 1,000 U.S. colleges and universities, allowing them to understand and improve student learning and civic participation on their campuses.

This study has transcended partisan lines, earning the endorsement of both Democratic and Republican administrations alike. For years, the federal government has actively encouraged participation in this study because NSLVE has proven to be a trusted partner with a process explicitly designed to be FERPA compliant.

NSLVE’s structure and policies have always prioritized student privacy. In fact, NSLVE never handles identifiable student information. It utilizes de-identified records from the National Student Clearinghouse and has no way of knowing if or how any specific student voted. The study does not share individual student data with any participating campuses or political or non-political third parties. And results are strictly limited to national trends or confidential campus-level reports, ensuring that no individual student can ever be identified.

A pattern of anticipatory obedience

Given this structure, the department’s claim that NSLVE data is being used by “political organizations to influence elections” is functionally impossible. But that impossibility is beside the point. By threatening to pull federal funding, the administration is seeking to create a state of anticipatory obedience, a move pulled straight from the authoritarian playbook.

“Creating an environment of fear and division is key,” writes our colleague Shanna Singh Hughey in her piece on anticipatory obedience. “People under threat naturally do what they can to avoid injury and maximize their chances of survival. And they do the same for the organizations they run.”

Read more: Reversing the vicious cycle of anticipatory obedience.

In this case, when the Department of Education warns that any school using this year’s data “could be at risk” of a FERPA violation, they aren’t seeking a legal victory; they are seeking a chilling effect. They want university lawyers to preemptively pull out of the study rather than risk their entire budgets on legal battles or cuts in federal funding. If they succeed, it will force a massive retreat from civic programs in the middle of a major election year, effectively gutting the infrastructure of youth participation in our democracy.

This is not an isolated incident. It is the latest in a series of moves designed to make it harder for universities to promote nonpartisan civic engagement. Last summer, the Department of Education prohibited universities from using federal work-study funds for nonpartisan voter engagement. And on the very first day of this administration, the president revoked the executive order that had directed federal agencies — including the Department of Education — to promote nonpartisan voter registration. It’s hard to view these actions as anything other than the administration trying to prevent more voters from voting.

The impact is the intent

Of course, if the real goal is to create a climate of fear, the legitimacy of this investigation would be irrelevant to its authors, who are seeking to delegitimize civic life and reframe the simple act of voting as a partisan threat. Whether through the quiet bureaucracy of a FERPA probe or by threatening the presence of ICE officers at the polls, the intent remains the same: to erect as many barriers to participating in our democracy as possible.

So while this technical investigation into data privacy may not have dominated national headlines, we still need to pay attention. This serves as a critical data point in the administration’s escalating use of the vast powers of government to target its perceived political opponents and ongoing efforts to suppress participation, and a reminder that not all authoritarian election rigging happens out loud. The current administration is using every small lever, every instrument at their disposal to choose its voters, out of fear that voters would choose their opposition.

Last week, a grand jury in Washington, D.C. (reportedly by a unanimous vote) declined to indict six Democratic members of Congress on charges of interfering with military loyalty. Their alleged crime: posting a 90-second video reminding service members of their long-settled duty to refuse patently illegal orders.

Ordinary citizens — not judges, not politicians, not legal scholars — looked at the evidence the Trump administration’s prosecutors put in front of them and concluded it didn’t meet the threshold to bring charges.

They were right. And their judgment holds an important lesson for the rest of the legal system.

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The amendments you probably don’t think about enough

If you remember high school civics class — or if you’ve watched enough Law & Order — you know the basics. The Fourth Amendment requires the government to get a warrant before searching your home or seizing your property. The Fifth Amendment requires the government to get a grand jury indictment before prosecuting you for a felony.

Most of us don’t spend much time thinking about these provisions. They sound procedural. Bureaucratic. The kinds of things you memorize for an exam and then forget.

But they exist for a reason. The Founders understood that government power, unchecked, bends toward abuse. They built these requirements — warrants reviewed by independent judges, indictments reviewed by independent grand juries — as structural safeguards. Not paperwork. Checkpoints. Places where someone outside the government’s chain of command looks at the government’s claims and says, “Prove it.”

When an autocrat in the White House appears intent on weaponizing every element of the federal government to entrench himself in power, these procedural checkpoints are more important than they’ve ever been.

Grand juries that wouldn’t rubber-stamp

When the grand jury refused to indict the members of Congress, they looked at the evidence the government provided with a healthy skepticism and spirit of objectivity and saw through the meritless, political prosecution.

Read more: Is it law enforcement or is it retribution?

While one of the most notable, this is just one example of a growing trend: The increasingly politicized Department of Justice is struggling to find grand juries willing to indict, including in cases against ordinary Americans.

There’s an old saying that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. But these “no bills,” or grand jury refusals to indict, are becoming increasingly common and proving to be a crucial guardrail against an authoritarian-captured Justice Department. In case after case, the abuses of power are so patently obvious: selective charges relying upon dubious interpretations of the law, targeting individuals for little more than exercising their constitutional rights to oppose administration policy. Ordinary citizens are refusing to go along.

Read more: Constitutional gatekeepers: The history and role of grand juries.

The growing trend of “no bills” proves that when everyday citizens exercise their independent judgment, they successfully prevent the law from being weaponized against the American people.

The Fulton County warrant that should alarm every judge

And then there’s the search warrant that was approved — and shouldn’t have been.

On Jan. 29, the FBI executed a search warrant at a Fulton County elections office, seizing all physical ballots from the 2020 election — absentee, provisional, in-person, emergency — along with tabulator tapes, ballot images, and voter rolls.

The recently unsealed affidavit reveals that the investigation originated from a referral by Kurt Olsen, a “Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity” and a figure with deep ties to efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

Read more: Trump’s elections Chimera.

The critical thing to understand about warrants is that in order to get one, you have to explain to a judge why you have “probable cause” to believe that a crime has been committed. In this application, the FBI claims to be investigating two crimes — a record keeping violation and a provision making it a crime to “knowingly and willfully” deprive the citizenry of a “free and impartially conducted election” by aiding in the registration of ineligible voters or casting or tabulating fraudulent ballots. Both crimes require evidence of intentional wrongdoing — something numerous independent investigations have ruled out and which the affidavit presents no evidence of. Consequently, the affidavit does not even come close to demonstrating probable cause for either alleged crime. (Former prosecutor Joyce Vance explains in greater detail here.)

In Georgia, federal officers seeking a warrant may not mislead the court by intentionally failing to represent contrary evidence which would undermine probable cause. Not only does the affidavit fail to mention the detailed investigations, hearings, litigation, reporting disproving these debunked conspiracies, it misrepresents the conclusions of sources cited in the affidavit itself, all of whom concluded there was no reason to believe there was any intentional wrongdoing in Fulton County and that the 2020 election was free and fair.

But a judge signed off on that warrant anyway. And in doing so, gave federal agents the power to seize an entire county’s election records based on the recycled claims of election deniers.

Grand juries have set the example for the rest of our legal system

In case after case, grand juries — panels of ordinary Americans with no special legal training — have been doing their jobs. They’ve looked at the Trump administration’s cases and seen them for what they are: baseless, politically motivated, and unworthy of prosecution.

Judges have to hold the line, too. So far, federal district court judges around the country have called out the government’s untrustworthiness and untruthfulness in court and blocked many of the administration’s unlawful abuses of power. But every judge has the same obligation to the Constitution, from the magistrate who granted the Fulton County warrant to the Supreme Court justices who serve as our democracy’s ultimate judicial authority.

Every judge reviewing a warrant application — or really considering any evidence or witness testimony — from this administration should approach it with the same healthy skepticism that grand juries have been applying. Not cynicism. Not partisanship. Just the baseline constitutional duty to honestly evaluate whether the government has actually met its burden.

The Fulton County warrant is what happens when that skepticism is absent. The grand jury “no bills” are what happens when it’s present.

The pulled Colbert interview shows that Trump’s media takeover is working

The late-night interview dominating the headlines this week is one that didn’t actually get broadcast on TV.

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico was set to appear on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Monday night. The interview was already recorded. And then, according to Colbert, CBS blocked it, citing concerns that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could find that airing it violated their “equal opportunities” policy.

Unlike the last time the FCC targeted a late-night show, it didn’t require a threat “right out of Goodfellas” from FCC Chair Brendan Carr to achieve the outcome the administration presumably wanted. There was no “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” because the administration is now reaping the benefits of a more subtle one-two punch strategy straight out of the Orbán playbook. By design, CBS chose the easy way and in doing so, supplied the administration with plausible deniability.

Read more: The FCC vs. the Constitution.

Here’s how the administration employed Orbán’s media takeover playbook.

Step 1: Because the FCC must approve the transfer of broadcast licenses, the administration had significant leverage over Paramount (CBS’ parent company) and Skydance when reviewing their proposed merger last year. The FCC used that leverage to impose significant policy changes, including commitments to make CBS’ coverage more “diverse” (i.e., friendlier to the administration) and install an ombudsman to monitor CBS for “bias.” Once the merger was approved, new owner David Ellison, a Trump ally and son of Trump megadonor Larry Ellison, installed Bari Weiss, a Trump-friendly journalist and political commentator, as CBS’ editor-in-chief — a hire that the president himself praised.

Step 2: Having extracted regime-friendly commitments from CBS, the administration continues flexing its regulatory muscles, indicating the FCC’s willingness to weaponize its authority against perceived critics of the president. Carr has often invoked the previously-seldom-used “news distortion” policy to intimidate broadcasters, including in his threats to ABC about Jimmy Kimmel last year. Carr now seems poised to use the FCC’s “equal opportunities” rule in much the same way. Earlier this month, he initiated an “equal opportunities” investigation of ABC’s The View based on its interview of Talarico, which CNN media reporter Brian Stelter cites as influencing CBS’ decision to preemptively pull Colbert’s interview of Talarico.

Read more: It’s time to take away Brendan Carr’s secret weapon.

CBS’ willingness to alter its coverage without being subject to any enforcement action (or even a threat of one) showcases the benefits for the administration of helping allies secure control of media companies and demanding more “balanced” coverage in return.

Another merger coming around the bend could put CNN under the same compliant ownership as CBS. CNN’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) seemed likely to accept Netflix’s bid to buy them until this week, when Netflix agreed to allow WBD to entertain negotiations with Paramount Skydance, the CBS parent company owned by the Trump-supporting Ellison family. On his Substack, Jonathan Alter reported that, according to his sources, the administration is planning to block Netflix from buying WBD, which could open the door for the Ellisons. If their bid succeeds, it would put CNN under the same leadership as CBS and further expand the Trump administration’s control over legacy media.

What else we’re tracking

• Yesterday, the Supreme Court struck down the president’s unilaterally imposed tariffs regime — a big win for the rule of law. In its 6-3 decision, the Court rejected the president’s claim imposing tariffs was a lawful exercise of his emergency powers. In case you missed it, when the Court heard arguments in the case, Ben spoke with Protect Democracy’s Ori Lev and Integrity Matters’ Audrey Roofeh to break down the law and the real world impacts of the tariffs.

• This week, Vox is rolling out a new feature series on American democracy after Trump. (Full disclosure: This series is supported by a Protect Democracy grant.) In the coming weeks, they’ll be publishing long-form pieces, uploading videos, and linking to podcasts here, drawing from lessons from abroad and charting a course to a more representative and resilient democracy.

• In The Bulwark, Nicholas Grossman makes “The case for being vigilant without panicking” as we confront threats to the upcoming Congressional elections: Trump can’t steal the midterms.

You’ve probably read or heard the words “immigration enforcement” hundreds of times in the last several months, used reflexively to describe the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE and Border Patrol to wage an assault on American communities.

When faced with an authoritarian takeover of a democratic society, the specific words we use to describe the authoritarian’s actions matter. Whether you’re a journalist for a national news organization or a concerned citizen with a social media account, there are other Americans who listen to you, and you have the power to help them reckon with the threat we face.

The power we all have in a democracy comes with a responsibility to choose our words carefully and ensure we are not carrying any water for the authoritarian coalition.

At this pivotal moment, we all have a responsibility to stop calling the Trump administration’s deployments of DHS forces to American cities “immigration enforcement” operations when they’re really violent crackdowns.

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It’s not (just) about immigration

While immigrants and Black and brown communities have been primarily impacted by aggressive and unlawful DHS tactics, we know these DHS deployments are not strictly about immigration, and immigrants are not the only ones who’ve been subject to brutal violence and harassment by government forces.

All the way back in October, a ProPublica investigation found that DHS forces had already detained more than 170 American citizens. And throughout last fall, numerous stories emerged about immigrants who were taken into custody while attending regular check-in meetings with immigration officials in an effort to stay on the right side of the law.

Read more: Arrested for following the law.

Despite Trump’s campaign rhetoric about focusing the administration’s deportation efforts on the “worst of the worst” immigrants who had convictions for violent or drug-related crimes, according to an internal DHS record, less than 14% of those deported in the first year of the second Trump administration had violent criminal backgrounds.

Numerous bystander videos (many highlighted in court rulings) show DHS agents pushing, shoving, tackling, and using chemical weapons against protesters and legal observers, from Chicago to Charlotte to Minneapolis.

Pair the actions of DHS officials with the words they use to describe their mission, and it becomes clear that the deployments are about intimidating and punishing certain communities, imposing extraordinary suffering on immigrants (many of whom have legal status) and U.S. citizens alike.

• In a video of DHS agents staging their terror campaign in Los Angeles, former Border Patrol commander-at-large Greg Bovino described the “orders all the way to the top”: “Everybody f—ing gets it if they touch you.” After telling the assembled agents that he was procuring “tractor trailers full” of nonlethal weapons like tear gas and rubber bullets, he added, when prompted by an officer, “This is our f—ing city!”

• In Chicago, Kristi Noem gave a “pep talk” to DHS agents before they attacked a peaceful protest outside the ICE facility in Broadview: “Today, when we leave here, we’re gonna go hard. We’re gonna hammer these guys.”

• In Minneapolis, DHS agents have threatened observers that they will suffer the same fate as Renee Good, who was shot and killed by DHS agents. Similarly, in Chicago, an agent drove by a combat veteran who was standing on the sidewalk observing a protest, pointed his handgun at him, and said, “Bang bang. You’re dead, liberal.”

These deployments are also operating in an intentionally theatrical way. Officials have reportedly been instructed to capture video footage for DHS social media posts, and groups of DHS agents have posed for photo shoots in cities where they’ve carried out these crackdowns. The administration is seeking to disseminate images that project DHS power and strike fear in everyday Americans. Serious immigration enforcement doesn’t require a massive investment in a propaganda apparatus, but intimidation does.

If there were any doubt remaining, the shooting deaths of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by DHS agents and the administration’s escalatory response confirmed that the intimidation and the suppression are the point.

Read more: Free speech, ICE, and free elections in 2026.

The administration attempted to justify the killings of the two Minnesota protestors by smearing them (and their fellow protesters) as “brainwashed,” part of a network of radicals, domestic terrorists, “agitators,” and “rioters,” intent on “doing maximum damage.” All simultaneously serving to form more pretext to come down harder on future dissenters.

And it all goes back to the upcoming midterm elections. Amanda Carpenter explains:

The attempts to brand dissent into “domestic terrorism” and make observers into “conspirators” are strategic smears to intimidate and silence those who challenge the president’s overreaches and ultimately, compete against those policies in future elections.

Those who wish to protect our elections must be firm: Free speech is the prerequisite for a free election. The Trump administration sees a dual purpose in deploying federal agents in such massive numbers to blue states and cities. Trump’s immigration crackdowns have morphed into free speech crackdowns, too.

And it’s definitely not enforcing the law

That brings us to “enforcement.”

When we say “enforcement,” that implies it’s about upholding our laws, when in fact this administration, including and especially ICE and Border Patrol, are acting lawlessly and expressing outright contempt for the law.

Last year, Ben Raderstorf wrote about the administration’s anti-legalism:

Anti-legalism is one of those trends that once you see, you can’t unsee it.

It’s a pattern that ties together almost all the Trump administration’s disparate actions — from the destruction of the East Wing and the apparent graft and bribery scandals, to the spending abuses and censorship campaigns, to the attempts to politicize previously apolitical institutions, like the Department of Justice and the military.

It’s not just that Trump and his administration routinely break the law. It’s that they seem to delight in doing so. That they are openly contemptuous of any suggestion of limits, guardrails, or rules. And when challenged on the law — by courts, by Congress, by civil servants, by national security leaders — they lash out with undisguised fury.

Vice President JD Vance and Stephen Miller, the president’s top advisor, have both wrongly asserted that DHS officials have “absolute immunity,” seemingly assuring agents that they can violate the law with impunity.

The administration’s anti-legalism is particularly on display in their hostility toward the judiciary and noncompliance with court orders.

In a new report for Politico, Kyle Cheney showed that:

[T]he Trump administration has slow-walked or outright defied judges’ orders demanding the release of people scooped up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at an increasingly rapid clip.

Last month, the George W. Bush-appointed chief federal judge in Minnesota, Patrick J. Schiltz, found that ICE alone had violated nearly 100 court orders.

In addition to noncompliance with rulings, the president and members of his administration have called judges “rogue” and “deranged,” investigated and threatened to prosecute them, and even characterized the executive branch’s relationship with the judiciary as a “war.”

Then there’s the president and his allies’ penchant for untruthfulness — even in court. Last fall, Protect Democracy and our partners brought litigation against DHS officials on behalf of journalists, clergy, and protestors who had been brutalized by DHS agents in Chicago for exercising their First Amendment rights. In her ruling, Judge Sara Ellis laid bare the overwhelming untrustworthiness and dishonesty of the Trump administration. Judge Ellis found that the government and its agents (including former Border Patrol chief Bovino) lied repeatedly in their testimony and filings before the Court.

Likewise, a new report from The New York Times reveals that prior to the DHS killings of Good and Pretti, four criminal prosecutions of people who were shot by DHS agents “fizzled after evidence emerged that contradicted the administration’s initial description of events. The charges were either dismissed or prosecutors dropped the case.” Numerous other criminal cases against protesters and observers have been dismissed by federal prosecutors or have ended in acquittal because of faulty evidence.

Of course, the excessive violence of DHS agents alone proves that their efforts are not legitimate attempts to enforce the law.

Telling agents they can violate the law with impunity, bucking court orders, threatening judges, lying in court, and the widespread use of violence against law-abiding members of the public are not the actions of a good faith effort to obey the law — let alone enforce it.

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Here’s how to talk about it

The term “immigration enforcement” is not only inaccurate, but it also enables the administration’s authoritarian abuses by helping insulate them from public backlash.

Referring to DHS deployments this way gives the casual observer the false impression that what’s happening is normal and a legitimate exercise of federal law enforcement to execute the administration’s immigration policy agenda. It inadvertently suggests that the essence of what DHS officers are doing is the hum-drum, routine business of administering the law and that the stories the public is hearing in the news about violence and intimidation are rare exceptions to the general rule. Yet we know the inverse is the reality. This phrasing falsely minimizes and marginalizes the brutality DHS is inflicting by implying that these efforts are principally focused on immigrants, or as the White House has characterized them, “criminal aliens,” — not law-abiding residents and citizens.

Euphemism doesn’t do us any good in this moment: We need clarity and specificity.

DHS isn’t doing “immigration enforcement.” These are DHS deployments to American neighborhoods. They are carrying out violent crackdowns.

Describe discrete DHS actions as what they are — unjustified uses of force, physical assaults, reckless violence against Americans peacefully exercising their rights, violations of court orders and long-standing protections for peaceful protest and assembly. Then, connect the dots. Expose the larger strategy: The goal is to intimidate Americans into silence, to prevent us from exercising our core First Amendment rights and participating fully in our democracy and to drive immigrants out of the country, whether or not they have legal status. To keep us from resisting the administration’s attempt to entrench itself in power, particularly during the upcoming midterm elections.

Here’s the good news: Public visibility into DHS’ conduct has shifted public opinion, which suggests that the American people are in fact open to changing their views about the legitimacy of DHS conduct when they’re presented with the truth.

The one thing all of us can do, starting right now, is refuse to lend even our words to the service of an authoritarian government. No permission structures. No sane-washing. No “immigration enforcement.”

Is Congress now back in the oversight business?

The early months of Trump’s return to power were marked by a complacent Congress: His nominees were almost all confirmed, there was little meaningful oversight, and virtually no effort by the opposition party to use its limited leverage to check him. It seems the tides may be turning.

As we’re seeing play out with ICE and Border Patrol, an unaccountable, unconstrained pseudo-military force is ripe for weaponization. That’s why it’s crucial, particularly ahead of the midterms, that Congress curb DHS abuses. And encouragingly, Democrats are unified in their pursuit to secure key constraints in exchange for funding ICE and Border Patrol.

But this is just one example of a newly reinvigorated legislative branch. Last night, six House Republicans voted with Democrats to block the president’s Canada tariffs, part of his signature economic policy. An increasingly skeptical Congress will have a chance to vote to repeal more of the administration’s unilaterally imposed tariffs in the coming weeks.

Congressional committees in both chambers have held tough oversight hearings this week to question key Trump administration officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi on the DOJ’s handling of the Epstein files, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on his ties to Epstein, and top DHS officials on their violent crackdowns in American communities.

Too many members of the president’s party continue to ignore their institutional responsibilities out of loyalty (or fear) toward him. But this week brought encouraging signs of a key check starting to wake up and do its job — perhaps inspired by the public’s growing rejection of autocratic abuses. We’ll need much more of that as the president works to further entrench himself in power.

What else we’re tracking

• Momentum continues to grow for state-level accountability measures for federal agents who violate citizens’ rights. This week, Protect Democracy’s Jane Bentrott testified in favor of Maryland’s version of a universal constitutional remedies law (UCRA), which Governor Wes Moore seemingly touted in his state of the state address. Also this week, Massachusetts lawmakers introduced their own version of the UCRA.

• Read Irina D. Manta for The UnPopulist on Czechoslovakia’s lesson for America: Lawyers are key to peacefully defeating authoritarianism.

• Grand juries are also key to defeating the retaliatory prosecutions that authoritarians use to intimidate and punish opponents. Former Minnesota prosecutors explain why in The Minnesota Star-Tribune. For more, check out our educational resource: Constitutional gatekeepers: The history and role of grand juries.

• And we’ve seen the importance of grand juries this week as the DOJ tried — but failed — to indict members of Congress for speaking out on national security issues. Likewise, a judge ruled in favor of Senator Mark Kelly, blocking DOD’s attempt to punish him for this protected speech. As we explained in our amicus brief on behalf of dozens of retired senior national security leaders, Judge Leon recognized that allowing DOD to punish veterans for exercising their First Amendment rights would “impoverish public debate on critical issues relating to our military and its role in domestic and foreign affairs.”

• A powerful story in The New York Times this week features a few of our plaintiffs in our challenge to ICE’s unlawful, widespread use of tear gas and pepper balls to quell protests in Portland, Oregon. Our plaintiffs offer courageous personal testimony, detailing the horrific physical and mental health harms of being repeatedly subjected to chemical weapons in their homes, which are directly across the street from an ICE facility.

Dear Civil Servant,

The Trump administration has finally delivered on one of its dark first-day promises to destroy the merit-based civil service: A new rule has officially created Schedule Policy/Career (or Schedule P/C, a revived Schedule F). As expected, the new rule wrongly claims that Congress intended for some rank-and-file career civil servants to become at-will employees.

As we’ve seen over the past year, erosion of civil service protections hurt us all by forcing out employees who follow the law, blow the whistle, voice concerns about agency direction, have different political views than those in power, and simply do their job professionally.

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This is not the system Congress created, and it is not the system the American people deserve. That’s why we are fighting it in court. Public attention is rightfully focused on this administration’s other attacks on the rule of law and basic decency. But this new regulation shows that the civil service’s independence remains under siege — at a time when we are seeing career civil servants increasingly willing to walk away or speak up when their red lines are crossed.

The administration continues to hide its destruction of the merit system of government behind a deluge of changes and long, technical language. The public should be able to understand these critical new government policies and their impact so we can have a voice in how our government runs.

That’s why, in addition to fighting the Schedule P/C rule in court, we are unveiling the Civil Service Archive: an online searchable database that tracks changes to how the federal workforce works. This newsletter contains an explainer on the new Schedule P/C Rule, but you can also view the new regulation on the Archive, where you will find its full text, a plain-language summary that breaks it down, and a list of related changes that can help contextualize what is happening. The Archive catalogues over a hundred policy changes like this, and more are being added on a rolling basis. Sign up here to receive updates about new content on the Archive.

Breaking down the new Schedule P/C rule

Here are the basics: The Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) creates employment protections for career civil servants, including a requirement that firing be only for cause. The law creates a carve-out from many of these protections for political appointees — what it describes as positions of a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” character — to allow presidents and agencies to employ a modest number of shorter-term employees who share their policy priorities and are at-will employees who can be fired for any reason.

This carve-out is part of the balance Congress struck in creating a web of protections for civil servants: Most must be insulated from partisan hiring and firing, but the president also has loyalists to help advance the agenda he was elected to pursue, at least when that can be done consistent with law. But the Schedule P/C rule will upend that carefully-constructed system by expanding the number of people subject to the whims of the president and being fired for partisan reasons.

Here’s what’s happening now: We are currently in a period of time when the new rule is published but not yet effective — which means that Schedule P/C doesn’t technically exist yet, and no positions have been reclassified. The rule will take effect on Sunday, March 8, and OPM has announced that an executive order (which will presumably be issued after March 8) will announce the positions that are reclassified as Schedule P/C positions. This means we still do not know which positions the administration wants to move into Schedule Policy/Career.

Here’s what we’re doing to fight back: Protect Democracy and our co-counsel at Selendy Gay are challenging the new rule in court with plaintiffs Government Accountability Project and NARFE. Other litigation against the rule is also pending. The litigation has been on hold while the rule has been pending. It will rev back up soon, and you’ll be hearing from us with more details before long.

The Civil Service Archive: the what and why

As you all know better than anyone, Schedule P/C is but one of the Trump administration’s many attacks on the civil service. To keep these attacks from getting buried and to be able to undo them when the day for rebuilding comes, we have built a new tool called the Civil Service Archive. The Archive captures each change to how the civil service works in order to educate the public and policymakers so they can understand those policies and to help spot trends or themes in what these changes do.

This first release focuses on government-wide policies or practices, including some changes that affect multiple agencies but not the entire government. We plan to release agency-specific updates on a rolling basis, as they are ready. We aim to be comprehensive, but this is a work-in-progress. Instead of waiting for perfection, we are choosing to make public what we have now, as we keep working to gather and process more information.

Sign up here to receive updates when new content is added to the Archive.

The Archive will never capture every little thing related in any way to the federal government, however. The site catalogues policy changes concerning the internal workings of the federal executive branch bureaucracy. This means it includes changes to how the work is carried out — not what the work is. This also means the Archive contains policies or practices, not individual events. However, when a specific event (for example, a firing or an indictment) seems to imply the existence of a policy that is not otherwise tracked, we have tried to include it.

How can I find what I need in the Archive?

Information in the Archive is searchable by tag (note that if you select multiple tags it will narrow, not expand, the search). Each new policy is available as a PDF to preserve it and linked to the web page where it originated when possible. If you click on an entry in the Archive, you will also see a plain language summary of the policy change (written by humans with expertise in the civil service — not AI).

You can find an FAQ with more information on here. If you want to make sure we’re aware of a publicly available policy or practice that you think belongs in the Archive, you can email info@civilservicearchive.org. If you’re thinking of a document that is confidential, classified, privileged, or otherwise protected by law against disclosure, please do not send it to us. Bear in mind that we are leanly staffed, so we unfortunately cannot respond to each communication.

Explore the Civil Service Archive

See also

• This “tracker of trackers” | U.C. San Diego

• Federal policy watch — Tracking how the Trump administration, Congress, and the courts are affecting workers’ quality of life | Economic Policy Institute

• Federal harms tracker: the cost to your government — Tracking employee reductions across federal agencies | Partnership for Public Service

• Worker policy watch — Tracking how federal policies are shaping workers’ rights—and what’s at stake for working people nationwide under the Trump administration | National Employment Project

What we’re reading

• The purged | Franklin Foer, The Atlantic

• 220,000 fewer workers: how Trump’s cuts affected every federal agency | Emily Badger, Francesca Paris, and Alicia Parlapiano, The New York Times

• Public service in America: a decade of danger and the choice to fix it | Isabella Ulloa and Abby André, Lawfare

• Rise of the Trump loyalist | Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic

This publication should not be construed as legal advice on any specific facts or circumstances. The contents are intended for general information and educational purposes only, and should not be relied on as if it were advice about a particular fact situation. The distribution of this publication is not intended to create, and receipt of it does not constitute, an attorney-client relationship with Protect Democracy. This publication also contains hypertext links to information created and maintained by other entities. Protect Democracy does not control or guarantee the accuracy or completeness of this outside information, nor is the inclusion of a link to be intended as an endorsement of those outside sites.

ICE wants protesters to know they’re being watched — and it has the technology to back it up.

In Minneapolis, ICE officers scanned protesters’ faces at demonstrations, then warned that the protesters were going to be added to a government database. In St. Paul, an agent photographed a vehicle’s license plate and used that information for intimidation — not just by addressing the legal observer by name, but by driving onto the street where she lives. In Maine, ICE officers showed up at an observer’s home and warned, “We know you live right here,” after an encounter at an elementary school bus stop.

Their message is clear: We know who you are. We know where you live. We’re watching.

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These aren’t isolated incidents. And while they are shocking, they tragically aren’t surprising. These examples are the byproduct of a federal law enforcement agency with dramatically expanded access to surveillance technology acting on behalf of a Trump administration that has decided constitutional rights are threats to be neutralized.

The playbook is familiar to anyone who has studied authoritarian regimes: Identify dissenters, make them visible to the state, and demonstrate that opposition has consequences. To be clear, the United States has a sordid history of surveilling activists, a history this administration is undeniably building upon. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has equated those protesting and observing ICE with terrorists, calling the filming of ICE operations a form of anti-ICE violence. Immigration officers are reportedly being directed to gather identifying information on anyone who films them.

But it’s not just the administration’s equating protesters to domestic threats that has led to the scenes we’re witnessing in Minnesota and Maine — it’s ICE’s expanding surveillance arsenal. Under the Trump administration, ICE has become the most well-funded law enforcement agency in the country, and it’s putting that funding to work to build a data collection apparatus to match. While ICE’s surveillance capabilities have grown under administrations led by Democrats and Republicans alike, what sets the second Trump presidency apart is its aggressive deployment of technology — supercharged by AI — to suppress constitutionally protected activities. ICE officers in the field currently have tools to identify protesters, map their associations, and find out where they live — all in real time.

As protesters across the country oppose ICE’s immigration crackdown and documented violence against immigrants and citizens alike, the agency is increasingly demonstrating a willingness to turn these tools against Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.

The function isn’t security. It’s suppression.

But we’re not powerless. ICE’s surveillance apparatus is in part reliant on access to state databases and local partnerships. Around the country, state and local communities are beginning to cut off some of those access points that are ripe for abuse (more on this below).

ICE’s surveillance arsenal

ICE’s toolkit for identifying and intimidating protesters includes a vast array of technologies, many of which remain shrouded in secrecy. But what we do know about how they’re being deployed against protesters is alarming.

Facial recognition technology: ICE officers in Minneapolis reportedly scanned protesters’ faces at the scene where Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents. Observers across the Twin Cities have reported that ICE agents are warning that they’re using “facial recognition” technology and photographing the faces of residents.

Contract records and internal ICE emails reveal the agency is using at least two facial recognition tools. The first is Mobile Fortify, an AI-enabled smartphone app ICE officers are using in the field to verify citizenship status and scan protesters’ faces. The second is Clearview AI, which signed a new contract with ICE in September to provide access to its massive database of facial images scraped from the internet — in part to investigate “assaults against law enforcement officers.”

Automated license plate readers (ALPRs): ICE agents eerily driving to the very St. Paul street where a legal observer lives may have been enabled by the weaponization of ALPRs. Companies like Flock Safety and Motorola Solutions operate cameras across the country that can be used to track vehicles’ location histories and identify their owners. Until recently, federal agencies, including ICE, had access to Flock’s national lookup tool, which aggregates data from thousands of local police departments using the company’s AI-enabled ALPRs. ICE has also begun using a smartphone app called Mobile Companion to scan license plates that’s integrated with Motorola Solutions’ ALPR network. The result: ICE can determine who protesters are, where they live, where they’ve been, and who they associate with.

ICE claims broad authority to deploy these tools, with DHS defining “violence” to encompass making and posting videos of agents in public — activities that ICE might then investigate as “assaults” despite generally being protected by the First Amendment. In a September presidential memorandum, the administration further named “anti-Americanism” and “extremism on migration, race, and gender” as potential motivations animating “violent conduct.” Essentially, any American who observes, protests, or records ICE operations can be subject to AI-powered surveillance.

Government data is expanding a panopticon

These surveillance tools all derive their power from data — including sensitive personal data that Americans have already entrusted to their government for entirely different purposes.

ICE has direct access to a range of data that states collect on their residents through the International Justice and Public Safety Network, more commonly known as Nlets, a data-sharing network for law enforcement agencies across the U.S. When ICE runs license plates through the Nlets system, for example, it can quickly gather sensitive personal information, including residential address, date of birth, physical characteristics, license plate, vehicle registration information, and facial photos (especially helpful for utilizing facial recognition technology).

As reported by 404 Media, Mobile Fortify integrates data from Nlets and several federal databases. And through the ALPRs described above, ICE can access data that is collected by local and state police for routine law enforcement.

This interconnected web of data creates a surveillance ecosystem where a single data point — a license plate, a face in a crowd — can unlock a comprehensive profile of an individual’s identity, location, and associations. And the reality is that government data enables much of (though not exclusively) this capability.

That is why, as we wrote last May, the Trump administration has been on a quest to centralize all forms of data collected by the government. ICE’s overreaching use of state and local law enforcement data fits the same pattern of systematically leveraging data collected for legitimate government purposes — tax compliance, benefit programs, routine policing — and repurposing it for surveillance and crackdowns without public notice or meaningful oversight.

As the agent of this administration, ICE wants us to believe that surveillance is inescapable. However, the tools that enable federal agents to identify and intimidate Americans engaged in First Amendment-protected activity depend in part on state data and local contracts. When communities put bottlenecks on the data supply, ICE’s surveillance apparatus weakens. ICE’s power isn’t absolute. It’s borrowed — and we can take our data back.

What you can do to stop it

Just as data provides the fuel for ICE’s advanced surveillance technology, so too does it provide leverage for opposition. From deep blue cities to red state legislatures, public pushback against ICE’s surveillance tactics is growing, and it’s working. The key is to reclaim power over our data.

Local and state governments are taking measures to curtail ICE’s weaponization of their constituents’ data to target and intimidate citizens and immigrants alike. Over 15 cities across at least 12 states have terminated or otherwise ended their contracts with surveillance giants like Flock Safety, which appears to have misled its customers about DHS’s access to customer data via their “national lookup” tool. Five states have severed ICE’s access to DMV data through Nlets.

Of course, none of these measures alone is a silver bullet. ICE undoubtedly will seek workarounds and loopholes to gain access to some of this data for unconstitutional purposes. But the reason these measures are powerful is that they provide openings to limit the surveillance machine. While they won’t deter a federal government bent on violating the First Amendment, they do slow and inhibit the weaponization of data against law-abiding citizens, buying time and space to engage in dissent.

Here are three ways you can help curtail ICE’s abusive applications of data and technology:

1. Keep ICE away from DMV data.

Many states provide ICE with unrestricted access to their DMV data through Nlets, allowing ICE agents to gather troves of information on individuals in the field — without a warrant — using only license plates. But some have already moved to change this.

Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Washington have already blocked ICE from accessing their DMV data via Nlets. New York has a clear law prohibiting motor vehicle offices from sharing information with ICE for civil immigration enforcement, while Massachusetts’ nondisclosure regulation came from its attorney general’s rulemaking. Minnesota has reportedly stopped sharing all motor vehicle data with ICE (even though its driver privacy law more narrowly restricts certain data sharing, specifically non-REAL ID data), and Oregon is reportedly taking a similar step to ensure its residents’ data is not available to ICE through Nlets without a legislative requirement to do so.

Encourage your state to join their ranks. Contact your state secretary of state’s office, governor’s office, and elected representatives to encourage them to take action to block ICE’s access to your DMV data through Nlets.

Use this email template to send a message in under two minutes.

2. Interrogate local connections to companies like Flock Safety and Motorola Solutions that have a history of sharing ALPR data with ICE.

Local pressure is driving cities to re-evaluate their data-sharing agreements or even terminate their contracts with ALPR companies like Flock Safety. In Flagstaff, Arizona, the City Council unanimously voted to cancel the city’s contract with Flock Safety following extensive outcry and activism from the community. And just last week, 700 people gathered on the plaza in front of Bloomington, Indiana’s city hall to protest the city’s contract with Flock Safety.

Equip your city council members or local sheriff with information on how ALPR data is being used by ICE. Show up to a town meeting, or consider requesting a one-on-one meeting to discuss your town’s ALPR contract.

Download this ALPR advocacy toolkit from the ACLU of Iowa to start a conversation with your city council.

3. Make the invisible visible.

Surveillance thrives in the shadows — and nothing busts shadows quite like a little sunlight. Shedding light on ICE’s surveillance technology and the data it runs on is a vital first step toward building the community power necessary to demand change.

Contact your local newspaper to pitch a story or letter to the editor to expose how your town’s tax dollars may be funding federal surveillance.

Check out the Atlas of Surveillance (a project by the Electronic Frontier Foundation) to see which ALPR technologies are currently deployed in your town. Use this resource to search for your town and select “automated license plate readers” to see results about which ALPR technologies are present in your community. Pair that information with the ACLU of PA’s Guide to writing an LTE to start the conversation.

There’s a three-headed monster heading for our elections.

The combined forces of the Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) are shaping up to be the Trump administration’s election subversion Chimera (that’s the fire-breathing lion-snake-goat hybrid creature from Greek mythology) in 2026. While the administration has flagrantly abused the federal government’s law enforcement powers from day one, in the past couple of weeks those abuses have become more explicitly about laying the groundwork for undermining elections.

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Think about it. In just the last two weeks:

• The attorney general of the United States told Minnesotans that the federal government would only withdraw DHS agents from their communities if the state turned over sensitive voter data to the DOJ.

• The director of national intelligence (DNI) and the FBI served a Fulton County, Georgia, elections office with a warrant for their voting equipment and records.

• The attorney general, DHS secretary, and DNI planned to appear before a gathering of secretaries of state in Washington, D.C. — likely to claim before the nation’s top election officials that our elections are rife with fraud — before backing out at the last minute.

• The president himself, building upon prior musings about “canceling” elections, twice openly expressed his desire to “take over” and “nationalize” elections, contra the Constitution.

The administration is showing its hand. We should pay attention. The 2026 midterms are already underway.

Weaponizing DOJ and DHS is all about elections

Here at If you can keep it, we’ve been warning since the start of President Trump’s second term about the increasing politicization and weaponization of federal law enforcement, exemplified by retaliatory prosecutions and lawless crackdowns in American cities.

Both are corrosive to the rule of law and liberal democracy in and of themselves, it’s true. But what has become increasingly clear is that these escalations are crucial components of the Trump administration’s effort to entrench itself in power ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Everything is about the elections.

The New York Times’ David French hypothesized how these entrenchment strategies may play out in his column this week:

Now, in October [2026], Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which rapidly expanded throughout the year, is running large-scale operations in Democratic-controlled cities. Hundreds if not thousands more American citizens have been caught in the dragnet. So have thousands of lawful residents.

…

As a result, nonwhite citizens are reluctant to go anywhere near ICE, and rumors of ICE conducting operations near polling stations spread like wildfire. Thousands upon thousands of citizens choose to stay home rather than risk arrest to vote.

During early voting, reports of citizens discovering they’re no longer on the voting rolls have multiplied. Most of them have Latin-, African- or Asian-sounding names. The voters named Smith or Jones have had no problems. But if you’re a Gonzalez or a Diallo, then you’ve been purged.

Meanwhile, the F.B.I. has raided several election offices in blue cities in swing states. Lawmakers in red states have moved to take over election administration in certain blue cities, citing the president’s raids and indictments as justification.

(Read the whole thing.)

These are not the paranoid fears of frequent Trump critics. The president’s long time adviser Steve Bannon said on his podcast Tuesday, “You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November.”

And Republican Senator Thom Tillis cautioned that stationing federal law enforcement at voting locations could “have a chilling effect on even U.S. citizens going to the polls because they don’t want to be detained and have to prove citizenship.”

The president and his allies are clearly setting up what will be the Next Big Lie: There is widespread non-citizen voting corrupting our elections. This will be the justification for DHS presence at the polls and baseless DOJ investigations that churn up “evidence” that will be used as a pretext to attempt to invalidate election results. Indeed, Bob Bauer warned yesterday, “[T]he DOJ may be quietly preparing to adjust its law enforcement guidelines to more closely align with Trump’s view that ‘nationalization’ is required to address widespread fraud.”

Along the way, the administration will seek at every turn to use law enforcement intimidation to attempt to scare protestors, journalists, and ultimately voters into silence. As we get closer to Election Day, the DOJ’s use of weaponized political prosecutions is likely to focus more and more on individuals and organizations who are involved in electoral politics and are viewed as political opponents.

Election deniers are in charge

Top administration officials are ready to use their agencies’ authorities to propagate the Next Big Lie, starting by bolstering the president’s false claims about the 2020 election.

Reportedly, DNI Tulsi Gabbard is the administration’s chief 2020 conspiracy investigator, which involved accompanying the FBI on their Fulton County raid at the president’s request, a government source told The New York Times. (The president is now claiming that Gabbard actually went at Attorney General Bondi’s “insistence.”) According to the Times’ reporting, Gabbard also played go-between between the president and the FBI agents that conducted the raid, arranging a phone call in which the president asked the agents questions and praised their work. Gabbard is steeped in election conspiracies and appears to be looking to curry favor with the president by being his election denial point person in the executive branch. As The Bulwark’s Will Sommer put it:

[Gabbard] is tasked with producing a report that could presumably be used to justify federal restrictions on this year’s midterm elections. Her mere presence there suggests that this “investigation” is headed in the maximally crazy direction.

There’s little doubt that this renewed push to prove the 2020 election was stolen serves primarily to further undermine Americans’ faith in our elections.

Having the power of DOJ, DHS, and ODNI at the tip of the spear is particularly dangerous because they’re charged with upholding the law and keeping all Americans safe. Whereas other agencies are limited to enacting regulations, levying civil fines, and withholding grants, the Chimera agencies can arrest people, prosecute them, spy on them, detain them, or otherwise muster government capabilities against Americans. When agencies are that powerful, it’s particularly essential that they operate in a way that adheres to law and builds trust. But what we’re seeing is the exact opposite of that. That’s all to say that there’s a reason these agencies make up Trump’s three-headed elections monster and not, say, the EPA, the Small Business Administration, and the Department of Education.

The election denier-in-chief himself isn’t slowing down. As part of his unconstitutional calls for “nationalizing” elections, the president suggested that there are 15 states in particular that the administration views as the worst offenders and whose election administration the federal government should take over. It’s not hard to imagine that the president might be thinking about the states with the most competitive Congressional races in November, which also conveniently include some of the president’s favorite blue state foils.

So while the DOJ-DHS-ODNI Chimera is emerging as the tip of the spear of the White House’s midterm subversion efforts, make no mistake: The orders come from the very top. And the administration will use every possible mechanism at its disposal to hold onto power. The past two weeks have made that clear.

How we push back

To be clear, much of what the administration is planning to do is already explicitly illegal. Courts have already ruled against many of the administration’s efforts to abuse power, and there will continue to be robust legal pushback against attempts to use federal law enforcement to interfere with the election. But litigation, while necessary, is unlikely to be sufficient.

It’s vital that state and local officials understand the ways in which the federal government might try to abuse power to interfere with the election and be prepared to refuse to cooperate and resist where they can. One example: As our colleagues Izzy Gray and Sara Chimene-Weiss wrote a couple of weeks ago, states should hold firm and refuse to comply with the federal government’s attempts to strongarm them into giving up their citizens’ private data. States must resist the administration’s efforts to gin up “evidence” in support of their election conspiracies.

Also at the state level, legislatures should pass universal constitutional remedies laws that give citizens more tools to pursue accountability when their rights are violated by federal agents, a solution that is gaining steam as bills have been introduced in nine states.

Giving people more tools to defend their rights can help neutralize the culture of fear and intimidation that the administration is seeking to create and keep the pro-democracy coalition on the field in 2026.

Congress must exercise its oversight powers and the power of the purse to reign in DHS abuses, including insisting that federal law enforcement not be used to interfere in elections. Progress is being made on this front too: Democrats have included restrictions on law enforcement presence near sensitive locations like polling places in their list of demands to fund DHS.

And of course, ordinary Americans can continue to use their voices to make it clear that we will not accept the administration’s attempt to rig our elections and take away our votes.

We know the administration will try to interfere with the 2026 elections by any means necessary. They’ve already put their plans in motion. But their success is by no means inevitable. Just like the mythological monster, so too can Trump’s elections Chimera be defeated.

The Washington Post falls victim to the Orbán playbook

This week, The Washington Post laid off 300 employees, a third of its staff. Shuttered or gutted are the Post’s tech, local, international, books, and sports beats. The cuts have left many media critics calling time of death on the once-revered institution.

Ultimately, the Post’s fate is the expected outcome of autocratic capture and the Orbán model of co-opting or sidelining independent media.

As our co-founder Ian Bassin wrote back in 2023,

[Autocratic capture is] a term we started using a few years ago to describe the phenomenon of authoritarian leaders trying to use the regulatory powers of the state to force private actors to toe a political line. If “state capture” or “regulatory capture” is the process of moneyed interests buying improper influence over government, “autocratic capture” is the opposite: government using its power to coerce political loyalty from moneyed interests.

In the Post’s case, owner Jeff Bezos has significant business interests beyond the paper toward which he wants favorable regulatory treatment from the Trump administration. Thus, his makeover of the editorial page to a more Trump-friendly point of view, ending political endorsements (because they would very likely have been of candidates who oppose Trump), and now gutting the newsroom can all be framed as shrewd (necessary, even) business decisions rather than ideologically-motivated surrender to authoritarianism.

Ben Raderstorf warned us about the coming threat to independent media before the 2024 election:

Democracy and autocracy are locked in an existential struggle in this country. By extension, that means the same is true of independent journalism and authoritarianism.

In the end, only one of the two will survive.

While The Washington Post has clearly fallen victim, that doesn’t mean the rest of our media (or our democracy) has to. What happened this week is a reminder that it’s more important than ever to support independent journalism.

What else we’re tracking

• Republican former election official (and former Protect Democracy client) Stephen Richer debunks the Next Big Lie about non-citizen voting: What’s really driving these bogus claims of voter fraud.

• “We call on people of faith to stand by your values and act as your conscience demands”: Read Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde and 153 Episcopal bishops on the moral crisis our country faces and how faith communities should respond.

• The New York Times editorial board has begun tracking 12 markers of democratic erosion in the U.S. As we warned in the Authoritarian Playbook for 2025, the Times finds this week that with the brutal DHS crackdowns against protestors in Minnesota, Trump’s stifling of dissent reaches a new level. In case you missed it, Amanda Carpenter wrote about this last month.

• Let’s not sportswash Trump’s authoritarianism: Protect Democracy’s Jon Steinman and Michael Angeloni for The Bulwark ahead of tonight’s opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics.