The group, which has monitored the safeguards underpinning the balance of power since Trump’s first term, says the erosion of democratic institutions has yet to reach its worst point.
A group of more than 400 former intelligence and national security officials has raised the alarm over what it sees as the growing erosion of democratic safeguards under US President Donald Trump.
Known as The Steady State, the group was formed in 2016, during Trump’s first term, after some of its future members became increasingly concerned about what they saw as the president’s authoritarian tendencies.
According to an investigation by the Financial Times, the group focuses on institutional safeguards, emergency powers, the independence of federal agencies and the rules designed to maintain the balance among the three branches of government.
For years, many of its members worked largely behind the scenes. They are now choosing to speak publicly, arguing that doing so is necessary to protect the country they served.
One of the strongest warnings comes from attorney Mark Zaid, who has spent months challenging in court the revocation of his security clearance.
Trump ordered the revocation on his first day back in office, targeting Zaid and around 50 other former officials whom he accused of signing a 2020 letter concerning the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The list of targets later expanded to include members of the previous administration. Zaid told the Financial Times that the campaign represented the broadest operation of its kind since the era of the Red Scare, when suspected communist sympathies could be enough to attract government scrutiny.
“The guardrails have all been removed,” Zaid said, warning that “we’re not even close to the worst of it.”
Former CIA officials see familiar patterns
Paul Kolbe, a former CIA official who studied authoritarian regimes during his years working in the Soviet Union and the Balkans, said he recognizes in Washington patterns he had seen elsewhere.
He described them as “relatively common ways of behaving when seeking to acquire and maintain power.”
Yet Steven Cash, who founded The Steady State, said that around half of the group’s members still prefer to remain anonymous despite having spent their careers working in war zones.
“They’re afraid,” he said.
The Financial Times investigation also documents what it describes as the White House’s increasingly aggressive use of declassified intelligence.
One example was Trump’s televised speech in which he revived claims of Chinese interference in the 2020 US election, despite a 2021 official assessment that had rejected those claims.
The CIA told the newspaper that it had cooperated with a transparency task force established by Trump while continuing to protect intelligence sources and methods.
CIA spokeswoman Liz Lyons, meanwhile, dismissed the criticism as coming from former officials associated with intelligence assessments that had already been discredited.
Concerns over a “cult of personality”
Gail Helt, a specialist on China and Taiwan, told the Financial Times that she was less concerned by Trump’s institutional moves than by what she described as a more personal ambition: the desire to see his own image on passports and banknotes.
She characterized the idea as an aspiration toward a cult of personality, noting bitterly that “even Mao did not go that far.”
David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, put the issue more succinctly.
He argued that the rule of law can withstand a certain degree of corruption, but not a culture of impunity.
That, he suggested, may ultimately be where the battle is being fought.
The White House has rejected the accusations, arguing that Trump is simply returning power to the American people by taking it away from unelected bureaucrats.
Julia Curlee, a former CIA analyst, offered a stark counterargument: remaining silent may protect those who choose silence, but it leaves the field open to people who have no such reservations.
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