The Fall of Rome

This is a special post not part of the Democracy Papers that was written by members of the AltGov collective and sent to me for publication.

A quiet but deliberate restructuring of the federal government is underway, and the scale of the operation is staggering. While the headlines focus on the usual political drama, a well-coordinated effort is gutting the executive branch, seizing control of policy-making, and purging the federal workforce. This isn’t reform. It isn’t efficiency. It’s a hostile government takeover, consolidating power before the opposition can even organize.

Control Over Agencies and Executive Functions

The first major strike was against the agencies that serve as the nerve center of federal governance: the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the US Treasury Department. These agencies control personnel, budgets and financial oversight, which means those who run them dictate the machinery of government itself. With them under centralized control, every hiring decision, every expenditure, and every internal policy is dictated from the top. Any dissent will not be tolerated. Leadership is being replaced with ideological enforcers, forcing every department into compliance. Officials unwilling to comply are being removed, reassigned, or pressured into early retirement.

Meanwhile, the administration is monitoring and controlling major social and media platforms, ensuring that only the "approved version of reality" is seen by the public.

Legal and Bureaucratic Warfare

This transformation isn’t happening through normal legislative channels. Instead, it exploits presidential immunity and executive privilege to push legally questionable orders under the assumption that by the time courts catch up, the damage will be irreversible.

The playbook is really simple: act first, bury opposition in legal battles, and make sure the new system is too entrenched to reverse by the time a ruling comes down; a favored tactic used by authoritarian regimes throughout history. From Hitler’s Enabling Act of 1933, which legally dismantled Germany’s democratic structures under the guise of emergency powers, to Putin’s strategic use of legal loopholes to centralize control in Russia, the goal is always the same: overwhelm the system, weaponize bureaucracy, and make the shift to autocracy look like a slow, bureaucratic inevitability rather than a coup. The legal system itself is being manipulated too, cases are being routed through stacked courts and friendly judges, ensuring that even legally sound challenges are dead on arrival.

The Forced Reorganization: Flattening and Consolidation

This is not about making government more efficient though, it’s about eliminating oversight. Entire departments are being merged or dissolved, reducing accountability and concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands. Employees are being forced to justify their own existence in exhaustive “efficiency reviews” designed for one purpose: to create a paper trail that makes their firings look legitimate. Every task, project, and function is being quantified, not for performance improvements, but to provide cover for mass purges.

The result is a workforce conditioned to argue itself out of existence, allowing the administration to wipe out thousands of jobs under the guise of efficiency without legal barriers or resistance.

A Workplace Turned Surveillance State

This is more than just restructuring, it’s about creating a surveillance state. Employees are no longer just monitored for productivity. They are tracked, analyzed, and flagged for even the slightest deviation from expected behavior:

• Every keystroke logged.
• AI-driven compliance software scanning emails and chats for “risk indicators.”
• Real-time biometric tracking under the guise of “security updates.”

Meanwhile, frequent BIOS and security updates are being pushed beyond normal industry standards. IT anomalies—failed updates, system slowdowns, strange glitches—aren’t just bugs. They coincide with silent installations of monitoring software, forcing employees to unknowingly approve their own surveillance tools.

This is not paranoia. It is an engineered compliance system designed to detect, flag, and neutralize dissent before it can even begin.

The Forced Return to Office: A Weapon, Not a Policy

One of the biggest weapons in this strategy? The mandatory return to office.

Rather than productivity, this directive is about forcing a crisis. Many agencies do not have the physical space to accommodate their full workforce anymore, yet employees are being ordered to return anyway.

The intent to force an artificial space crisis is clear, by using the lack of office capacity as justification for mass dismissals they will purge employees unwilling to comply with the new order.

There is no “returning to normal.” This is a calculated mechanism to erase career officials who refuse to fall in line.

The Budgetary Power Grab

In parallel, the General Services Administration (GSA) has frozen all new leasing, acquisitions, and contract renewals. This ensures that agencies are starved of resources, which means office closures and budget reductions become “inevitable” and future administrations will have no infrastructure left to reverse course.

Where do these “savings” even go? Not back into public services. Instead, they are being funneled into a discretionary financial vehicle that will control government spending for decades, outside of congressional authority.

Overwhelming the System with Regulatory Whiplash

The sheer speed of change is a deliberate tactic. The administration is flooding the system with policy shifts faster than anyone can organize resistance.

• Federal land management is being rewritten to prioritize extraction industries.
• Labor protections are being quietly erased through executive orders.
• Entire legal frameworks are being rewritten on 10-to-15-day cycles, ensuring watchdogs and legal challengers can’t keep up.

By the time opposition reacts to one move, five more are already in effect.

Automation: The Next Phase of Control

The next step is all about automating control. AI-driven decision-making is replacing human oversight, ensuring that policies are enforced at the systems level.

Fewer human workers means fewer people questioning orders, while algorithmic “compliance monitoring” removes discretion from agency officials and ultimately dissenters will be flagged, isolated, and removed.

This is not government as we know it. This is government engineered into a self-sustaining system of control.

The Role of Public Perception: A Deliberate Fog

Why isn’t there more public outrage? Decades of anti-bureaucratic propaganda, from Reagan’s infamous "government is the problem" rhetoric to corporate-funded think tanks pushing deregulation, have primed the public to see this as "right-sizing" government, rather than gutting it. Conservative media has relentlessly framed federal workers as lazy and ineffective, while policies like the Holman Rule have laid the groundwork for mass firings disguised as efficiency measures. Meanwhile, the media downplays the consequences, reinforcing the illusion of normalcy. Opposition is being fragmented, distracted, and drowned in disinformation.

By the time the public realizes what’s happening, the damage will already be locked in place.

The Endgame: A Transformed Government

By midterm elections, the restructuring will be complete. The federal government as it once existed will be erased. Every safeguard, every check on power, every institution designed to serve the people will be either dismantled or absorbed into the executive’s grip. What remains will be unrecognizable—a shell of its former self, stripped of independence and fully weaponized for those who orchestrated its fall. In its place? A tightly controlled, executive-driven machine.

Regulatory agencies will be completely defanged. Budgetary authority fully centralized under the Executive. Workforce purges will be massive and completed.  Surveillance infrastructure will be installed and fully operational.

And by the time Americans feel the full weight of these changes, the window to undo them will have closed.

We Are at the Crossroads

This is not a drill. This is not a policy disagreement. This is the deliberate dismantling of democracy’s foundation. If we do not act now, if we do not resist with everything we have, the America we knew will cease to exist, and it will be replaced by a government built to serve only those who seized it.