Blockers

Prologue: The Guns

Overview

A huge federal operation can be entered and shut down by outsiders with no warrant and no clear authority. The people inside cannot stop it, and no one steps in to help. What does it mean when the system built to handle the country's hardest problems gets taken over in a single afternoon?

The Lockdown at the U.S. Institute of Peace

Colin O'Brien was the chief security officer at the United States Institute of Peace. He was responsible for four hundred employees across twenty-eight difficult countries. He had mostly succeeded. There were close calls in Haiti and rocket fire in Kyiv, but no one was killed, and no new names joined the five on the memorial wall. On March 14, 2025, the threat was in Washington, DC. Three young men from the Department of Government Efficiency tried to argue their way into the institute building. Once inside, it would be over, just as it had been at USAID, the African Development Foundation, and other places.

During the campaign, Colin had not taken DOGE seriously. Trump's promise to create it under Elon Musk felt like his promise to make Mexico pay for the wall or end the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours. Watching Musk on political stages reinforced that DOGE was theater. His view changed after DOGE burst into federal agencies to shut them down and Congress failed to respond. If that could happen in broad daylight, no organization was safe.

Colin left work early that Friday. His daughter needed help with math homework, and he assumed nothing would happen before a holiday weekend. Then a call came: the DOGE kids were on the sidewalk asking to be let in. Colin texted his IT people, "Shut it down," and the building went into lockdown. Magnetic locks snapped shut. By the time Colin arrived to let staff out, the three had left. Two hours later they returned with reinforcements: a rare DOGE female and two FBI agents. This time Colin went out to meet them. The lead DOGE guy, Nate Cavanaugh, was not cordial. He expected Colin to jump to. Colin was not built to jump to. He knew Cavanaugh had dropped out of Indiana University to start a tech company in Los Angeles. He knew Cavanaugh's authority came from Musk, whose came from Trump. By night Cavanaugh and other twentysomething DOGE guys bunked with Musk on the sixth floor of the Government Services Administration. By day he marched into executive office buildings and told everyone he was in charge and they were fired.

The Fake Document and the Law

The DOGE trio had no warrant or court order, only attitudes. They wore skinny jeans, T-shirts, and little backpacks. The FBI agents, like Colin, wore suits and were uneasy as DOGE muscle. One said he hoped only to facilitate a cordial conversation. The DOGE woman, Laken Rapier, ran around back, pounded on the door, and asked to use the bathroom. When refused, she shouted that as a government employee in a government building she had a right to relieve herself inside. She did not seem to understand the institute was not a government building. Eventually they gave up and left. Colin unlocked the building, let out the remaining employees, and waited for DOGE to return.

They had come with a fake document on Institute of Peace letterhead, signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Pete Garvin of the National Defense University, the three board members who served by virtue of their government jobs. It announced they were firing acting president George Moose and replacing him with a DOGE guy. They lacked legal authority. The letterhead had been photocopied from genuine stationery, probably from Moose's own letter explaining the law. That law, passed by Congress and signed by Ronald Reagan in 1984, established an independent, nonprofit national institute. It was run by a board of fifteen, only eight of whom could belong to one party. Members served longer terms than the president. The president could appoint but not remove them, except for extreme misconduct. The White House had no control over spending. The book notes the building was leased for free in perpetuity, paid for with $100 million from Congress and $70 million in private donations, and wholly owned by the private corporation.

A Private Corporation, Not an Agency

Congress has a long history of creating hybrid institutions, privately controlled but receiving and giving federal help. The first was the Red Cross in 1900. In 1935 the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the practice. USIP predated them all. In 1796 George Washington proposed two private national colleges, one for warriors, one for peacemakers. Congress funded West Point but not the peace college, whose merits were debated for 188 years. Of all these hybrid institutions, USIP was legally the most removed from presidential control. If Musk, acting for Trump, could send Cavanaugh to take the building and fire everyone, he could take anything and fire anyone: the Federal Reserve, the Kennedy Center, the entire two-million-person civil service. This was raw power, an attempt to change how government had been run for more than a century.

The Guards

A call from the FBI asking whether Colin O'Brien still ran the institute's security guards tipped him off. The agents had put the question to Grok and believed the answer, and the mistake showed him DOGE would come through the building's own contractor. Inter-Con took $460 million a year from the State Department and $2.7 million from the Institute of Peace, so it would not hesitate. Removing the guards, Colin decided, was how to make the institute safer. He cut access to one mechanical lock, whose single outstanding key was held by Kevin Simpson, Inter-Con's manager and the one man Colin trusted with it.

A senior FBI agent named Doug Silk then called to say Colin was under Justice Department investigation for the events of March 14 and to ask him in for questioning. Colin refused, and told his wife to lock the doors and admit no one. He was at work by five the next morning, St. Patrick's Day, staff sent home, leaving him, George Moose and their lawyers.

The Portico

From an upper window he watched three vehicles arrive: a blacked-out Tahoe or Escalade he called a DOGE-mobile, a Tesla and a Jeep. An Inter-Con man named Derek tried the front door and his badge failed. The building had been designed to admit light, clerestory windows under a glass roof shaped like a dove's wings, which one critic called the height of think-tank architecture. Its weak point was the side door on the mechanical lock. Fifteen minutes after the cars arrived, Kevin Simpson was inside with three plainclothes Inter-Con officers. DC law barred the guards at courthouses, agencies and embassies from carrying their weapons home, so the guns needed storing, and the basement gun room held thirty-four 9mm Glocks owned and controlled by Inter-Con. Nobody who worked for the institute knew the safe's code. The men went straight down. A trespassing report to the DC police brought no police.

They toured the building like owners while the institute kept paying them. Colin sealed them onto the self-contained portico, which a button could turn into a cell, and spent two hours watching them push at doors and telephone anyone they hoped would rescue them. He removed the lock cylinder from the side door. His reasoning: a door you cannot enter cannot violate fire code. The last call demanding the guards' release came from Ed Martin, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. They left. An hour later the DC police arrived with Inter-Con men, Nate Cavanaugh and more DOGE staff, ordering the officers about like a private army. A senior Inter-Con man apologized as Colin was escorted out, saying DOGE had threatened the State Department contract. Cavanaugh became president, moved the building's title to the General Services Administration, swept its money into government accounts and dismissed nearly all the staff two days before their health insurance renewed. Colin read intent to hurt families in that timing.

What DOGE Posted

Musk got first access to the institute's computers, and the DOGE account on X published a list whose interesting items were untrue and whose true items were uninteresting. Moving leftover funds into the endowment was required by law and had been done for forty years. The institute was obliged to hire an auditor annually and paid about $380,000 for it, though the sum DOGE attributed to accounting matched a six-year legal services contract.

The Triangle of Death

The $1.3 million paid to the Al-Tadhamun Iraqi League for Youth was less than half that. It funded one project, explicitly approved by Marco Rubio, aimed at reducing extremism. After the Assad government fell in December 2024, thousands of Iraqis, mostly women and children, were stranded in a camp in Syria's northeast that had held thirty thousand refugees in 2019, and the Islamic State had gained a foothold there. Institute staff worked with the State Department to persuade Iraqi village elders to take the refugees in, and the elders wanted evidence that no one had ties to a terrorist group. The institute paid for venues, tea, coffee and the occasional lunch.

In 2007 the institute worked south of Baghdad in the Triangle of Death, a region of a million people where insurgents had killed fifty-four soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division and wounded hundreds. At the Army's request it convened thirty elders of warring tribes. Because the institute was American in purpose but not fully official, it could host conversations official authorities could not. I. William Zartman, working on an institute grant, had framed the idea of a hurting stalemate: the success of a peace initiative may depend less on its details than on its timing, and parties become open to peace only when anger and violence stop delivering. The elders filled out anonymous lists of grievances that were passed around, and recognizing their shared losses took enough heat out of the room for talks to begin. The peace has held. Pacifying the region had cost the Army $150 million a month. The talks cost a million.

Halimi and the Flight

Mohammad Qasem Halimi, the $132,000 "Taliban contract," was a religious scholar who had worked in the Taliban government as a liaison to foreign diplomats, quit after the 2001 invasion, survived three Taliban attempts on his life, and was paid $10,000 a month. He supplied the State Department with reporting on the Taliban's treatment of women that it could not get elsewhere, and in Trump's first term he prepped U.S. negotiators for talks with the Taliban. Musk's post exposed him, and the Taliban beat and imprisoned his relatives still in Afghanistan.

The $675,000 for private aviation was one charter, a 737 from Kabul to Qatar, which in 2021 carried 256 Afghan staff and family members out of Taliban reach. Colin also had two remaining employees smuggled across the Pakistan border and hidden there for three years.

The Building

On Fox News, Musk presented Cavanaugh to Jesse Watters as his exhibit, and Cavanaugh called the institute the least peaceful agency they had dealt with. Colin had expected to lose the building but not to its own contractor under blackmail, not to a police department serving as a private force, not to an FBI reconfigured into another arm of the White House. What mattered was who held the building and who held the guns. In mid-May, U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell ordered the administration to vacate, and Colin retook the building with off-duty Baltimore police friends, finding the flags stolen, the logo ripped from the wall, and beer bottles and cheap weed left behind. A month later a panel of Trump-appointed judges on the D.C. Circuit stayed the ruling. In December 2025 the institute was renamed for Donald J. Trump.

Key Takeaways

• The assault on the U.S. Institute of Peace was the clearest test of whether an institution chartered by Congress as a private corporation, with board members the president could neither appoint into loyalty nor remove, was genuinely beyond his reach. The answer turned out to be no.
• What turned legal weakness into a completed seizure was compliance rather than force: contractors protecting a State Department contract, a police department serving as private muscle, and FBI agents repurposed from investigation into escort duty.
• The posted inventory of waste dissolves on inspection. The endowment transfer had been legally required for decades. The Iraqi project bought meeting halls and tea that moved villages to absorb refugees. And the scholar labeled a Taliban contract was gathering reporting the State Department could obtain nowhere else.
• A favorable court ruling restores a building but not a settlement. The institute was retaken in May, the ruling was stayed in June, and by December the name on the building belonged to the president.
• The institute's unusual legal status, American in purpose but not fully official, was exactly what allowed it to convene warring tribal elders that no official authority could have assembled, for a tiny fraction of what fighting in the same region cost.

Chapter 1. The Refs

Overview

Every administration sweeps out the layer beneath it, and whoever survives all of them is the one nobody can place. The work that keeps a government running looks like nothing when it works, and the person trusted by every side is the hardest to read. What happens when that service stops being invisible?

The Climate

Everything in Washington was being named for Trump: the U.S. Institute of Peace, a foreign visa, children's savings accounts, a prescription drug program, the annual pass to America's national parks. The Kennedy Center was becoming the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center. Congress had bills to rename Dulles International Airport, carve Trump's face on Mount Rushmore, create $250 and $500 bills, make his birthday a federal holiday, and raise a triumphal arch taller than the Lincoln Memorial, nicknamed the Arc de Trump. No other president had used the office so energetically to promote a personal brand. The real change was in the climate. Certain behaviors were now tolerated and others discouraged, and Tim Curry took a surprisingly long time to see what it meant for him.

The Referee

He had been content through the first Trump term, as through the decades before it. A Democrat would win and ask him to impose new policies on the federal workforce; a Republican would win and ask for nearly the opposite. He managed either way, and his handling of vaccine policy earned him the Presidential Distinguished Rank Award, given to 1 percent of the Senior Executive Service.

At the Office of Personnel Management, three levels down the org chart, he was Deputy Associate Director, Accountability and Workforce Relations. Two roles defined the job: refereeing disputes between managers and workers, and overseeing negotiations between agencies and unions. The appointees who would draft Project 2025 still came to his office for help. One of them called him OPM's bus person, meaning that if he were hit by a bus the government would stop working. Unions thought he was their guy. Management thought he was their guy.

A Magic Trick

Bush people took him for a Bush voter. Obama people took him for a secret Obama supporter. Biden people took him for a Biden loyalist. Trump people suspected his unreadable calm hid a Trump fan. All of them were guessing. A colleague who had spent a hundred hours in a room with him could not name his politics. He built the blankness on purpose: off-the-rack suits, wire-rimmed glasses, an accent that shaved its syllables. When a colleague's young child died, he flew to Oxford, Mississippi, for the memorial and told no one he was going.

The Rules

Congress created the merit-based civil service in 1883, then spent most of a century building machinery for its conflicts with political bosses. Kennedy's 1962 executive order extended veterans' appeal rights to all civil servants, though executive orders can be reversed as easily as written. Nixon's use of the IRS and FBI against his enemies produced the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which:

• protected whistleblowers, with Inspectors General created in twelve departments to receive reports
• eased appeals to the EEOC for workers claiming discrimination
• gave unions collective bargaining rights, though not the right to strike or negotiate pay
• created the Federal Labor Relations Authority to settle union-agency disputes
• created the Merit Systems Protection Board to hear individual grievances

Maxine

At Grissom Air Force Base in Indiana, where he started in 1989, Tim learned that due process only meant the system had tried. A civil engineer named Maxine found her parking spot restriped around a new fire hydrant, parked in it anyway, refused to move, reversed into a security officer and his dog, and led a chase that shut down a base then supporting Operation Just Cause.

The Price of Independence

The base handled Maxine through its own machinery rather than filing criminal charges. Fired for cause, she could take a grievance to the Merit Systems Protection Board at little or no cost, or go to the EEOC or her union.

Six months later an administrative judge in Indianapolis cut her penalty to a seven-day suspension. The Air Force appealed, and the full three-member board raised it to ninety days and gave her back her job, a year and a half after the process began.

Tim was flabbergasted that three months' suspension was not grounds for dismissal. Maxine returned to find two higher-ranking white men covering her position and their own, at higher pay, so she claimed discrimination and sued for a raise.

The board charged no filing fees and drew many plaintiffs who represented themselves, which encouraged litigation. Under the old system, civil servants were likelier both to be misused and to be punished unfairly. Under the new one, they were less subject to pressure but likelier to escape consequences for their own conduct, and managers grew slower to discipline, unsure how a single administrative law judge might rule.

A Referee's Job

Tim's office inside the Office of Personnel Management handled conflicts across the entire government. He refereed disputes and reviewed other referees, working through the roughly seven thousand decisions the MSPB issued each year. When the White House or Congress changed the rules of the game, he often wrote the new ones, since a law rarely said who would administer it.

A mediocre pirate bent on seizing the government would find its pressure points quickly:

• OMB controls the flow of money and is the bridge.
• The General Services Administration controls buildings and procurement and is the engine room.
• OPM is the crew quarters, which Paul Dans, the architect of Project 2025, called the motherboard of the deep state.

Schedule F

Two weeks before the 2020 election, Dennis Kirk, a sixty-nine-year-old lawyer appointed to run the MSPB but never confirmed by the Senate, arrived with orders. Trump had signed an executive order creating Schedule F, meant to strip due process from any civil servant tied to policy. The first plan covered fifty thousand employees, and Kirk said everyone at OPM was being converted. Tim was a member of the Senior Executive Service, the eight-thousand-person buffer created by the same 1978 act. He objected for himself and for his assistant, who had nothing to do with policy. Kirk granted both.

Trump lost two weeks later and Schedule F was shelved. Tim thought it half-baked, since government ran on the continuity of its workforce. His threat sensors, by his own account, would not flash red until late January 2025.

Two Sets of Reformers

Project 2025, published by the Heritage Foundation in April 2023, included an OPM chapter written by Dans, Kirk and Donald Devine, known in 1981 for persuading Reagan to fire striking air traffic controllers. Tim agreed with parts of it, especially the complaint that the grievance process was far too complex. He rejected the deep-state premise, having seen no rise in appointees reporting insubordination; the first Trump agenda had stalled on managerial inexperience.

The people who entered OPM in late January 2025 were not Project 2025's authors. They were a loose mix of Elon Musk's friends, employees and hangers-on. The typical Project 2025 figure was a middle-aged lawyer defined by anti-government ideology who had never made much money. The typical DOGE figure was a twenty-five-year-old tech worker, eager to be near Musk, only now grasping that the government has three branches.

The Fifth Floor

The DOGE people were lawless. They took the executive suites on OPM's fifth floor and locked the doors, telling staff, Tim among them, that they could not get off the elevator there. Within weeks they fired or tried to fire every probationary employee, those hired in the past year, mostly young people or people with skills needed for an immediate problem. Permanent staff were offered an eight-month paid leave of absence that would cost them their jobs. Those likeliest to take the "Fork in the Road" deal were the ones with outside offers waiting. The government lost its young and necessary people and kept the old and superfluous ones. Shedding staff properly would have meant reviewing each agency to find which functions layoffs would least affect.

The Attack on Neutrality

What troubled Tim was the attack on nonpartisanship. Late-night emails fired the neutral third parties created by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

• Inspectors general were removed from most larger agencies, eliminating the one place a whistleblower could safely report wrongdoing.
• A Democrat was removed from the Merit Systems Protection Board, making an apolitical process overtly partisan.
• An executive order stripped rights from all but the Republican-leaning unions: Border Patrol, firefighters, police officers.

Probationary workers were dismissed for poor performance, the only legal grounds. Pressed to explain, officials floated the argument that civil service due process was unconstitutional, and Tim asked why that had not surfaced in the fifty years since the Civil Service Act.

Not Built for This

A Myers-Briggs test typed Tim as ISTP (introverted, sensing, thinking, perceiving), and Christina Sickles Merchant, who trained him in Clinton-era conflict resolution, said the only reason he had not scored higher on thinking was that the scale did not go higher. He met others' emotion with reason and their noise with silence, and he wanted nothing to do with politics. He was fifty-eight and had planned five more years. A new ennui set in: he stopped calling his father, by his own account his blood pressure spiked, and he began carrying a personal item home each night, then the framed picture of him with colleagues outside the Pentagon on October 11, 2001, a month after the attack. The unease felt like that time, except the attack came from within.

What Did You Do Last Week?

The night before, a woman at the IRS called with a rumor that OPM was about to email the entire federal workforce asking people to justify their existence. After midnight it arrived: about five bullets on what you accomplished last week, cc your manager, deadline Monday at 11:59 p.m. EST, unsigned. An X post from Musk followed, warning that failure to respond would count as a resignation. How should a CIA field agent, an IRS auditor or a DOJ investigator reply? Defense and Homeland Security told their own people not to. Who would read the replies? DOGE said AI would, the same tool that handled the two million leave-offer replies, counting a question as acceptance. Then his phone lit up with people treating him as responsible, and he had no interest in answering. He woke up and knew he was done.

Key Takeaways

• Appeals boards, inspectors general and bargaining unions are what keep a civil service neutral. Removing them is not streamlining. It is removing everyone positioned to say no.
• The grievance system really is slow and sometimes lets genuine misconduct go unpunished, and conceding that costs nothing, because the same bargain that shielded a bad employee is what shields the whistleblower and the dissenting analyst.
• Schedule F was drafted, shelved after 2020, and revived in 2025 by people who understood government even less than its authors did, which makes the deep state a premise chosen in advance rather than a finding about how agencies actually behave.
• The 2025 cuts sorted the workforce in reverse: probationary employees, mostly young or hired for one urgent skill, were pushed out, while those likeliest to accept paid leave were the ones with other offers, so the government lost capacity rather than headcount.
• Ordering every employee to account for a week's work to an unsigned email, with the penalty announced on social media, is a submission test rather than a management tool, and refusing to answer is the only option available to someone whose job cannot be summarized in five bullets.

Chapter 2. The Information

Overview

A Saturday night email asked Kathleen Walters to list five things she had done at work that week. She had heavier things on her mind. Her doctor had just found a lump in her breast. She was fifty-two, and half her known blood relatives had already died of cancer. She was also packing the house she loved beside Arlington National Cemetery and looking for a smaller apartment for herself and her daughter, Ava.

Walters was the IRS's chief privacy officer. She oversaw six hundred fifty people whose job was to keep a hundred thousand employees from losing, leaking, or peeking at any of the two hundred sixty-six million tax returns in process. The memo asked those employees to share what often should never be shared. She answered quickly and vaguely, sure no one would read it. Then her phone filled with questions and reports of full mailboxes. An IRS employee commits a crime just by confirming that a specific person did or did not file a return. Many risked jail for describing their jobs honestly.

Nine days earlier, on Thursday, February 13, a young man turned up in the IRS lobby. Security called Traci DiMartini, who ran human capital. Treasury had no record of anyone named Gavin Kliger. Escorted upstairs, Kliger, in black from hoodie to sneakers, gave no eye contact. He said he had come to root out fraud at the IRS. DiMartini said, "That's a big job!" Fraud was the wrong thing to hunt. Kliger carried badges giving him access to several agencies, plus a backpack of government phones and at least four laptops. He demanded an IRS phone, laptop and email address, access to taxpayer systems, and a meeting with the acting commissioner, Doug O'Donnell.

Treasury confirmed he had been hired three weeks earlier by OPM and attached to DOGE. Before he could work inside, he had to pass a tax audit, which he argued he did not need, then sit through ethics and taxpayer-information briefings. The audit filtered out the fraud-inclined. The lectures made clear that glancing at taxpayer information without a legitimate reason means dismissal, and leaking or stealing it means five years in jail. DiMartini called Walters to arrange a briefing on data privacy law. Walters was away, so her deputy Phyllis Grimes took it. Kliger refused to shake her hand, though he had shaken the hands of the white men who offered theirs. He said he had heard these rules elsewhere. She replied that no other agency is governed by this privacy law. He played on his phone, and a briefing that normally ran forty-five minutes took half that. Then he reached the Freedom of Information Act rules. He looked up to ask what he could do that would not be shared outside the agency. At the end, he asked her to tell him her name again.

The DOGE playbook came from Twitter: accuse the staff of incompetence before knowing them, terrify them, fire them en masse, and rehire some if the cuts were mistakes. The executive order promised each agency a DOGE team of at least four: a team lead, an engineer, a human resources specialist, and an attorney. There were never any lawyers, and some team leads covered two or three agencies. The IRS was a special case. After Nixon tried to use it against enemies, it was restructured to stay out of the White House's reach. It had only two political appointees, the chief counsel and the commissioner, serving terms that did not line up with the president's. No president had fired an inherited commissioner. In December 2024, Trump signaled the ouster of Danny Werfel in a Truth Social post that named only his successor. Werfel left without a fight. Trump appointed Billy Long, whose nomination stalled, so a career official ran the agency. The IRS Kliger entered had no political leadership. They called him the Chaos Agent.

Gavin was dressed in black and ignored Kathleen's handshake. He wanted to talk about Direct File, a new IRS program that let taxpayers prepare and file returns for free. Rollout had taken too long because accounting firms fought it. He accused Kathleen of making Direct File harder. Direct File required taxpayers to use biometrics or call an IRS representative to prove identity, and Gavin thought that made it too hard. Kathleen said theft and fraud were huge problems and that the security protocols came from NIST, not the IRS. He asked what committee at the IRS wrote the NIST guidelines. She explained that NIST was the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency in the Department of Commerce in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and that by law the IRS had to use its guidelines. Gavin, a technologist, had no idea what NIST was. Kathleen thought, We're in trouble. This kid doesn't know anything. The meeting ended badly.

Kathleen Walters had wanted to work in government since childhood, inspired by her father, a lawyer who modeled service. She went to Georgetown and UVA, worked corporate law to pay off debt, and joined the IRS in January 2006. She helped create the privacy office, ran the agency's TARP assignment during the 2008 crisis, and led its COVID response in 2020. She took the privacy job after the 2019 leak by Charles Littlejohn, a Booz Allen Hamilton consultant who leaked fifteen years of Donald Trump's tax returns, then the returns of over seven thousand other Americans. Littlejohn was sentenced to five years. On February 18, she got the call that Gavin wanted to see her, and she was deeply uneasy. On February 28, she took her daughter for pizza and saw emails. The first, sent at 6:34 p.m. by a colleague in the IRS legal department, said, "Melanie requested a data pull." The colleague added, "It feels not quite kosher." Exactly sixty-four minutes earlier, at 5:30 p.m., Melanie Krause, until then chief operating officer, had been installed as acting IRS commissioner by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

The request came from Rashidi Reza, the IRS director of data management, at 7:39 p.m. on February 28. DHS had asked the IRS to find addresses for 700,000 names of likely undocumented immigrants. Reza posed two questions to Kathleen Walters: Did the IRS have legal authority to use tax return filing data for this purpose, and if so, would its memorandum of understanding with the Social Security Administration allow the agency to combine SSA data with tax return data to produce reliable results? Reza noted the technical feasibility was unknown but likely very low. Kathleen read the first numbered paragraph and stopped. The request was plainly illegal.

The dataset DHS sought was in a silo reserved for returns filed by people without Social Security numbers. The IRS had created the Individual Taxpayer Identification Number in 1996 so undocumented workers and other non-citizens could file and pay taxes. For nearly thirty years, through formal press releases and millions of informal phone calls, the IRS had led this population to believe their tax information would never leave the agency. The program succeeded: the IRS collected hundreds of billions in taxes, and undocumented workers demonstrated their commitment to the country by paying more than their fair share. Now DHS wanted their data. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had gone hunting undocumented workers but lacked reliable home addresses. The tax returns told you where roughly seven million of them might be found.

Changing federal privacy law to permit such sharing was not trivial. Kathleen knew because she had just done it, to let the IRS share taxpayer data with state child support enforcement agencies. No one in American politics would oppose child support enforcement, and the change had passed Congress in December 2024 with almost no dissent. Yet it had taken eighteen months, endless Capitol Hill meetings, and the close involvement of the IRS commissioner and the secretary of health and human services. DOGE did not have eighteen months. As Kathleen saw it, their approach was: if you cannot do it legally, find a way to do it illegally. They were doing it on a Friday night, using Melanie Krause, installed as acting commissioner an hour earlier after a ten-minute meeting with Scott Bessent, and without informing the executive charged with protecting the information. The violation ran deeper than the law, which made it worse.

Government data could be imagined as two giant buckets. One held sensitive information, like individual taxpayer data, health data, or census data, which required privacy laws and people like Kathleen to protect it. Mostly this data had been protected. There had been breaches, as when Trump's tax returns were stolen by a Booz Allen contractor, and one obvious intentional violation of trust after Pearl Harbor, when the head of the U.S. Census volunteered to help the war effort by handing over the location of Japanese Americans so they could be more easily rounded up and moved to concentration camps. After the war, Congress passed stronger privacy laws, and nothing like that had since happened with sensitive government data.

The other bucket held data that could and should be openly shared. No country had ever sought to understand itself as creatively as the United States. The enumeration clause of the Constitution required a population tally every ten years to allocate congressional seats. That drive led to everything from the consumer price index to the North American Bat Monitoring Program, which tracks the number of bats on the continent. The bats provide billions of dollars in free services to American farmers. Where bat counts decline, pesticide use rises, as do infant mortality rates. The National Crime Victimization Survey, taken since 1973 by the statistical agency within the Department of Justice, revealed far higher rates of sex crimes and domestic violence than get reported to police, along with fluctuations in reporting rates. According to the crime statistician Jeff Asher, the survey tells you what is happening, and only after knowing what is happening can you ask why.

The two buckets were not isolated. Both depended on the caliber of the people collecting the data and the trust of the people providing it. The moment people sensed their data might be used against them was the moment they ceased to provide it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick floated replacing Census workers with postal workers, who had a duty to report anything fishy to law enforcement. Vulnerable populations knew this. What would be reported in the Census or the Crime Survey would be whatever people were happy to report to a cop.

A new rule took hold: everything inside the executive branch had to serve the narrow political interests of Donald Trump. Government websites removed climate data and all data related to immutable characteristics such as race, ethnicity, or sex, and to gender ideology, along with data that might reflect poorly on the president's policies. After Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill cut food subsidies to poor families, the Department of Agriculture eliminated the Household Food Security report, which showed how many American children were going hungry. The urge to count was being replaced by the urge to stay ignorant. What no one knew, no one could be blamed for.

The National Crime Victimization Survey became a victim. DOGE flagged it as wasteful. The official who did the flagging was Ethan Shaotran, a twenty-two-year-old on leave from college. A leading Commerce Department data scientist pointed out that without the survey, understanding sexual and domestic violence would be far harder, because those crimes are so underreported. Commerce officials talked the White House out of killing the survey but removed all questions mentioning gender identity, including two designated transgender. Asher noted that a survey about underreported crime should target groups more likely not to report being victimized.

Meanwhile, the regime pried into data never meant to be seen. Kathleen heard rumors DOGE had stolen or moved secure data from the Social Security Administration, later confirmed by whistleblower Charles Borges. She was watching at least two assaults on taxpayer data: Gavin Kliger wanted to comb through IRS contractor data, and DHS wanted addresses for 700,000 undocumented workers who had paid taxes.

The following Monday, Kathleen received a cryptic text from a senior IRS official: I'm going to call your cell, but don't answer. Her phone rang and she stared at it. Then came the second text: Gavin is asking where your office is and is now trying to find you to fire you because he says you're the blocker. The Blocker was one of Elon's favorite terms: the person who did not understand progress, the person without vision, the person who could not see beyond the way things were. Traci had been a blocker. Find the blockers between us and what we want, Elon told his young followers. Find the blockers and eliminate them.

Kathleen's office was on the seventh floor, in a corner with a view of the Capitol dome. Her windows had been bombproofed and sealed shut after the 9/11 attacks. To the standard-issue furniture she had added two small gold end tables from her parents' garage, found in 2020 right after her mom died. One wall held her daughter's schedule; another a poster of Al Capone's mug shots under the words "It took an Accountant to catch Al Capone." In one corner sat an ancient metal box predating the building. Inside were keys to every office in her department. Removing one, she walked down the hall to a small conference room, entered, locked the door, and switched off the lights. There she sat in the dark, listening for the squeak of Nike sneakers in the terrazzo hallway. She said, "I'm not getting fired today!" She knew what she was trying to protect and why she was under a new kind of assault for protecting it. She waited until evening.

Kathleen waited in the dark until evening, then took an elevator down to the basement garage. DOGE's recruits got around Washington by bike and scooter, so she counted herself clear. She never learned what had angered Kliger. It was almost certainly not her refusal to give Homeland Security the addresses of taxpayers without Social Security numbers; he never raised it, and because she believed she had stopped it, she stopped worrying about it.

On Thursday, March 27, an email chain appeared on her screen. Melanie was forwarding something from the IRS legal office with a request that explained nothing: could Kathleen help facilitate, since Melanie would not join? The two young lawyers who wrote the missing document said it was a memorandum of understanding to share taxpayer data with DHS, begun in late February and hidden from Kathleen and their own boss at Melanie's instruction. Kathleen read it as fear: the sign-off was being dumped on her, the same play Kliger had run on Traci DiMartini.

That day she arranged a Zoom with the requesters, who called themselves the ICE Innovation Lab. DHS lawyers joined, along with an IRS privacy lawyer, Julie Schwartz. Kathleen described the narrow circumstances in which the IRS can lawfully help, such as an undocumented worker with an outstanding murder warrant. Pressed on numbers, the group conferred and settled on seven million, more than wanted criminals: the current addresses of undocumented workers who had paid their taxes. The most law-abiding were the easiest to catch. They avoided the word profile while describing exactly that, one assembled for each person from all the government's data. When they seemed to doubt her reading of the law, she posted the statutes into the chat: commingled data, she said, cannot be controlled. Julie, normally the calmest person present, told her afterward she was off the project and might never return.

She called it life-or-death and chose to resign rather than be fired for enabling an illegal act that would hurt people. Her note to Melanie that weekend gave no reason, since Melanie already knew. She was weeks from her twentieth anniversary, and waiting until mid-May would have secured retirement benefits for life. She had just learned that her breast lump was benign.

Days later Melanie resigned first, and on her way out she asked Jodie Reynolds to plant a Washington Post story casting her as someone who quit on principle rather than surrender IRS data. Kathleen concluded she had misjudged her character.

Kliger filled the vacancy with the field agent Gary Shapley, whom Steve Davis picked from Kliger's list of acceptable names. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, bypassed in the process, got Trump to remove Shapley and then fired Kliger. Within six weeks Musk himself was gone, and DOGE dissolved.

ICE came at night, after property managers had gone home. Antonio Marquez, whose company owns apartment buildings housing mostly lower-middle-income Latinos across the South and Southwest, described unmarked cars, no warrants, no rights read, and a certainty about which doors to open. Morning revealed tenants gone and belongings in piles; he could not tell who had been taken from who had fled. Documented tenants were swept up too, including an older woman who always paid on time and came back in an ankle bracelet. He never worked out how ICE knew the addresses.

On February 11, 2026, The Washington Post reported that the IRS had shared with DHS the tax data of forty-seven thousand undocumented workers. IRS lawyers who had sworn the agency refused were summoned by a judge and admitted they had lied and shared it. The judge counted roughly 42,695 violations of the Internal Revenue Code in the disclosure of last known taxpayer addresses to ICE.

Key takeaways:

• Sharing tax return data with immigration authorities is illegal without a new statute, and the rush to do it on a Friday night through a brand-new acting commissioner, without telling the privacy office, is evidence of the violation rather than a workaround for red tape.
• The usefulness of government statistics depends on the trust of the people who supply the underlying information, so when vulnerable groups suspect their data will be used against them, the census, crime surveys, and food security measures all become less true.
• Labeling career officials as blockers is not a diagnosis of incompetence but a tactic for removing the people whose legal duty is to refuse unlawful requests, and their removal is what makes the unlawful request executable.
• An agency designed after Watergate to stay outside White House control relies on career leadership and privacy statutes; gutting both at once is how the machinery of tax collection becomes a tool for finding and deporting the people who paid into it.

Chapter 3. The Risk

Overview

The people a government relies on to confront its worst risks rarely arrive through any deliberate plan. They come from improbable places and chase problems no one has framed, often staying invisible until the danger has passed. How does a system find them before it needs them?

A pattern inside the government

Two patterns recurred across the federal government: its people rarely drew attention to themselves, and many were immigrants or their children. Hamid Jafari came from Pakistan and led the eradication of polio in India from the CDC. Susan Xu left Shanxi province for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, where she invented gear that doubled how long firefighters could endure extreme heat. Anh Duong fled Vietnam two days before Saigon fell and later led the Naval Surface Warfare Center team behind the bunker-busting bomb used in Afghan tunnels after 9/11.

Alex Maranghides

Alex Maranghides was the odd case: Greek, well-off, with no emigrants in the family. His mother won sailing medals with the king of Greece; his father worked on Aristotle Onassis's yacht and later persuaded the Hellenic Air Force to buy Lockheed's F-16. Alex liked difficulty. At twelve he circled Sifnos in a ten-foot inflatable Avon, thirty-seven miles with no radio, GPS or phone, and he chose Worcester Polytechnic Institute to design ships.

Fire science and two uneven pits

Shipbuilding struck him as cookbook work. In his junior year he found fire science, taught at only two graduate programs in the country, WPI and the University of Maryland. Hartford was the hub of property insurance, which had long paid WPI to learn what it needed to price fire risk. A professor with NASA money to study fire in space took him on, and his senior project, flown on the shuttle, measured how ignitable paper was at varying moisture levels. A 1973 government report, America Burning, had already called the nation's fire problem systemic and noted that no other developed country lost more lives and property per capita to fire, and that Americans met the subject with indifference.

Indoor fire research drew nearly all the money, because government and insurers both wanted losses reduced. Wildfire was left largely to the U.S. Forest Service and other stewards of open land. It resisted the same treatment. A chair on fire produces one megawatt, while a wildfire front a hundred meters tall can produce a hundred and fifty megawatts per linear meter, so twenty meters of front outproduce the largest power plants. Walls and openings fix the airflow of an indoor fire; outside, wind, fuels of different scales and atmospheric interaction govern how it moves.

The wildland-urban interface

The Oakland firestorm of October 1991 killed twenty-five people and destroyed more than three thousand homes. Nobody was studying what happens where fire crosses from forest into houses, the wildland-urban interface. Forest fuel is continuous and uniform; in a community it is discontinuous and heterogeneous, which makes burning far harder to predict. At a Missoula, Montana symposium in March 1993, Alex found that the outdoor experts saw the problem but treated it as the community's rather than theirs. He had to persuade his professor that the interface deserved a thesis, then wrote a program estimating how far burning vegetation needed to stand from a house to keep it from catching.

Halon and the towers

No one was hiring in that space. On a whim he mailed a resume to the U.S. Navy and within three months was running large fire experiments on ships, spending seven years replacing halon, banned by the 1987 Montreal Protocol for destroying ozone. One halon molecule extinguished three times as much fire as the next best agent, and substitutes cost more and took three times the space to store. His team of 120 settled on FM-200. On the morning of September 11, 2001, he was aboard the USS Ronald Reagan in the Chesapeake Bay when NIST asked him to run its fire laboratory and to explain why the towers fell. Joining made him an American citizen.

The bureau Alex later joined began with questions that sounded like trick physics problems: How heavy is a pound? How big is a foot? In 1885 the Treasury's weights and measures office told Congress the American pound's weight "is not known." New York surveyors used at least four different feet, among them a Bushwick foot, so some Brooklyn parcels could not be taxed; they existed on no map.

Standards the market would not make

The agency drifted from making standards to checking whether they were kept. When it tested what the government bought, it found manufacturers were not even meeting their own standards, which outraged them and reached Congress. The founding law listed six functions, five narrow and one broad, the "solution of problems arising in connection with standards," which let the bureau study nearly anything touching standards. Markets left alone do not create standards; they create fifteen kinds of electrical sockets and twelve gauges of railroad track, and what economists call asymmetry of information. The 1904 Great Baltimore Fire destroyed some fifteen hundred buildings because hoses from other towns would not fit the city's hydrants, each town having its own thread standard. The bureau set a standard and invented an adapter, but could not impose its answers.

Measuring the towers

To re-create the North Tower floors struck by Flight 11, Alex's team rebuilt Marsh McLennan's cubicles, carpets and file cabinets life-size and burned them over and over. Weighing the floors as they burned gave the cleanest measure of heat release, so the team invented cooling boxes to keep the scales working inside a furnace reaching 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The plane's impact alone could not bring the buildings down, and in theory neither could the fire. The surprise was how brittle the insulation was: the impact cracked it, exposing the core's steel columns and floor trusses to fire, and insulation meant to buy time became fuel. Jet-fueled fire weakened the exposed steel until the trusses holding one floor gave, the floor sagged and pulled the inner column and outer walls inward, then fell onto the floor below, and the towers collapsed into their own footprints.

Burning one tree

With the tower work winding down, Alex turned to wildfire, and to Ruddy Mell, a tinkerer whose degrees in applied mathematics and geophysics served the conviction that a model is a model only if it predicts observed behavior. No two trees are alike, so they bought Maryland Christmas trees, burned them repeatedly, and took each one apart into four bins, three sizes of branches and the needles, because only material thinner than a centimeter ignites, and needles alone are two-thirds of the mass that burns. Modeling a single tree took eighteen months.

Into the fire

Modeling a wildland-urban fire was harder: terrain, wind, and man-made fuels, where a play structure burns differently than a toolshed. No government would send untrained scientists into a big fire, so Alex and Ruddy earned the Red Card, a license to fight wildfires on federal lands, training until they could deploy a fire shelter in thirty seconds and walk three miles with fifty-pound packs in forty-five minutes. In late October 2007 the head of Cal Fire called Alex about a power line that had ignited chaparral near San Diego. The Witch Fire had burned more than eleven hundred homes countywide and nearly two hundred thousand acres, and half a million people had evacuated.

The Trails

Ruddy left a week in, when his wife fell ill, so Alex worked the Witch Fire alone with a Red Card and a NIST DAMAGE INSPECTOR shirt. He chose The Trails in Rancho Bernardo because the losses were partial: 245 of 275 homes sat inside the perimeter, 74 destroyed and 16 damaged. Rubble teaches little, he found; the value was in the damaged and, less so, the intact. Golf balls burned on one side only showed the fire's direction, and revealed intensity varying enormously and very locally rather than arriving as a wall of flame. Alex could not reproduce any of it in a lab, so he gathered evidence the way a journalist or historian would, except that description was only his route to prescription. His $600,000 of NIST funding depended on producing a plan.

Two dials

Risk divided in two. Exposure came from weather, terrain and fuels; the other type came from the structures themselves. Each house scored 1 to 4 on how hardened it was, from no thought given to the risk up to insulated windows, closed vents and defensible planting. Exposure resisted the same treatment. Earthquakes have the Richter scale, hurricanes have Categories, and only once the forces are measured can engineers adjust building codes. Wildland-urban fire had no number, though a third of the country lived with the threat, because exposure varies locally: three feet of distance can drop it by an order of magnitude. Fire is also the only natural disaster whose risk self-propagates. Wind does not make wind; "fire makes fire." The pair framed the answer as two dials, exposure and house, so that dialing up fuel risk requires dialing down house risk, and no single solution exists.

Embers

Brian Fennessy, deputy chief of San Diego Fire-Rescue, had left hoses in parked cars because homes kept igniting miles behind the front. He was angry that Cal Fire had let an investigator into the chaos, then reversed himself: Alex told him interior homes ignited before perimeter ones, verified through fire alarm companies, and that embers caused two-thirds of the ignitions in a WUI fire. Fennessy had seen palm fronds the size of beach umbrellas flying through the air on fire. He gave Alex permission to interview every firefighter.

Bird stops

Spanish tile roofs looked lethal by the raw count: 37 of the 74 destroyed homes had them. But The Trails held only twelve wood roofs, all of which burned, against 154 Spanish tile roofs, of which 76 percent survived. The tile roofs that burned lacked bird stops, letting nests form beneath the tiles that embers could ignite with very little energy. Irrigation did not save the cardiologist's palms; a fire truck had hosed his driveway for six hours. Of the 16 damaged homes, 15 were defended by crews.

Amarillo and after

The Amarillo fires let Alex rebuild ignition in detail: ten trained people, 29,000 photographs, every woodpile, picnic table and play structure mapped, 120 burned sheds against 18 unburned. Fences were the discovery. A fence carried fire between houses, or to a toolshed, which then radiated onto a home. In the lab, two fences side by side produced ten-foot flames rather than two-foot ones. Anything that can carry fire from one parcel to another will. Fire is less like flood than like smallpox: the only immunity is herd immunity. Waldo Canyon confirmed it, with only 10 percent of burned homes lit directly by flames, and it showed how thin wood trim on garage doors fails and how fast a fire can consume a home in a minute. By 2018 the Camp Fire had burned more than 150,000 acres and destroyed over 18,000 buildings, and it was the intermix fire Alex judged worth spending his once-every-six-years budget on.

A place apart

NIST sat on the fringe of government, run by career officials until 1989, when its director became a presidential appointee and average tenure fell from eleven years to two. When the American Wood Council objected that Alex's Witch Fire and Amarillo reports would hurt the timber industry, his superiors told the lobbyists to get lost. Cal Fire has an angle, Alex said, and so does the insurance industry, but NIST was neutral.

Howard Lutnick

That neutrality eroded. Money went to congressional pet projects, and after a guest researcher in Boulder cracked a plutonium vial, a congressional investigation required six signatures before any fire experiment. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was never once asked why he wanted the job. He insisted on personally signing every Commerce check above $100,000, then made his signature nearly unobtainable. When the White House proposed cutting NIST's budget nearly in half, he said nothing. A Partnership for Public Service survey found that nearly 70 percent of about five hundred Commerce employees felt less engaged than a year earlier, and that 6 percent trusted their political leaders.

Retirement

Alex quit at the end of April, fifty-six, persuaded the work would take generations rather than years and exhausted. He kept working, fifty hours a week instead of seventy, training the one younger researcher who might replace him. "We're one deep," he said.

Two mistakes

• The first was suppressing wildfire from the late nineteenth century into the late twentieth, turning many small explosions into enormous ticking bombs as the climate warmed.
• The second was the U.S. Forest Service's advice in the 1970s to push all fuel away from a house in the woods, sound for an isolated cabin but, transplanted into a community, moving the shed into position to ignite the neighbor's home.

Both failed because a policy wise in one setting can be foolish in another. A third mistake loomed, giving up on the research. "It's hanging by a thread," Alex said.

ESCAPE

The Camp Fire killed eighty-five people, twice the toll of any American wildfire in a century until Lahaina in 2023. Intact buildings teach nothing, since fire may never have reached them; among people the logic inverts, because the dead reveal nothing about what kept others alive. Cal Fire had stashed those it could not extract in parks and parking lots, giving NIST bunkers to study. ESCAPE carried two messages:

• Plan for no-notice events.
• Know where to go.

The two dials

The Hazard Mitigation Methodology condensed everything Alex and Ruddy had learned about which materials ignite. It did not quantify risk; it assumed a realistic worst case and asked how much spacing a house needed, leaving two dials to turn. At his final talk to the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, the more important dial was American tolerance for collective sacrifice: the story had to change from "my home is my castle" to "my neighborhood is my castle."

Berkeley

A woman from Berkeley told him afterward that her city had no fire problem. Then the Palisades fire burned more than five thousand homes and caused roughly $25 billion in insured losses, and Berkeley's council noticed how closely its hills resembled the Palisades. Insurers had already withdrawn from as many as a million California homes since 2019. The homes at the top of the Berkeley hills, down the ridge from the 1991 Oakland fire, lay in the district of a newly elected councilman named Brent Blackaby.

Five feet

In early 2025 Brent Blackaby, after consulting the fire department and outside experts familiar with Alex's work, proposed a law requiring people whose houses formed the first line of defense against incoming wildfire to fortify their property. Anything combustible within five feet had to be cleared, with exceptions such as giant redwoods without low-hanging limbs. Privacy hedges were banned, and wood fences had to be removed or replaced with metal. The approach came from Cal Fire, which had taken it from Alexander Maranghides's collected work. Compliance was not optional, since a line of defense is only as strong as its weakest link.

What it left out

It did not go as far as Alex thought it should. By law it could not require hardening the house itself, so the wood fence had to go while the wood deck went unmentioned, and with no property setbacks a toolshed could move to the property line, where it threatened the neighbor more. The zone ran a quarter-mile deep, though NIST's eleven-hundred-page Camp Fire report showed at page 129, figure 51 that embers had traveled as far as three miles. Removing fuel and snipping fire pathways turned the exposure dial the right direction, but how far nobody could say.

Passage and backlash

The council passed the law unanimously in June 2025, and the fire department set out to explain it to roughly a thousand households. The young firefighters knocking on doors found another risk rising in the hills: residents objected to bearing responsibility for private property on behalf of the wider community, in the same register as vaccine and mask fights, and a meeting on noncombustible gates and fences drew two hundred people to a church basement. Rhonda Gruska, whose home sat in an arboretum of combustibles, launched a recall campaign against Blackaby. There was no deception; the fire that inspired the law came two months after his election.

Colin Arnold

Colin Arnold, the assistant fire chief assigned to create the new zone, wants voluntary compliance rather than notices and fines. If the thousand homes burned, the California FAIR Plan would face about $6.5 billion in claims. Yards as shaggy as sheepdogs sit beside yards like shaved terriers, and a sheepdog can pass fleas to a terrier. The best case is eight of nine houses on a block complying, and the eight cheering when the ninth is cited. Bending the rate of ignition below the rate the department can answer would build a buffer the market would reward: insurers would return to compete, and the rest of the wildland-urban interface would follow.

What he hears

He has heard every proposed alternative:

• Fly drones around the clock during fire season.
• Cut down the big trees.
• Drop a lake of retardant from a 747.
• Get better at putting out fires.

Some came from college professors. The pandemic's attacks on expertise have returned, from people who wore masks and cheered the vaccine, a liberal elite turning the current administration's tactics against science that asks them to change. At a house belonging to family friends, he says the owners believe they comply. The tree will light the fence, and the fence will light the house.

Key Takeaways

• Wildland-urban fire is the one natural hazard that feeds itself, since every burning structure becomes fuel for the next; the neighborhood rather than the house is therefore the unit of defense, and any block is only as strong as its least prepared parcel.
• Exposure and construction are separate dials, and turning one down cannot compensate for leaving the other up: a rule that stops at the property line, or removes the fence while the deck and the relocated shed go untouched, addresses only half of what decides whether a home survives.
• The elements that convert a survivable fire into a catastrophe are small ones, a missing bird stop, brittle insulation cracked by impact, a fence bridging two lots, so attention belongs on the connectors rather than on the headline force.
• Long-range embers, not the flame front, account for most ignitions, which means the defensible space immediately around a structure matters less than the reader might assume and the depth of any required buffer deserves scrutiny.
• Neutral standard-setting agencies staffed by long-serving technical people are what let a society answer questions no market will answer on its own, and patronage, personal sign-off requirements and budget cuts dismantle precisely the capacity this problem demands.