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

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.

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.

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.

In the timely Star Wars spinoff Andor, the young rebel Karis Nemik writes, “Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle.”

This is the lesson of history. Authoritarianism is not new. It has appeared throughout human civilization. But we live in a largely free world today because of Nemik’s observation: Authoritarianism has been — at least historically — unstable. It has relied on imperfect information, fallible human enforcers, and coercive systems that strain under their own weight. And because of that brittleness, people have repeatedly been able to correct away from tyranny and toward freer, more democratic societies.

But what if that were to change?

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In his recent essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” leading AI lab Anthropic’s co-founder Dario Amodei opens with a different science-fiction reference: a scene from Carl Sagan’s Contact meant to illustrate a sobering idea — that societies capable of achieving immense technological power must also learn how to survive it.

Among the usual concerns of AI risk assessors that Amodei includes — human extinction, human subjugation to misaligned AI, mass unemployment — is a concern that needs far greater amplification and attention: the possibility that AI could undermine the historical dynamic Nemik describes. The very dynamic that has been democracy’s salvation. That AI could harden authority rather than expose it. That it could seal the cracks through which freedom has always eventually re-emerged.

In short, Amodei is warning that powerful artificial intelligence may be the first technology in human history capable of making authoritarianism permanent — not by violently overthrowing democracy but by eliminating the possibility of democratic reversal.

If that is correct (and, as Amodei acknowledges, there are still plenty of uncertainties that remain regarding both whether AI will achieve such advanced capabilities and the speed at which this occurs), we are not merely facing another technology policy challenge. We are approaching a civilizational threshold.

What’s more, while Amodei’s assessment largely looks to a future moment when AI has become powerful enough to be the equivalent of a “country of geniuses,” the harms caused by AI in the hands of authoritarians are all too real today. If we are to preserve the possibility of democratic reversal, we must act now.

Why authoritarianism has always failed

Authoritarian regimes have always appeared formidable from the outside. Yet their defining feature has been fragility.

They suffer from information problems. Fear distorts reporting; loyalty replaces truth. The “Dictator’s Trap” is that everyone around an authoritarian is afraid to deliver bad news and so provides him with misleading information that leads to overreach and error.

Authoritarians rely on human agents who hesitate, defect, or leak and who have capacity constraints by dint of their very humanity. They must tolerate inefficiencies and often breed and encourage corruption to maintain control.

And because repression is costly — politically, economically, and psychologically — it tends to provoke resistance, fracture elites, and invite external pressure.

Even the most brutal regimes of the twentieth century eventually broke. Fascist states collapsed under war. Communist regimes stagnated, splintered, or reformed. Military juntas gave way, sometimes suddenly, sometimes haltingly, to civilian rule.

The lesson is not that democracy is inevitable. It is that authoritarianism has never been able to fully close the loop. Something always leaked.

Amodei’s warning is that “powerful AI” could change this equation:

Current autocracies are limited in how repressive they can be by the need to have humans carry out their orders, and humans often have limits in how inhumane they are willing to be. But AI-enabled autocracies would not have such limits.

Authoritarian lock-in

Amodei identifies a convergence of sufficiently powerful AI-enabled capabilities that, taken together, threaten to eliminate the mechanisms through which authoritarian systems have historically failed:

• Total surveillance: Systems become capable of ingesting vast amounts of communication, movement, and behavioral data so that there’s no escaping or hiding from the controlling apparatus of the state. Resistance can be identified and rooted out before it can bear fruit.

• Personalized propaganda: Persuasion is optimized at the level of the individual, leveraging data on emotional states, social context, and psychological vulnerabilities collected by scraping data from digital (and potentially even real world) interactions. Individuals can be manipulated into consenting to giving up their freedom, rights, and willingness to dissent.

• Autonomous weapons: The state has the ability to enforce suppression at scale through automated tools capable of responding with full force to every transgression and every minor act of dissent or organizing — and to do so potentially autonomously and thus unconstrained by the capacity and accountability limits of human bureaucracies.

• Strategic mastery: With a “country of geniuses,” a leader or entity bent on power could strategically outmaneuver any not similarly equipped opposition, domestically or internationally, extending indefinitely the totality of their control.

Together, these capabilities point toward what can be described as authoritarian lock-in: a condition in which a regime does not merely suppress opposition but structurally prevents opposition or displacement from ever becoming effective.

The danger is that powerful AI could seal authority rather than strain it — closing the feedback loops through which societies have historically corrected themselves. Once these feedback loops are closed, the “adolescent” society never matures; it simply ossifies.

This concern differs in a significant way from concerns about human extinction or human subjugation at the hands of powerful AI. Whereas those concerns, however serious (and they are), are speculative and await the advancement of powerful AI, the concern about AI being used to empower authoritarian suppression is already here.

China is already using AI for facial recognition to track Uyghurs, for predictive policing to identify potential dissidents, for content moderation to suppress speech at scale. They are exporting this technology to other authoritarian regimes. And here in the U.S., the current administration is already implementing some of these tools.

The question that follows: What do we do about it?

Within the AI community and U.S. political community, there is already a dominant answer to this question.

Most leaders and thinkers closest to frontier AI — including Amodei himself — identify the primary danger as the possibility that China develops powerful AI first.

The reasoning is straightforward. China is already an authoritarian state. If it acquires powerful AI systems capable of total surveillance, predictive repression, and overwhelming strategic advantage, it would not merely entrench authoritarian rule at home. It could utilize its AI-enabled power advantage to extend its control abroad, potentially even achieving global hegemony under a totalitarian umbrella. Authoritarian lock-in, but without borders.

Fear of China’s global hegemony augmented by these tools often points to a single overriding imperative: The United States must beat China to the most powerful AI. The Trump White House has put it in those terms, declaring that “to remain the leading economic and military power, the United States must win the AI race.” On Capitol Hill, the message is even more explicit. Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz has argued that “the way to beat China in the AI race is to outrace them in innovation,” urging policymakers to “remove restraints” that slow development. And at hearings convened under the banner of “Winning the AI Race,” the framing is blunt: “America has to beat China in the AI race.”

Industry leaders echo the same logic: Microsoft President Brad Smith told lawmakers that the “number one factor” determining whether the U.S. or China “wins this race” is which technology is adopted globally, warning that “whoever gets there first will be difficult to supplant.” Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has repeatedly warned that AI leadership will shape the global order. The result, as the Washington Post describes, is a “near-consensus” among senior officials and top executives that the U.S. must let companies “move even faster” to maintain its edge over China.

It is for this reason that Amodei himself describes advanced chip export controls as among the most important interventions available to democratic governments. The underlying theory is clear: If AI is dangerous, it is far more dangerous in the hands of an authoritarian state than a democratic one.

This assessment has profoundly shaped the orientation of the U.S. AI ecosystem.

The perverse dynamic it creates

The China-first framing is not wrong. But it is dangerously incomplete.

If beating China to powerful AI is the overriding objective, the logical conclusion is speed at all costs. Minimize regulation, remove friction, treat guardrails as liabilities, and view caution as complacency. This logic pushes U.S. firms to race ahead, consolidate power, and resist democratic constraints — all in the name of preventing authoritarian lock-in abroad.

But that same logic leaves us exposed to a second, equally serious risk: authoritarian lock-in at home. Amodei himself recognizes this risk, though not specific to the U.S., in acknowledging that “a hard line” must be drawn “against AI abuses within democracies” with “limits to what we allow our governments to do with AI, so that they don’t seize power or repress their own people.”

Last year, one of us spoke with a founder of a leading AI lab. When we asked what worried them most, their answer was immediate: not China, but the possibility that extraordinarily powerful AI systems might come online while a leader with a deeply instrumental view of power controls the U.S. government.

This was not a partisan remark so much as a structural one. AI dramatically lowers the cost of surveillance, enforcement, and control. It centralizes authority. It weakens accountability. Those effects are dangerous in any system — but maximally so when wielded by leaders who already reject institutional constraints.

And as President Trump said just this week, “I don’t need guardrails. I don’t want guardrails. Guardrails would hurt us.”

The domestic authoritarian risk

The Trump administration largely accepts the China-first theory. It has embraced AI as a strategic asset and treated governance as an impediment to innovation. It has sought to remove guardrails in the name of competitiveness and national strength.

At the same time, our government is led by a president who has repeatedly demonstrated contempt for checks on his own power — attacking courts, undermining independent oversight, threatening political opponents, and praising strongman tactics. The administration has pursued expanded surveillance authorities, suppression of dissent, and consolidation of executive power — directionally aligned with the very risks Amodei warns about. Ironically given a strategy ostensibly grounded in concern about what China would do with powerful AI, Trump has praised Xi Jinping’s leadership style, calling him a “brilliant” leader for “control[ling] 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.”

The uncomfortable reality is this: The problem is not only which nation gets powerful AI first but who controls that nation when it arrives.

If AI hardens authority, then leaders tempted by authoritarian methods, whether in Beijing or Washington, pose a similar structural threat. If we have one quibble with Amodei’s essay, it’s that it seems to underplay this domestic risk, perhaps because naming it explicitly carries costs for an American company right now. But that itself underscores the problem. And so we’re taking one of Amodei’s pieces of advice (“the first step is … to simply tell the truth”) and naming that risk more explicitly here.

Political economy makes this worse

Layered on top of this dilemma is a brutal political economy problem.

Frontier AI development is extraordinarily capital intensive. Compute, data, and talent are concentrated in a handful of firms. Those firms command immense economic power — and increasingly, political influence.

As Amodei notes, AI is such a powerful economic and geopolitical prize that the risks of regulatory capture are intensified. Already, more than $100 million has been committed to an industry-backed super PAC committed to preventing regulation, and the pool of capital available to augment that is virtually bottomless. Democratic checks, already strained, risk being overwhelmed not just by urgency and fear of falling behind but by a huge campaign finance warchest.

The result is a convergence of concentrated private power and concentrated state power at precisely the moment democratic safeguards matter most.

Amodei acknowledges this problem but doesn’t offer a realistic proposal for solving it. If there’s a glaring failure in his essay, that is it.

The only durable solution

If AI can produce authoritarian lock-in, then preventing it requires more than choosing the “right” geopolitical winner or slowing development “slightly” (to use Amodei’s term) at the margins. It requires actively designing AI and its governance to advance democratic practices and values.

The only durable alternative is not merely to anticipate how AI may harm democracy and impose penalties for its abuses and harms. Instead, we must account for AI’s risks to democracy in its development and deployment while using it to affirmatively make democracy work better.

That means AI systems that increase transparency rather than secrecy; that strengthen accountability rather than weaken it; that distribute power rather than concentrate it; that help citizens understand, deliberate, and participate rather than manipulate or surveil them.

These goals must be built into the design choices being made regarding AI now, at the market level, the corporate level, and the governance level. They need attention, investment, and innovation – today.

From insight to institution: the AI for Democracy Action Lab

This recognition is why Protect Democracy launched the AI for Democracy Action Lab.

What is missing in the AI ecosystem is not analysis, white papers, or technical benchmarks, nor efforts focused on existential risk to humanity (though those are important too). What’s missing are institutions explicitly dedicated to defending democratic reversibility — the capacity of societies to correct course when power is abused. And getting there means building AI in a way that both anticipates and wards off the risks of authoritarian lock-in while advancing and improving democracy and democratic commitments.

When one of us spoke to another top executive at a frontier lab recently and asked about the tenor of conversations in their c-suite and lunchroom about how AI might shape the battle between democracy and authoritarianism, their answer was “what conversations?” While that might have been hyperbolic to make a point, it illustrated an imbalance that Amodei’s essay nobly strives to correct. We must invest far more attention and energy on the risk AI poses to democracy and democratic reversal.

That’s what the Lab is designed to do by focusing on three fronts:

1. Defending democracy from AI-enabled authoritarianism through litigation, regulatory measures, and effective governance.

2. Ensuring AI contributes to a healthy civic media ecosystem.

3. Harnessing AI to strengthen democracy by creating products that augment democratic practices.

This work is not only for civil society and government. It is the real challenge for AI companies themselves. For Anthropic and others who take Amodei’s warning seriously, avoiding authoritarian lock-in cannot be a secondary concern. It must be a design principle.

The choice before us

Nemik was right: Tyranny has always required constant effort. It has broken because it is brittle.

As Amodei argues, powerful AI threatens to eliminate tyranny’s inherent vulnerability. It threatens to seal authority, automate control, and make correction impossible.

But, crucially, today we are not simply awaiting the other shoe to drop. The AI of today is already redefining authoritarian capabilities inside and outside the U.S.

Whether AI will either make democratic governance more capable than it has ever been — or render it obsolete — will not be decided by the technology itself. That question will be decided by us as AI’s shapers and wielders. We are the determinative factor in whether action is taken before authoritarian lock-in becomes irreversible.

We have argued that the contest between democracy and authoritarianism is the test of our time, and it is now clear that one of the central fronts of that contest will be which side AI advantages.

It is up to us to get that right before it’s too late. The clock is already running.

Jerome Powell is an unlikely social media star. The current chairman of the Federal Reserve is a serious, silver-haired septuagenarian attorney and former investment banker who sees his role as an apolitical one. But this weekend Powell made a video statement that quickly went viral. (It has one million views on the Federal Reserve YouTube page alone, as of publication.)

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Powell’s less-than-two-minute statement is a stunningly clear indictment of the president’s thinly veiled attempt to weaponize the Justice Department against federal officials who don’t obey his every command:

This unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure.

This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress’s oversight role; the Fed through testimony and other public disclosures made every effort to keep Congress informed about the renovation project. Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.

This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions — or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.

To be sure, at first glance, a president demanding lower interest rates sounds like a populist win — who doesn’t want cheaper mortgages? And “Fed independence” seems like an abstract, stuffy tradition. The status quo certainly hasn’t been working for all Americans. But history and economics tell a grimmer story. The independence of economic policymaking isn’t an end in and of itself. Independent institutions create policies based on, as Powell put it, “what will serve the public,” not the personal preferences of politicians.

When autocrats control economic policymaking, the result isn’t a booming economy; it’s a broken one. And the people pay the price.

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Independent institutions guard against an economic sugar high

For politicians, the incentives will always be to run the economy hot and make short-sighted decisions that sound good to their citizens and boost their allies’ business opportunities.

Meanwhile, the bad economic consequences may not be immediate. It’s not clear that the stock market will, in the short term, punish Trump for nuking Fed independence. The economic damage of politicizing the central bank may temporarily be clouded by the economic sugar high of lower rates.

In fact, this delay — between politicization and its consequences — explains why Fed independence is so important. Politicians are often willing to risk long-term consequences for short-term gains. But someone has to focus on the long term.

Economic experts who are insulated from political pressures make decisions based on evidence and that prioritize stability. In the long run, these decisions result in better outcomes for citizens. As Georgetown University professor Andreas Kern wrote:

[A] large body of economic research makes it quite clear: Placing monetary policy into the hands of an independent central banker, who bases decisions on evidence and data instead of populist ideals, leads to lower inflation and greater economic stability – key ingredients of a strong economy.

This is precisely why independent economic policymaking institutions (especially independent central banks) have long been the norm here and in other modern democracies abroad.

In the past, American presidents — including Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and George H.W. Bush — have tried to influence the Fed’s decision making, and Lyndon Johnson even explored firing the Fed chair back in 1965. But President Trump’s attacks on Fed independence have been relentless. Beginning in his first term, Trump regularly criticized the Fed’s policymaking and referred to Powell as an “enemy,” “clueless,” and a “bonehead” because he was not cutting interest rates. Trump started exploring ways to remove Powell as chair back in 2019, just two years after Trump himself had nominated Powell for that post.

In his second term, Trump has doubled down on pressuring the Fed. In July, for example, Trump showed House Republicans the draft of a letter attempting to fire Powell. And in September, the DOJ opened an investigation into Fed Board of Governors member Lisa Cook as Trump unlawfully tried to remove her under the pretext of mortgage fraud allegations.

Beyond the Fed, the president has also expanded his scope to other important economic policymaking bodies. Most notably, the Federal Trade Commission: In April, the president illegally attempted to fire FTC Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause before the end of their Senate-confirmed terms.1

As Slaughter put it:

The Federal Trade Commission catches scammers, prevents monopolies, and stops landlords from padding your rent bill with junk fees. We make rules that require tech companies to protect children’s privacy online. We promote competition in the pharmaceutical industry to drive prices down. And we can do all of this because the FTC can’t be bought with campaign contributions or bullied by politicians.

A roadmap for two million percent inflation

Similar efforts by autocrats around the world have had disastrous consequences for the average citizen — including causing inflation to skyrocket.

• In Turkey, President Erdoğan’s insistence that high interest rates cause inflation (an economic flat-earth theory) led to the firing of multiple central bank governors. The result? A currency in freefall and inflation that peaked near 85%.

• In Argentina, a current MAGA fixation, decades of political interference in the central bank have turned a once-wealthy nation into a cautionary tale. The inflation rate at the end of last year was 31.5%, which represents the lowest year-end figure since 2017.

• In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez took control of the Central Bank in 2007. As economists feared, by 2014 Venezuela’s inflation was among the highest in the world, eventually reaching 2,000,000%. I’ll say it again: two million percent.

Trump’s push for lower interest rates has even been tried (and failed) here at home. President Richard Nixon famously bullied Fed Chair Arthur Burns into keeping rates low for the 1972 election. This shortsighted decision helped trigger a decade of “Stagflation” — high unemployment paired with spiraling prices — that took a brutal recession in the 1980s to fix.

Congressional oversight is crucial

Even if Trump fails in his head-on assault — if he is not successful in the unprecedented and unlawful removal of Powell, the current chair — the threat of a politicized Federal Reserve does not go away. Powell’s term as chairman expires in May (although he remains on the board until 2028). Trump gets to appoint his replacement.

This is where “checks and balances” becomes less a platitude about the novel design of American democracy and more the crucial safeguard between an autocrat hell-bent on dominating monetary policy and the American people, who will pay the ruinous price if the checks fail.

Any nominee for Fed chair must be approved by the Senate, where some Republicans have expressed concern about the president’s Fed power grabs.

Senator Thom Tillis, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, vowed to block any nominee for the Fed until the investigation is resolved, stating that “It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.”

And Senator Lisa Murkowski offered a strongly-worded rebuke:

[I]t’s clear the administration’s investigation is nothing more than an attempt at coercion… The stakes are too high to look the other way: if the Federal Reserve loses its independence, the stability of our markets and the broader economy will suffer.

Additionally, a bipartisan group of former Fed chairs and Treasury officials issued a forceful condemnation of the investigation against Powell. And more and more Republican members of Congress are expressing their opposition (to varying degrees of forcefulness).

It’s an encouraging sign that the investigation has drawn the ire of more than the typical crowd of Republican Trump critics. For the sake of the long-term strength of our economy, the Senate needs to exercise its oversight authority to block any future Fed nominees without a demonstrated commitment to independence. Otherwise, we may follow autocracies abroad down the road to ruin.

Track other retaliatory actions

Jerome Powell is only the latest retaliatory target of the Trump administration. Keep tabs on the others with our tracker here.

Today, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of young child.

According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, Good described herself on Instagram as a “poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN.”

Here is what your federal government, in an official statement, claimed happened1:

[R]ioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them — an act of domestic terrorism. An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers. The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased.

“Domestic terrorism.”

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Here are two stitched-together videos filmed by witnesses, as well as a third video taken from further away. Fair warning, they are disturbing. If you don’t want to watch, here are the two key frames:

Does that look like “terrorism” to you?

I will let you make your own conclusions — certainly I have mine — on whether or not the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is lying. (The Minneapolis mayor called their explanation “bullshit.”) But I think it’s safe to say in this case that no one should be taking their claims anywhere close to face value.

Almost as shocking as the brutality of this shooting is the sense of impunity, the reflexive and callous disregard for fact, reality, or consequences of their actions.

Under Trump, the government harms people and lies about it without consequences

This is not an isolated incident. The Trump administration, especially DHS, has a long history of brazen lies and falsehoods. When the people harmed have managed to get the federal government into court, these lies quickly fall apart.

For example, in the evidence and findings from CHC v. Noem, our lawsuit on behalf of protesters, clergy, and journalists in Chicago, Judge Ellis found over and over again that the government was outright lying. Key quotes from the 233-page opinion:

The government would have people believe instead that the Chicagoland area is in a vice hold of violence, ransacked by rioters and attacked by agitators. That simply is untrue. And the government’s own evidence in this case belies that assertion. After reviewing all of the evidence submitted and listening to the testimony, I find the defendants’ evidence simply not credible.

…

More tellingly, Defendant Bovino admitted that he lied. He admitted that he lied about whether a rock hit him before he deployed tear gas in Little Village. Videos of what happened in Little Village, even from the agents’ body-worn cameras and helicopter footage, do not match up with agents’ descriptions of the chaos that was going on. The number of protesters was about equal, if not less than, the number of agents gathered at the time that Defendant Bovino threw the tear gas canisters. In fact, when he threw the second one, the crowd was running back. And there was an apparent flash-bang grenade that agents tried to claim were fireworks that the crowd threw. That’s simply not true.

And yet your government lies to you, without hesitation or fear of consequence. Why?

Minnesota can and should close the legal loophole that helps protect the shooter from accountability

There’s a legal backstory that helps explain why DHS is, practically speaking, able to operate with such impunity. When the government — that is, the federal government — violates constitutional rights, it can be hard for citizens to get recourse, even through litigation.2

The reasons are legally complicated, but much of it comes down to a simple loophole. In our system, to sue the government for damages (i.e. compensation) after the fact, you need specific statutory permission, called a “cause of action.” This permission does exist at the state and local level. If your constitutional rights are violated by state or local officers, you can sue, after the fact, for damages under a federal law known as Section 1983.

That is to say, if this had been a Minneapolis police officer or Minnesota state trooper, the victims’ family could sue them retroactively for violating constitutional rights. This possibility of lawsuits is a significant part of how our society maintains accountability for state and local law enforcement. When officers know they could face lawsuits — as all local and state cops know well — they are much more likely to carefully follow the Constitution.

There is no such cause of action for federal officers, insulating them from accountability. (Courts used to provide an alternative known as a “Bivens” action, but the Supreme Court has recently largely choked off that pathway.)

This loophole in federal law, where victims or their families can sue local police, but not federal officers, for violating their constitutional rights is one of those frustrating legal realities of our system.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. And it also wouldn’t take federal legislation to close the loophole. Minnesota could, on its own, pass a law giving Minnesotans a cause of action to sue any and all government officials for violating their constitutional rights. This fix, generally known as a “universal constitutional remedies act” or a “converse-1983” cause of action is widely believed to be both effective and legal.3 It simply would close the loophole, through state law, and subject federal officers, including ICE, to the same standard legal liability that the vast majority of law enforcement in the United States currently operates under.

Minnesota would not be the first state to pursue this fix. Illinois just passed a similar law (though it’s narrow and limited to constitutional violations occurring during civil immigration enforcement), and legislators in California and New York are both quickly pursuing their own versions of a broader cause of action.

Governor Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey, and other Minnesota elected officials are understandably and rightfully outraged today. They should turn that outrage into action and pass a law to hold future ICE agents accountable and ensure this never happens again.

In fact, all states should do the same.

Three days ago, Donald Trump successfully deposed a head of state by force. Five years ago today, he tried and failed to do the same thing here in the United States.

I don’t want to over-interpret the parallels between the two putsches, one failed and one successful. Most obviously, Nicolás Maduro was himself a brutal dictator whose continued hold on power was illegitimate,1 while Joe Biden had recently been freely and fairly elected president by the American people. Together, though, the two events illuminate the core ethos of Donald Trump’s movement: that power alone should be what matters.

That the right to rule should belong to those willing and able to dominate others by force.

That might is right.

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Stephen Miller, Trump’s most powerful aide, told CNN’s Jake Tapper yesterday:

We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.

Miller was talking about the White House’s new threats to illegally seize and annex Greenland from Denmark, an act of war that could destroy NATO and risk military conflict with our longest-standing allies. The logic, though, explains the entire worldview animating the authoritarian faction. Power is self-justifying.

To believe that strength is an authority in itself — that the right to rule comes simply from the ability to seize it — is, it must be said, contrary to our country’s DNA. The U.S. was explicitly founded as a rejection of the unbroken line of monarchical rulers, stretching into antiquity. All of those kings’ authority rested on their ability to dominate others through strength, force, and power. We sought to assert the opposite, to be “a government of laws, not of men” as John Adams put it.

Read the Declaration of Independence again. (I recommend doing so regularly these days.)

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Emphasis on that key clause is mine.

Certainly, our country has struggled to live up to this founding ideal. That passage above excluded, explicitly, women and, implicitly at the time, people who weren’t white. We also have a long history of domination attempts and military coups abroad.

Through it all, though, the underlying ideal has always been the guiding principle. The north star to which our country aspires. Our Constitution was and remains a powerful assertion that might does not make right. That authority comes delegated, temporarily, from the people. And that the legitimacy of our rulers comes not from their ability to dominate the people, but rather from their acquiescence to the limited authority we the people have granted.

Every single president before Donald Trump respected (or at least claimed to respect) that principle.

If Trump and Miller get their way, if they tip the world back into the pre-democracy paradigm of raw power and conflict, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will die. In fact, we are already seeing the carnage. As Oona Hathaway writes:

Last year marked the 80th anniversary of the 1945 United Nations Charter, a document signed by 51 nations at the close of World War II. The signatories pledged to act “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The great powers have not gone to war with one another since, and no U.N. member state has disappeared as a result of conquest.

But over the past decade, that peace has begun to unravel. Today, it is on the precipice of collapsing altogether. If that happens, the consequences will be catastrophic. We can already see the devastating cost: According to my calculations, from 1989 to 2014, battle-related deaths from cross-border conflicts averaged less than 15,000 a year. Beginning in 2014, the average has risen to over 100,000 a year. As states increasingly disregard limits on the lawful use of force, this may be just the beginning of a deadly new era of conflict.

At the same time, just because Trump and Miller believe that might is right, that does not make it so. There is a paradox to this view of power, one that makes this administration much weaker than it would appear — or claim — to be.

As much as the president aspires to rule through the right of force, he still does not. The Jan. 6 coup failed. We have reason to believe that similar coup attempts in the future would also fail (at least for now). Trump does not, even today, hold the sort of arbitrary power that he sought five years ago. Trump is in office because he won the 2024 election, not because he used violent force to try to take the 2020 election. This administration’s authority is still entirely on loan from the American people. It is still an administration, not a regency or dictatorship. Its authority comes from law, not force. (One small example: Recent legal wins blocking the administration’s use of force, particularly in Chicago, prove this to still be true.)

Donald Trump may have returned to the White House, but the broader effort to turn democracy into dictatorship is far, far from complete.

The real struggle is still ahead. The most important story of 2026 will be who decides the makeup of Congress starting next year: Will it be the American people, through lawful and democratic means, as it has been for two and a half centuries? Or will it be the people currently in power imposing their will on the rest of us, regardless of how we would vote?

This will be a difficult process. The administration is almost certain to use federal power to attack the midterm elections with the same lawless enthusiasm as the strike on Caracas. Their tactics will likely include — but not be limited to — armed law enforcement, National Guard, and federal troops.

The coming assertion of might over law and elections will only fail if it is resisted by a broad coalition of people committed to the principles of the Constitution.

Our task, the moral struggle of our time, is the same as it was in 1776. To prove that the power of law is greater than the power of men. To maintain our most precious heritage handed down, uninterrupted, for 250 years: a form of government where might does not automatically convey legitimacy. Where the people, not the king, are sovereign.

This piece was co-published with the AI + Elections Clinic at Arizona State University. Follow them here.

What happens to elections if artificial intelligence manages to erase the boundary between fact and fiction? If it becomes ubiquitous in the operation of election administration systems? If it enables a new wave of cyberattacks?

Many of the “nightmare scenarios” for election threats now rightfully involve AI. Even as the most significant concerns have yet to come to pass, the potential for the technology to be used maliciously grows every election cycle.

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At the same time, like all technological changes, the risks of AI are easily overstated. Most likely, artificial intelligence is not introducing new categories of election threats. Instead, it is supercharging long-standing risks. Plus, with appropriate guardrails and human review, there are positive and salutary uses of AI in the elections context (more on those at the end).

Based on work by Protect Democracy and the AI + Elections Clinic at Arizona State University, we believe AI most clearly amplifies three existing risks to U.S. election administration:

1. The malicious spread of false information about elections.

2. Intentional cyberattacks (and other attacks) on election infrastructure.

3. Inadvertent mistakes, accidents, and errors in critical systems.

Threat one: False information

Generative AI provides malicious actors another tool for pushing false election information to voters at scale.

Deepfakes are poised to play a growing role in influencing future elections as ​​they become increasingly difficult to distinguish from human-generated content. Audio deepfakes, in particular, are already hard for humans to detect. Meanwhile, the launch of new video creation platforms in the last year has shown how AI-generated videos’ realism has rapidly improved and will only continue to do so over time. An early case from January 2024 was a deepfaked Joe Biden (“malarkey” and all) robocalling New Hampshire voters.

Read more: An AI-generated milestone in New Hampshire?

The 2024 election also saw coordinated Russian disinformation campaigns driven by deepfaked videos, and we have seen other troubling examples of deepfakes disrupting elections abroad. As AI makes it more difficult to tell what’s true and what’s false, bad actors will likely use every tool at their disposal to confuse and deceive voters.

Threat two: Attacks on election infrastructure

Election infrastructure (IT systems or databases, for example) has long been flagged as a potential target for bad actors, and that trend is likely to continue.

AI is already scaling up the sophistication of attacks on infrastructure that, before long, could include systems that keep electoral processes functioning. Just in November, Anthropic announced that it had detected what is potentially the first known cyberattack driven largely by autonomous “agentic” AI. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and phishing attacks are additional areas where bad actors can use AI to improve their attacks on infrastructure, either by crashing those systems or accessing the sensitive data within.

In short, a future where AI systems are capable of targeting election infrastructure more effectively than humans is now plausible.

Threat three: Unreliability

AI is simply not always reliable, and elections are an area where even mistakes caused by good intentions can have severe and far-reaching consequences. By its nature, the technology is probabilistic — some degree of randomness is built into how any LLM functions. Elections, however, have no room for error.

Take chatbots powered by learning language models: They’re now part of daily life for a huge number of Americans, yet both research and actual use cases show us why election information generated by AI tools always needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The wide reach of these systems increases the damage that could be caused by any of them inadvertently providing users with false election information. Learning from these cases, as AI continues to be incorporated into election administration itself (more on that below), officials should similarly be careful to always assume that AI is fallible just like any other tool.

AI tools have become more accessible than ever before, both in terms of financial cost and ease of use. That democratization of AI technology means it’s easier to create widely seen deepfakes reaching millions of voters, technical attacks on election infrastructure, and well-intentioned yet faulty outputs that can have devastating effects. How election officials and the public respond to all the ways AI can amplify election disruptions will help determine how damaging those disruptions are.

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AI’s benefits to election administration

But as the announcement of Protect Democracy’s AI and Democracy Action Lab noted a few weeks ago, AI has the power to both enhance our democracy and to erode it. Just as it is amplifying pre-existing threats to elections, AI can also potentially fortify effective election administration.

To the degree that AI can be used productively in an election context, it should likely be limited to:

1. Uses paired with human review before and after application: AI can add another set of “eyes” to an existing review process — but it must always be supported by careful human review at multiple points, including both before and after the AI’s usage.

2. Uses that only draw on publicly available data: Unless you are using a closed and controlled LLM or working with a secured government-grade LLM, such as Microsoft Copilot GCC or ChatGPT Gov, any election-related data entered into AI systems should come from publicly available sources, and any AI application should be completely firewalled from access to non-public data, like social security numbers.

3. Uses that leverage AI’s strengths, such as data synthesis: AI will add the most value for election administrators in processes that are time-consuming and challenging for humans, including tasks that require synthesizing many different sources of data or large amounts of data that humans cannot easily digest.

Even with careful selection of use cases, however, any use of AI retains some risk and election officials should carefully monitor outputs to minimize those risks.

Arizona State University’s AI + Elections Clinic has been working to identify transparent, safe, and effective AI use cases that election officials have already tested, while engaging with and finding ways to mitigate the risks that accompany any use of AI tools.

Two examples that meet the criteria described above:

First, AI holds promise for poll worker training. Poll workers are often temporary employees without election administration experience. Their trainers, on the other hand, are typically full-time election officials who live and breathe elections every day. It can be challenging for election officials to put themselves in the shoes of newcomers when designing poll worker training. Luckily, reframing content for a specific audience’s context and needs is something at which AI excels. Election officials can ask an AI assistant to adjust the language in their training materials to develop drafts tailored to poll workers’ level of experience, which officials then should carefully review to ensure their accuracy and nuance.

Read more about poll worker training materials and AI: Prompts in practice — Using AI to create poll worker training flashcards.

Second, AI could help predict turnout. Accurately predicting turnout for in-person voting can be a challenge for election officials. The number of people who show up at a poll site at a given time can be influenced by a huge range of factors like traffic, local events, and voter preferences.

Election officials must base their decisions around where to allocate staff, equipment, and other resources on the basics such as the number of registered voters in a precinct, and weighing this range of additional factors appropriately can be challenging. The consequences of inaccurate predictions are all too real: long lines of voters waiting to cast their ballots.

Given AI’s data analysis and pattern-recognizing capabilities, AI tools may be well-suited to support election officials in conducting the analysis to inform these predictions. Election officials can use AI to consider a wider range of specific, publicly available data sources to inform turnout forecasts. This could include reports from previous elections on turnout by precinct, reports of lines or other negative experiences in past elections, or announcements about construction or other nearby disruptions. To minimize risks, election officials should cross-check with the data sources they directed the AI to use and verify any findings.

Read more about election resource planning and AI: Using AI and simple math to leverage other tech and better predict election resource needs.

These examples differ from other possible applications of AI, such as with signature matching or voter list maintenance, where the repeated, granular decision-making involved makes checking AI outputs challenging and raises the risks of unseen errors leading to potentially catastrophic impact. They also focus on smaller yet critical background tasks in election officials’ workflows, rather than high-stakes public-facing processes like voter registration.

The AI + Elections Clinic will be holding a series of training sessions throughout 2026 to help election officials differentiate between these types of AI applications and implement AI tools responsibly, including in Los Angeles on February 12 and Phoenix on February 26.

We encourage any interested election officials to join. Email the Clinic here for inquiries about upcoming sessions.

American scientific integrity is under attack.

Funding cuts have halted critical research, staff reductions are limiting agencies’ ability to fulfill their missions, and political interference and widespread disinformation are eroding public trust in decades of peer-reviewed science and proven public health measures. When an entire sector — scientific research as a whole — faces such direct and harmful political interference, what can its members actually do?

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with more than 25 cancer scientists, virologists, epidemiologists, climate scientists, professors, environmental health experts, and public health officials to explore this question. Through those conversations it has become clear to me that the scientific community is facing a profound dilemma. For many scientists, objectivity isn’t just a value, it’s central to who they are. And while the scientific sector has long been connected to the political and policy worlds, many in this community never imagined themselves as political actors on such a hostile public stage. While some have begun courageously speaking out, others are keeping their heads down, hoping to weather the storm and avoid provoking further attacks.

The choice many scientists face at this moment feels impossible: stay quiet and risk seeing their work quietly dismantled, or speak out and risk losing everything to political retribution. It’s paralyzing. People are afraid that speaking out will politicize their reputation and their work.

That fear is understandable.

But as Abby Tighe, founder of the National Coalition for Public Health, recently reminded me, it’s built on a misconception. “Science and public health are inherently political,” she said.

Research priorities, funding decisions, and the direction of scientific inquiry are all shaped by policymakers, meaning the sector is always affected by political agendas. She went on:

We need to remember that while scientific research often intersects with politics, it does not have to be, and should not be, partisan. That distinction is crucial right now. The Trump administration has repeatedly undermined scientific independence, and over the past decade, partisan battle lines have been drawn around issues that were never controversial. We cannot allow basic goals, like safe communities, safe food, clean air and water, and strong scientific research, to be seen as partisan.

In an effort to appear neutral or objective, much of the scientific community is delaying action. In moments like this, delay becomes a concession.

Anticipatory obedience and the Authoritarian Playbook

As they try to “weather the storm,” many scientific institutions have been engaging in anticipatory obedience: self-censoring or complying with perceived threats before direct pressure appears. In this case, scientific leaders, trained in caution and consensus, believe that staying quiet will protect their work and institutions from political conflict.

We’ve seen this pattern play out repeatedly in countries where democracy has faltered.

Hungary under Viktor Orbán is a striking example. There, scientific institutes were stripped of autonomy and placed under political control, research priorities were redirected toward government-approved agendas, dissenting scholars lost funding, and entire departments were shuttered.

Orbán’s 2019 takeover of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ research network, followed by the “foundationization” of public universities, transferred institutional governance from independent bodies to political appointees. The Central European University, for example, was forced to relocate most of its programs to Vienna as further attacks on academic freedom took hold. Hungary, which was once home to some of the world’s most prestigious universities and scientific institutions, is now dominated by scientific bodies that largely validate government directives.

It’s no surprise that we’re seeing similar authoritarian tactics emerge in the United States. The goal is to control information so thoroughly that the administration becomes the sole arbiter of “truth’’ in ways that preserve power and advance a particular narrative and agenda. To achieve this, evidence is cast as suspect, questioning becomes risky, and silence feels safest. This climate of self-censorship is not accidental, it’s the intended outcome.

Around the world, there’s a clear pattern for how democratic decline tends to impact science and research. Here’s what we can expect to continue, according to the Authoritarian Playbook:

• Further politicization of independent institutions. Agencies like the CDC, NIH, and EPA are portrayed as partisan, undermining their authority and recasting evidence as ideological. Universities are coerced, and civil society is forced to assume institutional work, inadvertently granting the government legitimacy.

• Rampant disinformation. Attacks on vaccines, reproductive health, and climate science aim to undermine the public’s trust in established science and break the connection between the public and scientific professionals, replacing expertise with speculation.

• Mounting suppression of dissent. When scientists see colleagues punished or attacked, they internalize the message and stay silent.

To many outside of the sector, these attacks seem scattered (one targeting climate science, another LGBTQ+ research, another undermining vaccine access). But that fragmentation is part of the strategy.

Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists, put it clearly: “Make no mistake. This is a coordinated attack on scientific institutions across the country.”

The way out: collective action

This brings me back to that core dilemma. Science is not an apolitical enterprise sealed off from society; it is an independent one, and fiercely so. Great scientists, from Galileo to modern public-health leaders like Peter Hotez, have long understood that defending truth and scientific independence sometimes requires stepping into the public arena to confront organized misinformation.

The success of the authoritarian strategy to silence the scientific community depends on the community’s own compliance.

“Authoritarian regimes fear facts and evidence that threaten their power and agenda,” Gretchen Goldman told me. “That’s why they attack science they don’t like, and that’s why the scientific community must hold the line in response. We need independent scientific voices to stand united, speak truth to power, and ensure that essential science continues and truth prevails.”

It’s daunting, yes. But speaking out becomes far easier when your voice joins a choir. Christina Pagel, professor of operational research at University College London, recently put this beautifully: “We became scientists because we love science. That passion is empowering. Explaining why science matters can build solidarity and agency. The key thing is that you don’t have to do it alone.”

We’re already seeing courageous acts of collective action across the scientific community. Here are just a few examples from the past year:

• NIH employees came together to sign the Bethesda Declaration (nearly 33,000 signatures, including 69 Nobel laureates). When they faced retaliation, nonprofits like Stand up for Science and volunteer attorney networks provided support.

• Private funders provided bridge funding for recipients of terminated NSF education grants. Organizations like the Vaccine Integrity Project offered clear, evidence-based guidance when federal communication faltered.

• The Association of Science and Technology Centers published a guide for organizing community discussions. Protect Democracy partnered with the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Health Research Alliance to host educational conversations about authoritarian threats to prepare members to step up and take action.

I recently heard an infectious disease specialist say that courage is contagious. He then quickly corrected himself, saying courage was only “mildly contagious.” If that’s true, for America to maintain its leadership in the scientific sector, we all need to add our voices to the choir. That means calling out attacks on scientific integrity when we see them (Christina Pagel’s Action Tracker is a great resource for staying up to date) and urging our institutions and professional associations to take concrete steps to protect and elevate academic research and critical scientific thought.

This is an extraordinarily challenging moment.

Speaking out carries real risks: Reputations, research programs, and team funding can all be affected. It’s natural to feel exhausted, anxious, or concerned that raising your voice could jeopardize work communities rely on. But when scientific independence and integrity are under attack, defending science is not a political act; it is a professional obligation and a civic duty.

This holiday travel season, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been naughty or nice: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is tracking everyone’s travel.

Over Thanksgiving, ICE arrested and immediately deported a 19-year-old Dreamer flying home to surprise her family for the holiday.

Turns out that was only the start.

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As the New York Times reporter Hamed Aleaziz broke today: The Transportation Security Administration is providing passenger lists to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to identify and detain travelers subject to deportation orders (gift link).

Needless to say, it’s not just targets for deportation flying this holiday season. With this arrangement, ICE now has access to the flight information of every traveler who flies through an American airport.

The implications of this extend far beyond immigration enforcement. This represents a fundamental shift in how sensitive data is handled and risks undermining Americans’ constitutional right to privacy. Information collected for one essential purpose (airport security screening) is being repurposed for another (surveillance) without the checks and balances that protect against abuse.

A pattern of evading oversight

The TSA-ICE data-sharing arrangement is part of a broader pattern by this administration to access the sensitive data of Americans without following established legal guardrails. ICE has sought millions of tax records from the Internal Revenue Service. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has offered to match state voter lists against unreliable Social Security records in a baseless hunt for illegal votes. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is poking around in Medicaid records for information to send to DHS. And the Department of Agriculture is demanding states turn over to them five years’ worth of SNAP application data on millions of Americans.

In each case, agencies are leveraging data collected for legitimate governmental purposes — tax compliance, pensions, medical and food security benefits, and now airport security — and repurposing it for surveillance.

Privacy guardrails exist for a reason. When agencies can freely share data across purposes, it creates what privacy scholars call “function creep” — the gradual repurposing of data beyond the scope for which it was originally collected.

As the Times reported:

Airline passengers have long been subject to some federal scrutiny. Airlines typically provide passenger information to T.S.A. after a flight is reserved. That information is compared against national security databases, including the Terrorist Screening Dataset, which includes the names of individuals on a watch list of known or suspected terrorists.

But the T.S.A. previously did not get involved in domestic criminal or immigration matters, said one former agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue freely.

How we got here: A Privacy Act loophole

Under normal circumstances, when one federal agency shares millions of sensitive records with another agency, the Privacy Act of 1974 requires public disclosure through a System of Records Notice detailing what information is being shared, how it will be used, and what protections govern the data.

However, because Congress merged both ICE and TSA into the DHS in 2002, they’re treated as a single “agency” under the Privacy Act. No public notice appears to have been filed for this data-sharing arrangement, despite its scope affecting millions of travelers.

This is not how data governance should work in a democracy. TSA collects highly sensitive information — passenger names, travel dates, itineraries, and potentially much more — for the specific, essential purpose of screening passengers for aviation security threats. That doesn’t mean it should become an unbounded surveillance program for whatever ICE deems worthy of investigation.

An end-run around the airlines

What makes this particularly concerning is that it appears to be a deliberate workaround.

Earlier this year, ICE was purchasing similar passenger data from the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), a data consortium owned by major U.S. airlines. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had bought this same data, although ARC made CBP agree not to reveal the source of its information(!). When members of Congress raised concerns and called on airlines to end these contracts, ARC indicated it would discontinue the data-sharing program by the end of 2025.

ICE’s deal with TSA circumvents that congressional accountability.

Rather than working through airlines and with Congress, ICE simply found another path to the same data — one with even less transparency.

What’s needed: A privacy law for the 21st century

Our federal privacy laws should prevent ICE from snooping on our travel plans. But our woefully outdated laws are failing to prevent this sort of data sharing within agencies.

Several legislative proposals would help close these gaps. Last year, Senators Wyden, Merkley, Markey, and Van Hollen introduced the Privacy Act Modernization Act of 2025, which would strengthen disclosure requirements and limit function creep. In the House, Rep. Lori Trahan has been collecting proposals for Privacy Act improvements and is expected to introduce reform legislation.

These bills represent a starting point for ensuring that the data the government collects for one purpose isn’t automatically available for any other purpose the agency chooses. But to some degree, modernizing the Privacy Act only nibbles at the edges of what’s needed: substantive federal privacy protections that control what the government can do with our private information, not just the paperwork it has to fill out first.

In a democracy, that kind of check on executive power shouldn’t be controversial — it should be fundamental.

TSA and ICE may have valid reasons to coordinate on specific threats. But sweeping access to millions of travelers’ records should require clear legal authority, public transparency, and meaningful limits.

This isn’t about a false choice between security and privacy. It’s a choice between security that respects privacy and unbounded surveillance. Right now, we have the latter — and that should concern every American, regardless of their views on immigration enforcement.

This holiday season, it’s not just Santa Claus who is making a list and checking it twice.

When federal immigration agents deployed to Chicago this year, terrorizing families, detaining American citizens, and even literally rappelling from Black Hawk helicopters into apartment buildings, Chicagoans pushed back. And it worked.

The Trump administration has said it wants to use American cities as training grounds for the military. Federal forces are being deployed not to address emergencies, but to create images of chaos, suppress dissent, and condition Americans to get comfortable with masked men with guns marching through their own city’s streets.

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As New Orleanians and lawyers who have litigated to protect protesters, clergy, and the press from unconstitutional federal force in Illinois, we’ve seen up close what an effective response looks like. Chicagoans showed us that communities don’t have to accept this fate.

Here are three lessons that Chicago can teach New Orleans about how to effectively resist the incoming federal deployment.

Unity under a ‘big tent’

Chicago’s response was effective because ordinary people refused to be divided. While Governor JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson — far from political allies previously — were unified from the start, community resistance didn’t wait for permission from City Hall.

Faith leaders across the theological spectrum issued joint letters. Members of the clergy, including one of our clients, the Rev. David Black, literally put their bodies on the line in peaceful protest at the Broadview ICE facility and throughout Chicago. In September, federal agents shot Black seven times with chemical projectiles as he prayed. Business leaders also made the case that federal deployments harm workers and the local economy.

Coordination requires collaboration. Civic organizations created trusted channels for residents to communicate and document evidence of illegal actions, ensuring that when bad actors engaged with hostility towards the public, the community was watching.

This whole-of-society approach means that when federal forces arrive, they face not just rhetorical opposition but an organized infrastructure of accountability.

Show that the deployment is everyone’s problem

The most effective protests have been sustained, daily, and have drawn from a diverse cross-section of society. They include everyday people, elderly residents, and faith leaders. When one of our plaintiffs in Chicago, William Paulson, a white 67-year-old retired union painter, ended up on his hands and knees vomiting from tear gas exposure, it became impossible for the government to frame their violent actions as targeting only “antifa,” “outside agitators,” or some other bogeymen.

Chicago succeeded in part because a diverse set of residents experienced firsthand that militarized law enforcement threatens everyone. Federal agents don’t just disrupt the lives of undocumented immigrants; they terrorize neighborhoods daily, shut down streets where citizens move freely, and fill the air with chemical weapons near schools and homes. When journalists covering the story were hit with rubber bullets, when American citizens had their front doors blown up, the targets of these actions just didn’t fit the administration’s narrative of only going after the worst of the worst.

Quick legal action focused on accountability

Cases in California, Oregon, and Illinois demonstrated that rapid litigation creates accountability and constrains unconstitutional federal tactics.

In Illinois, we, along with our co-counsel, represented media organizations, clergy, and private citizens whose First Amendment rights to protest, pray, and observe were brutally violated by federal agents. But lawyers cannot litigate without evidence, and that evidence came directly from the community.

The legal victories had an impact. After a federal district court in Chicago issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting unwarranted uses of excessive force, indiscriminate use of chemical weapons, and retaliation against the press and protestors, Border Patrol’s agent in charge, Gregory Bovino, announced he was leaving the city. It was the footage captured by neighbors, the testimony of pastors, and the documentation by local journalists that allowed us to bring the government into court.

And while that order has been stayed pending appeal, the litigation has laid bare the brutality and extent of federal use of force, stripping the administration of its ability to deny what was happening on American streets and calling the government into court to answer for its actions.

Get ready, New Orleans

The Department of Homeland Security has announced that New Orleans is next and that agents may be operating in the Greater New Orleans area and across South Louisiana for months. Here are some lessons from other cities that New Orleans can use to protect its residents:

Before deployment happens, pre-bunk bogus federal justifications. The administration claims that its enforcement operation will target only those immigrants convicted of crimes. That is false. Every resident can do the work of truth-telling: Speak to your neighbors, your city council members, and your social circles to debunk that lie loudly and repeatedly.

Document federal abuses. The most damning evidence in Chicago’s litigation came from residents filming federal violence on their phones and sharing far and wide on platforms like TikTok, Reddit, X, and others. Treat this not just as social media content but as a shared civic duty.

Force the issue. When neighborhoods stand united to say, “We don’t need federal help,” it makes it impossible for the administration to claim they are here to “save” the city.

Keep it peaceful. Portland protesters used humor, showing up in costumes that successfully deflated federal attempts to portray them as threats. Nonviolent resistance from a broad cross-section of the community demonstrates that opposition comes from ordinary Americans defending their city, not from fringe agitators.

The path forward

What Chicago proved is that whole-of-society opposition works. When elected officials, police chiefs, faith leaders, business owners, and ordinary residents stand together to say “not in our city,” they model the kind of broad-based community-driven resistance that authoritarian movements cannot easily dismiss or overcome.

Americans have always known that the true guardians of our constitutional system aren’t found only in government. We’re being reminded that they’re in churches and newsrooms, on jury benches and city streets; anywhere people refuse to accept that militarized force is an appropriate response to the routine work of governing, working, and simply living in American cities.

Chicagoans showed us that refusal — sustained, strategic, and united — can turn these deployments from demonstrations of federal power into demonstrations of constitutional courage. New Orleanians can, too.

This piece was originally published in Verite News, a New Orleans-based nonprofit newsroom.

As the Trump administration deploys federal agents and troops to America’s streets, the president and other officials continue to paint a picture of a country under the constant threat of violent crime.

Before deploying the National Guard to Washington, D.C., Trump falsely claimed that the capital had a higher homicide rate than “the worst places on Earth.” He called Chicago a “hellhole” and the “worst and most dangerous city in the [w]orld, by far.” And he’s vowed to end “savagery” in Memphis and even crack down on what he’s mischaracterized as crime-ridden Beverly Hills.

Crime is real, and it affects Americans from all walks of life. Despite major improvements over the past thirty years, crime still shapes how we understand public safety and our personal security. Ignoring this reality only empowers those who exploit genuine concerns about crime to advance their own agendas.

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At the same time, crime is the autocrat’s favorite pretext for consolidating power. Around the world, they routinely use vague and hyperbolic claims of crime emergencies and the specter of chaos to justify power grabs — often bouncing from crisis to crisis until their demands for total power are met. Even in places where crime is a legitimate challenge, strongmen manufacture crises and stoke fear to centralize their authority and criminalize dissent altogether.

The White House is following the Orbán playbook

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has perfected the modern playbook for dismantling democracy from within. During a meeting at the White House earlier this month, Trump praised Orbán for the “fantastic job” he’s done as prime minister, claiming that “he’s got no crime, he’s got no problems” and making clear that he intends to emulate Orbán’s approach to crime.

Indeed, Orbán has deftly exploited public safety concerns to carry out sweeping expansions of executive power, including his takeover of Hungary’s parliament, judiciary, and media.

By 2015, Orbán seized on Europe’s migrant crisis to consolidate even greater power. His rubber-stamp parliament passed legislation enabling the government to declare a broad “state of migration emergency” which he then used as a tool for executive overreach.

As part of this “emergency,” one proposed law would have allowed police to enter the home of any Hungarian citizen without a warrant in order to track down refugees. But facing public backlash, the government stepped back from the idea — only to later push for a different proposal that empowered military personnel and state security forces to “restrict personal liberty” during the emergency.

Hungary, like many of its neighbors, did in fact face a sharp influx of migrants. But Orbán took advantage of the crisis to tighten his grip on power.1 And it’s not clear that he ever intended to actually address the challenge at hand. A decade later, the so-called “state of migration emergency” remains in effect and has mostly served to legitimize Orbán’s myriad power grabs by disguising them as necessary crime-fighting tactics.

Orbán has increasingly used the force of law and allegations of criminality to target his political opponents. Last year, he established the Sovereignty Protection Office to pursue what U.S. officials have described as “draconian actions” against government critics. And new legislation would essentially criminalize anyone (including political parties) that the government deems a “threat” to national sovereignty.

For fifteen years, Orbán has framed his power grabs as efforts to “restore order” and protect public safety. But all of his tough-on-crime talk rings especially hollow given the reported corruption and lawlessness of his own inner circle, as is often the case with leaders unbounded by the rule of law.

Left-wing populists also deploy law-and-order appeals to build power

Mexico’s former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO), adopted a similar approach, using crime as a justification for centralizing and expanding the power of the state.

When AMLO took office in 2018, previous governments had failed to adequately address the scourge of organized crime across the country. Voters were understandably frustrated by the continued violence.

Though AMLO previously condemned the militarization of Mexican society, he ultimately deployed more troops nationwide than his predecessors and pushed for the creation of a new, highly militarized National Guard. To facilitate his vision of expanded military power, AMLO ignored court orders and broadened the military’s functions beyond its traditional national security responsibilities.

Even as he boasted (inaccurately) that his policies put an end to organized crime, AMLO continued arguing for the further militarization of law enforcement. But during his six years in office, the military had a mixed track record as a crime-fighting force. In some jurisdictions, crime actually rose after the arrival of federal troops. AMLO’s strategy was less a genuine effort to improve public safety than a bid to consolidate law enforcement power.

Successful crime reduction is popular

El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele has weaponized the politics of crime even more effectively. Prior to his 2019 election as president, El Salvador endured years of gang violence and one of the world’s highest homicide rates.

Once in office, Bukele militarized law enforcement and co-opted the judiciary to carry out his tough-on-crime agenda. In turn, he’s presided over the swift erosion of El Salvador’s already-fragile democracy. Throughout his “war on gangs,” civil liberties and individual freedoms have gone by the wayside as the state deploys arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings to go after alleged lawbreakers.

Though many Salvadorans credit Bukele for prioritizing public safety, he has used real fears about crime to justify his opportunistic power grabs.

Bolstered by high approval ratings, Bukele continues to construct what some view as an ascendant authoritarian regime under the banner of fighting crime. The country’s co-opted Supreme Court allowed Bukele to run for reelection in 2024 despite a previous constitutional ban on presidents serving two consecutive terms. This year, loyal lawmakers went a step further by amending the constitution to eliminate term limits altogether — cementing Bukele’s highly personalized system largely on the back of his tough-on-crime agenda.

Strongmen use crime to justify crackdowns on dissent

Beyond building popularity, “fighting crime” is an especially useful pretext for autocrats to sideline those standing up for democracy.

From Xi Jinping’s efforts to criminalize pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong to Nicolás Maduro’s use of state security forces to crush his “criminal” opponents, crime is a throughline for strongmen seeking to hold onto power.

In Turkey, longtime leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has held democracy hostage by expanding executive power, jailing journalists, and doling out arbitrary punishments for members of the political opposition. And when pro-democracy movements gain momentum, as they have over the past year in Georgia and Serbia, autocrats tend to manufacture false narratives of criminal behavior to target those speaking out. In doing so, they distract from their own violations of the rule of law and delegitimize those who threaten their grip on power.

And when it comes to leaders who cynically take advantage of fears about crime, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Vladimir Putin.

Since his election as president in 2000, Putin has built on the old Soviet practice of weaponizing the law against the Kremlin’s opponents. When he entered office following the chaos of the 1990s, he immediately played on the public’s frustrations with crime to construct his authoritarian power apparatus.

Under the guise of protecting public safety and national security, a wily Putin used various crises to consolidate power. In the aftermath of the 2004 Beslan hostage crisis, for instance, he abolished direct elections for regional governors and placed them under Kremlin control. To justify his power grab, Putin argued that the continued popular election of governors would impede the state’s efforts to fight crime.2

Over the past decade, “extremism” has become the new frontier of Putin’s law-and-order crusade. The Kremlin uses the “extremist” label as a catch-all to criminalize civil society groups, political opponents, and anyone who stands in contrast to Putin’s authoritarian vision. And since launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Putin has escalated his tough-on-crime rhetoric and punitive crackdowns.

How to flip the script

Invoking crime is a tried-and-true vehicle for authoritarians who want to consolidate and hold onto power. These leaders are adept at capitalizing on chaos and fear for their own gain.

Here’s how we might use these lessons from abroad to think about countering the autocrat’s playbook on crime:

• Pro-democracy allies should beat the drum on how the autocrat’s punitive crackdowns leave everyone less safe — not only the immediate victims of autocratic abuses but all of us. Public safety can be a galvanizing issue for an opposition committed to the rule of law, equal protection, and effective governance.

• Where it’s clear that allegations of crime are either exaggerated or manufactured, speak out early to prevent the autocrat’s narrative from taking hold. It’s possible to both acknowledge the importance of combating actual crime and unequivocally reject the autocrat’s lies.

• The more effective that local leaders are in addressing legitimate public safety concerns from their constituents, the harder it becomes for the autocrat to exploit fears in service of their power grabs. When crime is, in fact, prevalent in a community and the public believes that local leaders aren’t taking it seriously, it’s easier for the autocrat’s pretextual justifications to take hold.

• It’s critical that the public not come to view the autocrat and his enablers as the only ones interested in and capable of keeping us safe. That’s how people might get more comfortable giving up freedoms for a false sense of security.

Even if public safety is a legitimate priority for voters — as it is in the U.S. — it’s clear that autocrats care more about consolidating their own power than keeping the people safe.

Their overreach and abusive actions often leave us more vulnerable in the end.

Last week, Congress ended the longest government shutdown in American history… with a deal that keeps the government open for about 10 weeks. In other words, we could be starting the same fight all over again as soon as late January.

If you’re starting to think that Congress is irredeemably broken, we get it.

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The simple fact is that right now, Congress is a disaster. Even before the shutdown, it was not doing its job — not passing laws, not solving problems, not serving the American people. For many years, the American people have disapproved of Congress, and Congress has earned their disapproval.

Worse, Congress’ dysfunction means it has essentially abdicated its central role in our constitutional system. Congress was intended to be the voice of the American people; it is the subject of Article One of our Constitution, and the ultimate check on abuses of power by the president (or the judiciary). Congress’ inability to function is a core reason why our country has become so vulnerable to abuses of executive authority.

But is Congress hopeless? We think not.

In fact, we have an idea for how to start fixing it, and we’re pretty sure it’s one you haven’t heard before. It doesn’t require amending the Constitution, waiting for a different president, or hoping for Democrats and Republicans to have some big epiphany and start working together again.

All it requires is for the two political parties to embrace their own internal divisions — a decision which could be in their electoral self-interest.

The two-party tug-of-war

At the heart of Congress’ dysfunction lies a familiar problem: our rigid two-party system.

The American people have all kinds of different views. We are liberals, conservatives, radicals, moderates — and many independent-minded people whose views defy easy categorization.

But our system forces us to choose sides in what has become an endless tug-of-war. Nearly everything one party is for, the other party is almost instinctively against. Every “win” for one party is viewed as a “loss” by the other.

And the current rules in Congress seem designed to escalate this two-party conflict.

In our modern-day Congress, party leaders have tight control over the legislative agenda, and they use that control to block bills that would divide their own members. In practice, this means that if half of the majority party opposes a bill — even a bill that would be widely supported by the rest of Congress — that bill doesn’t have a chance of even making it to a vote. On any given issue, the most extreme half of the ruling party can effectively block progress.

And that’s a major reason why we’ve experienced increasing conflict and gridlock.

Both parties have taken turns winning narrow control of Congress. But the insistence on party unity makes them beholden to their extremes and makes it extremely difficult for Congress to act. This kicks off a cycle:

1. Extreme-driven gridlock makes the opposition party even more frustrated, heightening the conflict and polarizing them toward the opposite extreme;

2. Growing polarization between the two parties narrows the margins of victory and makes gridlock even worse; and…

3. The cycle continues, as worse gridlock causes more polarization and greater conflict.

If you plot legislators’ voting patterns over time, as researchers have done, you can literally see this polarization cycle in action.

Eventually, this cycle risks tearing the country apart.

Unless we do something about it.

Read our full report: Democratize Congress.

The sub-party solution

How do we break through two-party gridlock without upending our entire system? By empowering the different groups within the existing parties.

The basic idea is this: In a system with only two rival groups, there’s very little reason for those groups to cooperate. But what if you informally divide those two into, say, four or six sub-groups? And you then give each of those groups some freedom to try to build a coalition around their ideas by negotiating with one another?

In short, if party leadership were to give up some measure of gatekeeping authority, they could diffuse two-party conflict, and free Congress to legislate through more complex and dynamic coalitions.

In this new arrangement, all the factions within Congress would have an opportunity to pass legislation. They may even feel some competitive pressure. It’s not as appealing to just keep yelling at your opponents if your peers are finding ways to work with them and get results.

We like to think about these smaller groups as “sub-parties.” There are already some distinct sub-party-esque groups in Congress, particularly in the House of Representatives, which contains Progressive Democrats, Freedom Caucus Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats, the Republican Governance Group, and others.

But these groups aren’t very visible to the American people, and more importantly, they don’t have any real opportunities to get things done. Almost anything they want to accomplish has to be channeled through party leadership — which usually means that it either gets sucked into the two-party vortex, or it ends with a divisive, party-line vote.

The Progressives may want to work with the Freedom Caucus to ban congressional stock trading; the center-right may be willing to work with the center-left on tariffs and trade or immigration. But there’s little point even trying when these proposals may never get a vote.

What we need is to change the rules to empower sub-parties and give them opportunities to access the legislative agenda. That will require creative changes to the current congressional rules. But if more members are given the chance to show genuine leadership, invest in new ideas, craft new coalitions, and put their proposals before Congress, members may gradually see less value in partisan warfare and more value in trying to get things done.

A democratized Congress could restore the popularity and effectiveness of our political parties

Right now, voters dislike both parties, and that unpopularity drags down their own candidates. Candidates often try to say “I’m a different kind of Democrat [or Republican],” but in a heavily national media environment, voters have difficulty distinguishing one kind of Democrat or Republican from another. There may well be districts that would elect a Republican who prioritizes healthcare or a Democrat who is pro-life or a candidate who is more to the left or the right of the one they’ve elected. But electing such unusual candidates has become a rare occurrence because the thing that speaks the loudest is the “D” or the “R” next to the person’s name.

Real, meaningful sub-parties could help voters understand the diversity of views in Congress. And that would allow the major parties to have their cake and eat it too. Their left and right-wing members could be unabashedly left and right-wing, their moderate members could be unabashedly moderate, and all without one side skewing the voters’ perception of the other.

A party that embraces its own divisions could win elections with an actual big tent coalition that better represents the American people.

The big question of course is whether party leadership will be willing to do that — willing to embrace the uncertainty of change, which often has winners and losers. But they should be asking themselves, “what exactly do we have to lose?”

No one likes the current system. The voters hate it. Members of Congress are leaving in record numbers. The leaders of the two parties themselves are constantly fighting an endless, thankless fight. Even when they win, the prize they receive is a job that is both temporary and extraordinarily difficult: herding cats so that an unpopular party can attempt to lead an even-more-unpopular institution.

Ironically, giving up a measure of authority could make it much more possible for them to leave a legacy of accomplishment.

And the beauty of the sub-party solution is that it faces fewer procedural hurdles than most other actions a congressional leader can take. It doesn’t require the president’s signature. It doesn’t need the approval of the Supreme Court. It doesn’t even require the House and the Senate to agree.

All it requires is for leaders in each chamber (or either) to be willing to make changes to their own rules — to recognize that the status quo isn’t working, and to have the courage to find a new way forward.

On Nov. 4, the richest man on earth inadvertently drew his followers’ attention to a little-known piece of American electoral heritage.

No, this wasn’t a ballot error. New York is one of the few places in the country that still gives multiple political parties the freedom to nominate the same candidate — a longstanding system known as fusion voting. (In this case, Democrat Zohran Mamdani and Republican Curtis Sliwa were each nominated by two different parties.)

It isn’t surprising that this system was unfamiliar to Musk — most Americans have never encountered it — but it is a little ironic. In the not-so-distant past, he tried to build a third party, the “America Party,” only to realize just how difficult it would be to mount a nationwide challenge to the two major parties in the United States. Even his riches aren’t enough to overcome the structural obstacles that keep us stuck in a two-party doom loop.

Despite those obstacles, many political scientists believe having more than two viable parties would be healthy for American democracy — and fusion voting may be the key to getting there.

While it may seem unfamiliar to those of us who don’t vote in New York or Connecticut, the truth is — fusion was commonplace across the country for much of our history. And returning to it now could forge a path to a more representative and effective democracy.

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Fusion voting shaped American democracy

Up until a century ago, fusion was common practice in elections throughout the U.S. When large groups of voters found themselves boxed out by the two-party system, fusion was the way that they mobilized to push for political change.

Prior to the Civil War, anti-slavery activists struggled to have real electoral or legislative impact in an era when both the Whig and Democratic parties resisted challenges to slavery. That was until they came together in the Free Soil Party, running their own candidates where they could win outright and cross-nominating candidates from the two major parties who were willing to take a stand on the issue.

A generation later, farmers and workers found themselves similarly marginalized by the lopsided and corrupt politics of the Gilded Age. They launched a new Populist Party (often called the People’s Party) that fused with Republicans in the South and with Democrats in the Midwest and West. They proved so successful that in some cases the major party in a state became the fusion user and simply adopted the Populist slate of candidates wholesale. The Populist movement pushed for reforms to election, education, and labor policies, just to name a few.

Unsurprisingly, the two major parties did not especially like the extra competition. In state after state, legislatures banned the practice of fusion.1

The problem is the two-party system

By banning fusion voting, the two major parties entrenched themselves in power — to the detriment of our democracy.

A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 53 percent of Americans do not think democracy is working, and 79 percent believe the country is facing a political crisis.

Americans say they are unhappy with the current system — especially our two major parties. 38 percent of American voters don’t think either party fights for people like them, and only about 20 percent of people who identify as Republicans or Democrats think their own party has “a lot of good ideas.”

The two-party system, combined with our winner-take-all system (in which the party or candidate that wins a plurality of votes wins total representation of the jurisdiction) and increased geographic sorting, has resulted in uncompetitive elections that offer only bad options for voters.

For too many voters, too much of the time, their options on the ballot are either a heavily favored candidate from one major party, a long-shot challenger from the other major party, and maybe — maybe — an option to waste their vote on a third-party candidate. In plenty of cases in local and state races especially, only one candidate from the locally-dominant party even bothers to run.

And voter dissatisfaction isn’t the only negative consequence for our democracy. The two-party, winner-take-all system disadvantages minority voices, stifles competition, exacerbates polarization, and escalates extremism.

Read more: How our electoral system shapes our politics.

Why fusion voting

Again, fusion is the system of allowing more than one party to nominate the same candidate, and those nominations all appear on the ballot. With fusion, voters can choose the candidate they prefer, but do so on the ballot line of the party that best matches their political views and values.

Fusion voting, in short, lets the voter vote for two things at once:

1. The candidate they find most acceptable (or least unacceptable) to represent them.

2. The party that most reflects their values and priorities.

Because the votes on each line are counted separately before being added together for a candidate’s total votes, elected officials know exactly how much of their support came from each party, giving minor parties real heft during policymaking and giving voters a way to demand more responsiveness from their representatives.

The impact that fusion voting could have on cracking open our party system is not theoretical — it’s part of American political history.

Read more: Fusion voting, explained.

Today, there is growing recognition that re-legalizing fusion voting would help to address some of the dysfunctions in our current politics. It would empower a wider range of voices to meaningfully participate in politics, create a pathway for moderates to help balance our party system against extremism, and provide a pathway back to engagement for Americans who feel disillusioned with our democracy.

Compounding benefits for democracy

Fusion voting is a relatively modest change to our electoral system that would create opportunities for a more representative and effective democracy. But its benefits could be even wider — opening up pathways to other significant reforms.

Experts have long pointed to adopting proportional representation as one of the most powerful changes that Americans could make to our democratic institutions. Proportional representation would make the government more representative of and responsive to its citizens and make it harder for authoritarians to co-opt the political system.

Read more: Proportional representation, explained.

While many Americans are open to the idea of proportional representation once they know what it is, the path towards reform isn’t always obvious.

That’s where fusion voting comes back into play.

When we look at other countries that have adopted proportional representation, there are many paths forward but a few prerequisites come up again and again — like widespread dissatisfaction with the current system or big disruptions that create clear reform windows. One common factor is a a break in the major parties’ hold over the political landscape — episodes in which minor parties or new political movements start to gain support. When the parties that dominate politics expect that they will continue to do so, they have no reason to embrace (or at least acquiesce to) calls for reform. They’re doing just fine with the current system, thank you very much. But when that changes, reform becomes more likely.

In the U.S. today, a major potential obstacle to large-scale reforms like proportional representation is just how entrenched the two-party system has become.

Americans are unhappy with the system, but that has not automatically translated into room for more voices. (Again, if even the world’s richest man can’t get a new party off the ground, the barriers must be pretty darn high.)

Fusion encourages the growth of new parties that can channel widespread dissatisfaction with our politics into a sustained demand for proportional representation. There are three main reasons why the types of parties that emerge through fusion voting could help move us towards proportional representation:

First, fusion advantages parties that are rooted in existing networks and communities. Unlike so many “outsider” third-party efforts in recent memory, fusion does not lend itself to organizing around celebrity candidates or one-off elections. Because the currency of fusion is votes and fusion parties need to distinguish themselves from the major parties in order to maximize support, they tend to grow out of or build on existing organizations or movements. The Free Soil Party built on the infrastructure of the abolitionist movement. The Populists grew out of the Farmers’ Alliances and the Knights of Labor. Fusion parties are typically not hollow in the ways that major parties today are. They have organizations and preexisting engaged constituencies — not just brands or negatively polarized political tribes.

Second, fusion parties have strong incentives to be responsive to voters and advance their supporters’ priority issues. Fusion parties have to reliably demonstrate that their nomination is valuable at election time, or candidates will not engage with them. That value comes from parties’ ability to build loyalty among their voters. That requires not just the ability to turn them out (see above about having actual organizational capacity) but the ability to deliver on policy promises. If voters don’t think fusion parties can be effective in influencing legislation, they won’t bother to vote on their ballot line.

Both historically and recently, fusion parties have had notable success in pushing major parties to advance their policy priorities — from the Conservative Party’s backing of fiscal policies in New York to the Working Families Party’s push for paid sick leave in Connecticut. Fusion parties do not just pop up at elections to help major parties and then disappear until the next cycle — they push for policy and legislative change.

Finally, fusion parties have proven to be remarkably strategically flexible. While fusing their support behind major party candidates is the main way these parties participate in elections, it is not their only move. Many fusion parties have built enough power to run their own candidates in at least some races — the Free Soilers and Populists did this a century ago, as have, occasionally, the Conservative and Working Families parties in recent years.

Americans are increasingly looking for ways to make democracy more representative, responsive, and resistant to authoritarianism. Re-legalizing fusion voting in more states would create room for more voices and help channel those desires into change.

Learn more about how fusion voting can lead to proportional representation.

November 11 is a day of reflection for those of us who served this country in uniform. We reflect on our reasons for joining the military, the places we deployed, the campaigns we participated in, and the friends we made (and, in some unfortunate cases, lost) along the way.

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Our paths to service were different — one as an enlisted sailor straight out of high school, the other as a Marine Corps officer following graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy — but our commitment to public service and dedication to the principles of our nation are ties that bind. And like nearly 16 million other veterans, we took an oath when we became members of the United States military.

It wasn’t an oath to a political party or individual leader. It was an oath to the Constitution, the document that created our democracy and outlined a set of values that makes our country worth fighting for. We served to defend our fellow citizens’ individual freedoms, to guard against tyranny at home or abroad, and to preserve that constitutional democracy.

On this Veterans Day, as the Trump administration seeks to widen military deployments across American communities, we are reminded of that oath and our sworn duty to the Constitution and to the American people — of our role as their military, not that of an individual or political faction.

Read more: Not his military.

As veterans, we are unsettled watching masked immigration agents snatching people away from their families without court hearings. We are disheartened when those agents are confused for military personnel. We reject the intent to use military personnel to provide a veil of legitimacy to these reprehensible actions. We cringe as we witness an administration that seeks to weaponize the military to further divide our society. Our troops signed up to help make Americans more safe, not to be used by civilian leadership to make them feel less safe.

They didn’t sign up to be gardeners, either.

Read more about deployments in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Memphis, and Chicago.

As veterans, we see the immense challenge facing those currently serving: They are legally bound to follow lawful orders to conduct missions they may fundamentally disagree with. And they’re being ordered to do so by civilian leaders who flaunt the rule of law and who have abandoned their own duties to those in uniform. But we also take real pride in seeing the ways that members of the military have bravely upheld their oaths to the Constitution even in such challenging circumstances.

We saw the oath in action with the retirement of Lieutenant General Joseph McGee, an Army officer who served as director for strategy, plans, and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. McGee had reportedly been raising concerns about the legality of the lethal boat strikes occurring in the Caribbean, off the coast of Venezuela, and in the Pacific Ocean in the Southern Command area of operations. These attacks have been conducted with questionable legal authorities, killed people who have not been charged with any crimes, and have so far claimed 67 lives.

McGee was forced out of the Pentagon for honoring his oath to the Constitution by questioning these extrajudicial uses of the military.

Our fellow veterans remember their oath too. In central Florida, veterans organized to push back against the intended deployment of active-duty Marines to support immigration enforcement operations, a mission that they are not trained to execute.

A coalition of retired general and flag officers met with the governor of Illinois to call out the “ongoing exploitation and politicization of America’s servicemembers and [the] unprecedented attempt to deploy the military into American cities.”

For veterans, our oath to the Constitution and all that it stands for does not end the day we leave active service.

Sometimes service members’ fealty to the Constitution rather than to political leaders shows up in small acts of professionalism.

In September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brought together hundreds of generals, admirals, and staff non-commissioned officers for a speech at Marine Base Quantico — an unprecedented gathering during peacetime. Hegseth was joined onstage by President Donald Trump, who gave a political speech before the professional military audience. While the political leaders appeared to have expected applause, they were met with a room full of straight-faced service members exuding the stoic neutrality that is expected of all members of an apolitical military.

Their professionalism was so forceful that it gave Trump pause. “I never walked into a room so silent before,” he said. “If you want to applaud, you applaud. You can do anything you want.”

Our military is a formidable fighting force, famous for victories in countless far-flung theaters of operation around the world.

As vets, we’re proud of our military’s achievements everyday, not just on Veterans Day. Our military members work hard to keep us all safe and stay ready to respond to any new threat to our security. But our military’s operational excellence — from combat operations to humanitarian assistance — should always be in service of the law. Not in tension against it. The oath matters. The rule of law is worth defending.

On this Veterans Day, we remember our oaths and what makes this country worth fighting for.

In the United States, the military is not used for domestic law enforcement. That’s a bedrock civic principle, one that separates our democracy from dictatorships around the world. Our troops serve to protect the American people from harm coming from abroad, not to police people at home.

Legally speaking, though, there is one glaring exception: The Insurrection Act.

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Enacted at the turn of the 19th century, the law allows a president to deploy the U.S. military domestically for “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy,” and permits those federal troops to directly perform civilian law enforcement actions like making arrests, detaining citizens, and enforcing court orders — normally barred under the Posse Comitatus Act. Unrest so severe it could topple the republic was hardly a fantasy at the time: The French Revolution was a fresh memory, as was the Whiskey Rebellion, and another war with the British was on the horizon.

This year’s National Guard and Marines deployments have been a mix of state deployments and federal missions under President Trump’s control. Because Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act, the federal troops he has directed to Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland have been subject to the Posse Comitatus Act and its strict limitations about how they can operate within the U.S. If the president invokes the Insurrection Act, however, troops under his command would be allowed to function as an extension of state or federal law enforcement.

Think of it this way: The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the federal government from using the military to enforce the law domestically except when the president invokes the Insurrection Act. The Insurrection Act has rarely been used, and only then in moments of real crisis. Lincoln used it to send troops into seceding states; Grant to put down Ku Klux Klan violence. Eisenhower and Kennedy invoked it to enforce desegregation in the South.

Today’s challenging political circumstances do not represent such a crisis.

Trump is creating fake emergencies as a pretext for his unconstitutional power grabs on a number of fronts. He has, incorrectly, claimed that the trade deficit constitutes an economic crisis that necessitates the novel use of emergency powers to implement a sweeping tariff regime, representing one of the largest tax hikes in our nation’s history. He has, wrongly, declared the country is being “invaded” by immigrants to activate war powers to detain people and send them to foreign prisons without due process. More recently, he issued an executive order to tag members of his political opposition as “terrorists” without merit. And now he is frequently toying with the notion of invoking Insurrection Act powers without any concrete purpose at all, save, perhaps, to continue and expand the deployment of National Guard and other military personnel in communities around the country — under the vague pretext of combating crime and facilitating DHS immigration operations.

Read more: Eight things to know about the National Guard in Washington D.C.

While invocation would represent an egregious abuse of the military and executive powers, it is important to remember our democracy can nonetheless withstand such an event. Despite what Trump says, the Insurrection Act does not give the administration unconstrained, dictatorial powers.

Here’s what the Insurrection Act does and doesn’t do.

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What the Insurrection Act allows: Military engagement in civilian law enforcement on U.S. soil

Invocation of the Insurrection Act allows the president to deploy troops to directly and openly participate in law enforcement — an escalation from the more limited, supportive role that the troops currently deployed around the country are performing. However, this authority is conditioned on the existence of extraordinary circumstances (i.e., an actual “insurrection”) that prevent local and state authorities from executing the law and protecting constitutional rights.

In other words, Trump invoking the Insurrection Act could very well be illegal and struck down by the courts.1

Setting aside the ultimate questions of legality, though, invocation of the Insurrection Act would likely carry at least some of the following consequences:

• More active-duty troops pulled away from critical national security roles around the world. Instead, they could be redeployed to serve as a political show of force on American streets.

• Expanded attempts to use soldiers and military infrastructure and equipment for direct law enforcement roles — like making arrests or policing protests.

• Higher risk of violent incidents. Without the rigorous and ongoing training, there is an increased likelihood of tragic accidents and violence. Earlier this year, a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected All-Terrain Vehicle collided with a “civilian vehicle” on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

• Danger of unlawful intimidation and violations of constitutional rights. Armed soldiers patrolling the streets and confronting protesters would discourage dissent and chill free speech for all of us. The intimidation is the whole point. (Whether or not they would succeed is a different question.)

• Decreased trust in the institution of the military. Already, Donald Trump’s political machinations have shaken the country’s faith in an institution that has historically commanded wide respect. This would make that problem much, much worse.

• Loss of morale and unit cohesion across the armed forces. American soldiers understand the political agenda being pushed by the White House in trying to deploy soldiers domestically. Demoralization over being used as a political prop will likely ripple through the armed forces, as well as harm future recruiting and retention.

What the Insurrection Act does not allow: License to break the law or violate the Constitution

The Insurrection Act is not a carte blanche to deploy troops against U.S. citizens.

It cannot be lawfully invoked to respond to Americans peacefully exercising their constitutional rights. Nor does it impose martial law, disrupt the role of courts to administer the law, suspend civil liberties, or give the president the authority to interfere in elections. If it did any of those things, it would amount to a self-destruct button on the Constitution. It is not that.

Instead, soldiers deployed domestically under the Insurrection Act — including if redirected to law enforcement roles — would still be required to follow the law and relevant regulations on the use of force. Military personnel swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. And the past few months have put on clear display how seriously our service members take this duty: Public reporting has uncovered a tiny number of incidents of alleged misconduct amidst thousands of deployed National Guard troops, despite deliberate efforts by the administration to stoke tensions in the affected communities. Contrast this with DHS personnel — ICE and CBP, in particular — whose reported allegations of illegal detentions and excessive force grow by the day.

There are also several key constraints that federal courts have already imposed (or would be likely to impose) on the administration:

• First, courts might block an unlawful invocation. As noted above, even a deferential judiciary could enjoin the president’s abuse of these authorities if the pretext and bad faith are obvious enough. (For more on the possible legal issues, see our paper on the topic: Legal Challenges to an Invocation of the Insurrection Act.)

• Second, even if an invocation stands, expect courts to continue to closely scrutinize the behavior of troops once deployed. Right now, courts across the country are carefully evaluating both National Guard deployments and the activities of federal law enforcement agencies. This sort of litigation — including our lawsuit on behalf of protesters and the press in Chicago — would continue even if the president attempts to throw the Insurrection Act into the fray.

• Finally, any unconstitutional behavior or violation of individual rights will still be illegal. Military personnel do not have special powers to violate rights and must follow the same domestic laws and rules as ICE, CBP, or local law enforcement, as well as adhere to military law. Soldiers and commanders alike can potentially face consequences for breaking the law.

Deployments are unpopular — and generate opposition

When Trump considered invoking the Insurrection Act in 2020 during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, many high-ranking members of America’s military leadership spoke out against such measures, including senior leaders who served under Trump like Gen. (ret.) James Mattis, the former defense secretary, and Gen. (ret.) John Kelly, the former White House chief of staff.

Similarly, Senate Republicans and governors, such as Oklahoma’s Gov. Kevin Stitt and Vermont’s Gov. Phil Scott, have already criticized Trump’s deployment of troops onto American streets to fight crime or support law enforcement.

More generally, domestic military deployments are already extremely unpopular.

And that’s not just among voters in blue states and cities.

A Gallup poll in early October found that roughly six in 10 Americans oppose the use of the military or National Guard to combat crime in cities.

We also conducted our own poll in October to gauge public opinion in communities not (yet) directly affected by National Guard deployments. In a survey of 600 likely voters in Iowa, here’s what we found:

• 63 percent of Iowans believe the recent military and National Guard deployments are dividing Americans.

• 69 percent of Iowa voters believe it would be better to increase funding for local law enforcement rather than spending huge sums of taxpayer money on military deployments.

• 63 percent of voters surveyed said that governors are in command of states’ National Guards and a president deploying them over a governor’s wishes undermines states’ rights and the Constitution’s separation of powers.

• 50 percent of Iowans believe that President Trump’s deployment of military and National Guard to Democratic-run cities is a political stunt.

• Over 20 percent of Iowa Republicans oppose the latest federal deployments of the National Guard.

See full poll results here.

Now imagine Trump using the Insurrection Act to put soldiers on the streets of Des Moines or Dubuque? The administration’s actions are already unpopular even though neither local Guardsmen nor civilians have had to deal with the hassles and dangers of the recent deployments.

To be sure, invocation of the Insurrection Act would represent a dramatic intensification of an already troubling set of circumstances. The law is vague and too broadly written — and in great need of reform — but it is not a free pass for President Trump or members of the military to violate our constitutional rights.