With the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team on dubious legal footing, congressional Republicans are quietly inching forward legislation to grant President Donald Trump new, lawful powers for razing the federal government: the unprecedented ability to propose to Congress, under reorganization authority, the abolition of executive departments, independent regulatory agencies, and all statutory programs in either.
If enacted, the legislation would let Trump recommend that simple majorities in Congress bless any fatal finishing move of his on the already–gutted Education Department, any other Cabinet-level department, or any executive agency, including independent regulatory agencies — such as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Federal Communications Commission, and Federal Reserve — designed to serve congressional interests and whose heads have codified protections, albeit flagging, against at-whim firing.
Legal experts tell Rolling Stone the Reorganizing Government Act would empower the president to ask Congress to approve, on a fast track, reorganization plans altering or eliminating how the executive carries out laws passed by Congress, effectively neutralizing, say, any or all civil rights laws, environmental laws, or fill in the blank.
The Trump administration has already moved to impair or abolish several agencies, starting with the U.S. Agency for International Development, whose scraps have been folded into the State Department. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to “to close the federal Department of Education,” and as president, he’s attempted to dismantle it via executive order. His administration has fired heads of independent regulatory agencies, now under litigation. Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, head of the key White House agency for executive-led reorganizations, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has long targeted entire statutory programs — housing vouchers, student loans — for elimination.
The very–little–noticed “Reorganizing Government Act,” introduced by Republicans in both the House and Senate, would allow Trump to do the work of DOGE on steroids — and with the statutory backing from Congress that federal judges have stated he needs.
It would give Trump far more authority than any previous president has ever enjoyed — with the partial exception of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression — to recommend Congress approve wide-ranging restructurings of the executive branch and, possibly, of even more entities inside the wider executive establishment.
The slowly-moving legislation would resurrect and amend the congressionally granted presidential reorganization authority that expired in 1984, allowing Trump to propose ending or altering any executive agency or some/all of its statutory programs — such as the Environmental Protection Agency, any of the 18 spy agencies, or the IRS — as well as any “corporation wholly owned by the United States.” Such corporations federally chartered include the Millenium Challenge Corporation; international aid foundations structured as corporations like the African Development Foundation; and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supplies small yet important funds for PBS, NPR, and local member stations.
Expansive language in the legislation makes the list of potential targets sprawl — encompassing potential reorganization plans for firing independent regulators, eliminating their positions or agencies, and likely challenging the administrative apparatus in novel ways. Reorganizing means transferring, consolidating, coordinating, authorizing, or abolishing governmental org-chart entities or their functions, most plainly warranted when government efforts are needlessly duplicated.
By letting the president formally pitch lawmakers on such restructurings, the legislation would grant Trump and his narrow Republican majorities in Congress exceptional power to take down the administrative state. Trump could, through 2026, present up to three concurrent plans to lawmakers, who’d then have 90 days per plan to consider each. Instead of the usual 60 Senate votes needed to pass legislation, based on filibuster rules, the reanimated law from 1984 would allow these plans to pass by simple majority votes.
At any time during a 90-day period, Trump could withdraw a plan, and for the first 60 days, the ex-TV game show host could start-stop changes to it — an invitation to use what he calls “great television” to stress everyone out with repeated shocks of will he or won’t he, habituating fear into acquiescence.
Stanford Law professor Anne Joseph O’Connell, who specializes in agency structure and personnel, tells Rolling Stone that “While the Congressional Review Act of 1996 already allows for fast-track repeal of recent major agency regulations, this legislation, if enacted, could demolish statutory mandates that have been on the books for decades. The Reorganizing Government Act would, in practice, end the legislative filibuster for a wide swath of issues carried out by federal agencies. It is a wolf hiding in the details of government organization charts.”
Assuredly, passing the legislation would regularize, if not Musk’s DOGE per se, then similar, stronger austerity powers for the White House. The world’s richest man on May 28 announced his supposed departure from DOGE, and while his murky “special government employee” categorization apparently concluded around the end of May, authority for the austerity team itself persists through July 4, 2026, the country’s semiquincentennial. Yet to keep dismantling the administrative apparatus long-term, federal judges have indicated the White House must put its dismantling efforts on a firm legal foundation.
Trump’s need for statutory backing is especially pressing since Musk or his operatives have been accused of various law breakings, in their attempts to hoard ever more power for the executive. Congressional Democrats led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have called DOGE conflicts of interest “a disturbing pattern,” a way to “enrich Mr. Musk and other elites.” His hacker-like team of twentysomethings’ apparent stockpiling of sensitive information includes demanding states and their contractors give up food stamp recipients’ personal details. In its data-hoovering efforts, DOGE has been accused of breaching protected records such as tax return data for millions of people and nearly every federal employee, as well as the Treasury systems behind almost all payments made by the U.S. government, though judges have since enjoined their access partially.
Two federal judges’ May 22 preliminary injunctions paused the White House’s brazen staffing and budget cuts for the duration of their respective lawsuits. One, brought by 21 attorneys general from Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, seeks to stop the gutting of the Education Department, calling it equivalent to abolishment, with New Jersey’s top prosecutor, Matthew J. Platkin, saying “Trump is not a king, and he cannot unilaterally decide to close a Cabinet agency.” The other, filed by nonprofits, local governments, and labor organizations — prominently, the largest federal employee union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) — aims to “stop the unconstitutional dismantling of the federal government by the President […] unprecedented […] in clear excess of his authority.”
In court in April, the Justice Department conceded the obvious: Trump doesn’t have statutory reorganization authority. The AFGE, in a March letter to the House, explained their dread that giving him it would result in an executive branch made up of fewer civil servants and more contractors.
For all the White House bluster about increasing efficiency by cutting a bloated federal workforce, its portion made up of actual employees has, percentage-wise, long been shrinking consistently, while hovering — in absolute terms — around three million people since the late sixties. The often lucrative, secretive public gigs for the private sector — combined with revolving-door practices and capture of government decision-making by ‘self-contracting contractors‘ — not infrequently give the growing number of hirelings weaker incentives than those offered the attenuated core of salaried civil servants to remain loyal to the United States Government and the public it’s supposed to serve.
Legalizing DOGE-style austerity would require getting the Reorganizing Government Act through the Senate, where the GOP is seven senators shy of bypassing filibusters sans sufficient defections from Democrats and independents.
The legislation was born into a climate of drastic political regression. Trump’s allies are pushing to legalize the twice–impeached president’s hoped-for, but unconstitutional, third term; he’s already selling Trump 2028 merchandise. Influential ideologues are glorifying extreme dominance hierarchies as the best human social structure, even claiming that installing a monarchy wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Passing the Reorganizing Government Act would be a huge step toward crowning — even as protests swell against the idea — the first United States king.
Unconstitutional, is that what you’re saying?
Republicans introduced both Reorganizing Government Act bills on Feb. 13 into a seismic landscape: Two days earlier, Trump had ordered federal agency heads to “undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force (RIFs),” the type of DOGE- (or OMB-)led restructuring involving axing budgets and personnel rosters — and the type receiving the most media attention.
But Trump’s order also told agency heads to submit reports “discuss[ing] whether the agency or any of its subcomponents should be eliminated or consolidated,” for the purpose of “Developing Agency Reorganization Plans.” OMB and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) followed up 13 days later with guidance deriding the government as “bloated, corrupt” and instructing that the reports be developed with agencies’ DOGE “team leads,” then handed in by Mar. 13.
The reports, Agency RIF and Reorganization Plans (ARRPs), couple reduction in force aspects — budget slashings, firings — with restructuring aspects such as abolishments; largely unrevealed, their contents would help illuminate the administration’s doings.
In the AFGE lawsuit, Judge Susan Illston at a May 9 hearing showed intense interest, per the transcript this journalist obtained, in the ARRPs, stating that “Defendants have not publicly released these plans despite requests from the public, employees, and members of Congress.”
Illston asked the Justice Department if the Senate’s request for the ARRPs had been answered. When attorney Eric J. Hamilton replied that “interbranch discussions between Congress and the executive branch” weren’t “relevant,” she retorted, “So you don’t want to tell me, is what you’re saying?”
He didn’t. The Justice Department claims the ARRPs contain sensitive details, aren’t final, and don’t bind agencies to specific actions. On May 13, the plaintiffs provided at least part of one. The judge wrote that it didn’t “neatly align with the government’s characterization of ARRPs in general.”
With a discovery order, the judge obtained a sampling of ARRPs herself and reviewed them behind closed doors. The government’s motion to prohibit the plans from coming to light remains pending.
Illston explained why inspecting the ARRPs, the characterization of which the parties dispute, is pivotal: Did “Trump, OPM, OMB, and DOGE simply instruct agencies to begin planning for RIFs in the future and provide guidance on how to make those plans?” That’s what the Justice Department claims; if true, the deliberative process privilege would shield the plans from oversight.
Or, as multitudinous news reports suggest, were the full ARRPs “directing agencies to make ‘large-scale’ RIFs and to make them now?” The same question applies to structural reorganizations.
Illston decided the evidence shows the ARRPs were indeed directive and on May 22 issued a preliminary injunction to “pause large-scale reductions in force and reorganizations” for the lawsuit’s duration. On June 2, the administration appealed to the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs told Illston the next day that their opponents aren’t obeying her injunction.
When issuing the pause, the judge gave Trump another option: procure “the cooperation of the legislative branch.”
If Congress passes it, that statutory partnership — presidential authority to propose reorganization plans — is exactly what the Reorganizing Government Act would supply the White House.
Uphill battle in Senate
At the moment, the Reorganizing Government Act appears to be moving slowly and looks unlikely to pass. With only 53 GOP senators, it faces an uphill battle for the 60 Senate votes required by default.
But that could change if Republican Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) new nuclear option effort, which is currently pending, portends further sleights-of-hand by his party. Such longshot tricks, if successful, might permit Republicans to get a budget bill to Trump with non-fiscal provisions — such as reorganization authority — shoehorned in.
Rep. James Comer’s (R-Ky.) half of the Reorganizing Government Act cleared the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform by a party-line vote of 23-20 on Mar. 25, and now has 19 cosponsors. Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) version in the upper chamber, however, is still sitting in the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee with its two cosponsors, apparently collecting mothballs.
If GOP leaders want to force the reorganization bill through, Senate Republicans could try to add the legislation to budget reconciliation legislation — in an attempt to protect the bill from a filibuster, so it could sail through the senior body with just 51 votes.
Congress is currently using the byzantine reconciliation process to try to extend and expand Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the richest, which will be financed, in part, with unprecedented cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs for the poor.
Members from both major parties have sometimes used the reconciliation process to try to stuff in agenda items probably not primarily fiscal, except the maneuver Graham has indicated he’ll use represents a severe escalation.
In April, GOP senators eschewed Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough’s expertise and claimed Graham could decide the cost of a bill all by himself. The budget chairman said the extension Republicans set forward for Trump’s 2017 tax cuts would be cost free. Rather than measuring against the “current law baseline,” assessed for half a century following a statutory definition, he announced his intention to measure expenses against a “current policy baseline.” He hasn’t yet shown his math-work.
Number-crunching watchdogs from both the center-right Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and the liberal Center for American Progress teamed up to tell the Senate in April that the Graham-goes-it-alone trick is “abuse” tantamount to “fabricat[ing] their own scores on the spot.”
Even faking numbers, the GOP couldn’t coherently claim the Reorganizing Government Act is principally budgetary in nature. The CBO scored the House version as having zero “direct spending” and zero “revenues” because it’s the subsequent legislative dominoes — the putative joint resolutions approving any reorganization plans — that would impact the star-spangled spreadsheets.
Bobby Kogan, a signer of the April letter and the Center for American Progress’s senior director for federal budget policy, tells Rolling Stone that the Graham solo trick, arguably an attempt at a newfangled nuclear option, couldn’t logically apply to sneaking the Reorganizing Government Act through reconciliation.
“CBO says the Reorganizing Government Act doesn’t have a scorable impact, so it’s not allowed in reconciliation,” Kogan says. “This is exactly the sort of thing Senator Byrd didn’t want in reconciliation and that his rule [controlling the process] was intended to keep out.”
So far, Graham’s maneuver is untested in floor debate. His office didn’t respond to multiple emails and calls for this article.
Republican senators might not give up easily, given the threat of Trump supporting primary challengers. An unusually high number of their seats, 20, are up in the midterms. Further, Americans for Prosperity, the dark-money flagship of fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch, told Congress on Apr. 28 to prioritize, along with four other bills, the Reorganizing Government Act. For months, the Koch network has sought statutory footing to “establish lasting reforms” without Musk.
“Nuclear options” are almost always avoided since one’s Senate opponents might deploy them too — mutually assured destruction — yet the times are trigger happy. Under White House pressure, the Senate’s presiding officer — possibly J.D. Vance, a onetime harsh critic of Trump who’s now his vice president and bowing bulldog — could assent to shutting down MacDonough or other Strangelove-style games.
AFGE acting legislation director Daniel Horowitz tells us, “The question hanging over reconciliation is to what extent is the Republican majority going to play by any rules at all. They are clearly going to stretch the boundaries of the budget laws as far as possible to insert their anti-government policy priorities into any package.”
If defeated or left for dead, the Reorganizing Government Act would stand as a marker of just how far some congressional Republicans wanted to go to keep empowering an already off-the-chain Trump. And if presidential reorganization authority isn’t in the cards this congressional session, there’s always next year(s) — especially as long as Trump commands the loyalty or fear of many on Capitol Hill.
Silence, skipped votes, and separation of powers
Muddying the tea leaves, the White House and almost all queried congressional Republicans have said little or nothing about the Reorganizing Government Act.
In fact, according to this journalist’s historical review, with only one debatable, situational exception, every president extended reorganization authority by Congress since the power was first granted in 1932 has — as chief executive or president-elect — openly explained his desire for it to lawmakers or the public ahead of the earliest bill’s introduction, usually weeks or months in advance. Trump, on the other hand, hasn’t said a thing about it this term.
The doubtful analogue occurred in an era when statutory reorganization authority was lower stakes, somewhat routine: President Jimmy Carter, in his 1980 State of the Union, could assume his touting of a then-forthcoming reorganization plan more or less implied, without his spelling it out, that Congress might need to renew his authority before it expired early that April. Lawmakers did, fairly fast. The House even passed their portion of the renewal under suspension of rules, a simplifying process for uncontroversial legislation.
If Trump were granted such authority without publicly justifying it, he could try painting himself as somehow akin to Carter, but whereas Carter’s campaign promise of “a complete reorganization of the executive branch” was headline-grabbing enough to inspire multiple polls on the subject during his initial year in the White House, the first-term Trump encouraged the press to opt out of filming a “little report” on the reorganization authority his officials were, in and around 2018, pursuing without much fanfare. Trump even told the journalists that report was “extraordinarily boring and therefore not fit for camera.”
Second-term Trumpers aren’t talking at all. During the Mar. 25 Oversight session, Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), opposing the “blank check” of the Reorganizing Government Act, said: “I don’t believe that Mr. Musk or any member of the administration has actually been in front of this committee […] yet here we are in a process to pass it without any clarification about why this authority is needed.” Several emails and calls from this journalist to the White House Press Office and OMB went unanswered.
Congressional Republicans are almost all mum, too, despite the prerogative’s capacity to profoundly affect the separation of powers among the three federal branches: Congress, executive, and the judiciary. Each checks the others and answers to the Constitution.
Besides statutory reorganization powers, presidents can change up the executive branch via, varying with the type of agency, the usual slow method of working with Congress to enact statutes, or they can — because the Constitution lets presidents arrange for assistants while enforcing laws — issue executive orders or facilitate internal reorganizations led moreso by individual agencies themselves. However, those latter options may rely heavily on judicial assent, often requiring presidents to plunge into protracted power struggles, as in the AFGE lawsuit.
If Congress enables presidents to propose reorganizations, the chief executives are largely freed from lawmakers’ snail-speed deliberations and entrenched dependencies on specific districts and states, and can make recommendations quickly to Capitol Hill as a whole, from a birds-eye view.
Yet whenever lawmakers delegate such a prerogative, Capitol Hill sidelines itself: Congress retains its constitutional power to create, edit, or end executive entities that implement statutory goals, but it passes to the White House the political capital baton — and lower procedural hurdles for congressional assent, nowadays including the filibuster-proof simple majorities mechanism.
John A. Dearborn, a Vanderbilt University political science professor who authored the book Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation, tells Rolling Stone, “In the early to mid-20th century, Congress’s decisions to grant presidential reorganization authority depended on legislators’ sense that they could trust the president, as an officeholder elected by the whole people, to uniquely act in the national interest and achieve a rational reorganization of the executive branch.”
“But in recent decades, the level of trust Congress and the wider public has had in presidents to do that has declined, and correspondingly, since 1984 lawmakers have avoided granting presidents such broad reorganization authority,” he says. “The Reorganizing Government Act of 2025 comes during a political context very different from earlier periods when that kind of authority was regularly granted: a time of extreme polarization and disagreement over whether the president can be counted on to act in the interests of the whole country.”
Given the contentious climate and the marginalization of Congress the legislation would entail, one might hope lawmakers would discuss it eagerly. But my multiple emails and calls to GOP leadership in both chambers, the bills’ sponsors and cosponsors, and Republicans on the relevant committees went unanswered — save for the rare staffers who advised me to ask someone else and for two Representatives whose communications teams provided startling comments.
Press Secretary Will Garrett told me on Apr. 25 that his boss, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), “fully supports any effort that allows President Trump to make government more efficient.”
However, in economics, public policy, physics, and the dictionary, efficiency means something like useful output divided by total costs. DOGE’s boasts notwithstanding, federal government first-quarter expenditures — arguably a plausible denominator for an efficiency ratio — have increased, while revenues, the corresponding numerator, have slightly declined, the whole fraction compared with President Joe Biden’s final first quarter. If receipts versus outlays spells efficiency, then that’s not being efficient. That’s not even just being cheap. Trump and Musk have been inefficient.
Reorganization authority isn’t any automatic efficiency cure-all. The Congressional Research Service report from 2012 that Comer entered into the record during the Oversight session states that there have been “few instances in which reorganization plans resulted in documented cost savings.” Of course, obtaining reorganization authority and abolishing Cabinet-level departments could save fortunes — in the same way weight loss may be achieved by chopping off limbs.
Discussing his state-level reorganization efforts as Georgia’s governor in his 1975 presidential campaign autobiography Why Not the Best?, Carter criticized thought-terminating bizspeak clichés such as efficiency: “Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States, or the Declaration of Independence, or the Bill of Rights, or the Emancipation Proclamation, or the Old Testament or the New Testament do you find the words ‘economy’ or ‘efficiency.’ Not that these two words are unimportant. But you discover other words like honesty, integrity, fairness, liberty, justice, courage, patriotism, compassion, love — and many others which describe what a human being ought to be. These are also the same words which describe what a government of human beings ought to be.”
For all the questions, three Republicans skipped the Oversight vote, and while the offices of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) ignored my repeated calls and emails asking why, Press Secretary Annie Butler emailed me on Apr. 18 that the absent Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-N.Y.) — who cosponsors the bill — had a “scheduling conflict” for “an Energy and Commerce Committee hearing scheduled at the same time.”
“That’s all!” she added.
In multiple emails — reinforced by calls — I asked her, “The Energy and Commerce Committee hearing ended at about 1:41 p.m. Eastern. But the House Oversight vote for H.R. 1295 was more than five hours later. It takes something like 15-20 minutes to get from room to room, yes? So why didn’t Rep. Langworthy vote on whether or not to favorably report this legislation he co-sponsors?”
No answer.
The White House and most of the relevant congressional Republicans’ unwillingness to talk underscores the sense that Congress would not be granting reorganization authority to a principled steward of the national interest, but to a president who answers only to himself, his, or foreign foes.
In April, the late Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), then the House Oversight ranking member, told Rolling Stone that “congressional Republicans are finally admitting that President Trump and Elon Musk do not have the legal authority to kill entire federal agencies, take a chainsaw to beloved programs like Social Security and Medicaid, or purge the federal workers that care for veterans, keep our food supply safe, and fight cancer.”
He added, “They’re plotting to use the shell of a long-dormant statute as a Trojan Horse to gift Trump and Musk the unprecedented, filibuster-proof authority they crave to use and abuse taxpayer dollars however they want in their bid to remake our government in their own corrupt image.”
Congressional Republicans must now navigate, on one side, the risk Trump will tar them in MAGA extremists’ eyes, and on the other, his softer voters among their constituencies angering at his doubling-down that their kids should just make do with fewer dolls and pencils, realizing it may not herald the new economic “golden age” the six-time bankruptcy filer promised. Meanwhile, rising voter suppression legislation and voting computer insecurities threaten to list the ship of state farther and turn such political constraints into ancient history.
Vanderbilt University political science professor David E. Lewis, an expert on presidents and the bureaucracy, tells us: “In the past, presidents would exercise restraint in the use of reorganization authority. If they overstepped, there would be consequences. Upset members of Congress could refuse to support their legislative agenda, and so forth. For Trump, emphasizing an executive agenda, he is not worried about members refusing to support him down the road. He needs them for very little and does not fear losing their support.”
Reorganizing the response
Instead of Congress predominating as a representation of a diverse public, the MAGA-backing ideologues seek to reverse today’s unique evolutions toward increasing heterodoxy — insta-global communications sharing bottom-up knowledge, feminist uprisings worldwide — to make macho-monarchy great again, though the Declaration of Independence says it wasn’t.
Maybe it seemed hard to believe — that some aim to make Trump a monarch — before mid-February, when he posted AI-generated imagery of himself as a king, which official White House socials circulated.
In a January New York Times interview, the most prominent monarchist ideologue, blogger Curtis Yarvin, was asked if his “point” was that the U.S. has supposedly “had something like a dictator in the past, and therefore it’s not something to be afraid of now.”
He answered: “Yeah.”
Years earlier, “Mencius Moldbug,” Yarvin’s pseudonym, typed missives out of his grab-bag of cacophonous quotes to the fascist-friendly among consequential, on-the-down-low hacktivist chat-circles.
Now the Times calls him the “MAGA court philosopher,” reporting on Yarvin’s May 5 debate at Harvard. The report says he calls for “a techno-monarchy,” but an attendee said the debate “never got to the heart of the matter: Yarvin’s affirmative case for monarchy.”
Likely Trump has heard, through his vice president and others, bits and pieces of that rambling, if you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bullshit case for monarchy — “humans fit into dominance-submission structures” very easily, Yarvin wrote in 2008, with a tunnel vision cropping out counterexamples. He elaborated three years later that Trump has “obvious kinginess”: “Supreme personal authority, generally male,” for which The Donald is “clearly biologically suited.”
On a podcast last year, Vance, then a U.S. Senate candidate, referenced Yarvin fleetingly, but approvingly. The vice president is a protégé of Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel, who invested in his Senate campaign and also in Yarvin’s computer networking project the regressive blogger described in 2010 as “digital feudalism.” The night before Trump’s second inauguration, at the D.C. “Coronation Ball,” Yarvin was a fêted guest. On his trip, Moldbug and the VP spoke with one another — briefly, the blogger says.
DOGE, especially if upgraded into statutory, escalated reorganization authority, is verging on a king-flavored administrative coup: a non-military seizing of enough power — illegally — to steer the ship of state very much elsewhere.
Aided by Yarvin’s circuitous justifications, Trumpers are smashing hollows into the government, and they’re not remaining vacuums. Evidently, the White House is filling them, not infrequently, with themselves, their cronies, and perhaps tentacles of foreign enemies.
So far, the public is responding with some strength. A grassroots effort to grant Trump his third impeachment — Operation Anti-King, now called Citizens’ Impeachment — has gained several Representatives’ support; protests are growing countrywide; the stakes keep skyrocketing.
Yet in a world increasingly run — de jure or de facto — by software architects, it can feel like something new is needed, beyond the atavistic urge to discover pseudo-selfhood in stanning a bully-king or dusting off laudable, creaky impeachment protocols antithetical to the same.
Another software architect, working on a global commons for online collaboration based on public-only data — a framework far from Yarvin’s “digital feudalism” — debated political theory at a leading university during Trump years, too, except philosopher and human rights activist Heather Marsh at the Oxford Union in 2018 argued for her project and the peaceful, prosocial-yet-diverse evolution of democracy, not its regression, and got censored.
Regarding the Reorganizing Government Act and the United States generally, Marsh, author of the recent books Stigmergy: How to Create a Mass Movement and How to Dismantle a Dictatorship, tells Rolling Stone, “A spectacle of horror creates suspense, terror and dread. Dictators take advantage of audience shock to spin a web around a mesmerized public until it is too late for escape. The paralysis of fear, guilt, anger, docility and nihilism still trapping part of the population in inertia is allowing a dictatorship to form where a democracy stood such a short time ago. The regime goal appears to be to isolate the U.S., tank the economy, and cause mass death through autogenocide, in order to create the perfect moment to implement totalitarianism.”
How can the public ‘reorganize’ in response? Marsh says, “The blitzkrieg strategy of regime actions must be turned on them until they are the ones dizzy and overwhelmed with the speed, variety and unpredictability of opposition tactics. There should be thousands of different things for them to respond to every day. Protests, boycotts, town halls and legal challenges are happening, but actions need to overwhelm the regime.
“At the same time, we have to build alternative community and governance structures to replace the rapidly collapsing ones,” she says. “The neo-fascist-monarchist ideologues think they have a replacement ready, but they are just lazily recycling ideas we already fought against and won. If we beat them to implementation, we can create a new system that works for everyone. We must accelerate and diversify opposition actions quickly — while ensuring it is them who are paralyzed with shock and dread.”
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