Economy for Everyone
An LLC was created days before it received a $143 million federal contract. The contract bypassed competitive bidding. The company that ran the ad campaign, a firm whose CEO is married to the contracting official, doesn’t appear in public contract documents. Seven lawmakers requested an investigation. The inspector general who would have reviewed the contract had already been removed.
That’s one procurement case. It illustrates a pattern.
On June 3, 2026, DHS canceled most pending Noem-era contracts after congressional scrutiny and an internal watchdog review. That case shows both directions at once: contracts moved quickly when normal approval channels were bypassed, and oversight that still functioned stopped some of them. Weak oversight created the opening. Functioning oversight closed it.
The United States has structural resistance Hungary never had. Courts still block unlawful orders. States control their own election administration. Civil society hasn’t been captured. This post documents active pressure against that resistance - separating confirmed abuses from things that look wrong but haven’t been confirmed. The lever categories are familiar. We’re earlier in the story.
The three-stage logic
Remove oversight. Raise the cost of resistance. Route benefits through loyalty. That is the machinery.
Here’s the operating logic. First, get rid of the referees - the inspectors general, the watchdogs, the people whose job is to catch you. Once they’re gone, contracts don’t get audited. Irregularities don’t go anywhere.
Then make resistance expensive. Not necessarily illegal, just costly. Target a law firm that took a case you didn’t like. Fire the federal workers who pushed back. You don’t have to win every fight. You just have to make the math clear to everyone watching.
Then take care of the people who are with you. Contracts, exemptions, pardons. Now they have something to protect.
No master plan required. Just make extraction cheap and oversight expensive, and the rest follows.
What the lever map shows
Here are the three levers. The full receipts are in the linked case study.
Hungary shows one mature version of this playbook. Hungary’s version matured over sixteen years. What’s happening here is earlier in that process. Courts are still blocking specific mechanisms - something Hungary’s opposition never had.
Weak oversight, opaque discretion, and political proximity are exactly the conditions corruption needs. Some items below confirm abuse. Others show the guardrails are too weak to catch it.
Capture the referees
On January 24, 2025, seventeen inspectors general were fired by two-sentence email. No 30-day notice. No substantive rationale. Both are required by statute.
The White House said only “changing priorities.” No selection criteria were disclosed. But several had live investigations. The DOD inspector general had an open SpaceX compliance review: foreign leader contacts, classified disclosure obligations. The USDA inspector general had an active Neuralink animal treatment investigation. The USAID inspector general published an $8.2 billion humanitarian funds risk report on February 10. He was fired the next day.
In Storch v. Hegseth, a federal judge ruled the firings violated the Inspector General Act. Then he declined to reinstate the IGs. They hadn’t shown “irreparable harm,” the court said. The law was broken. The court declined to enforce it. The IG workforce declined 16.6% by early 2026.
Schedule F’s final regulations, effective March 2026, reclassify approximately 50,000 civil service positions into at-will employment. The regulations explicitly call civil service protections “unconstitutional overcorrections.” The stated goal is making independence itself the problem.
Trump fired the Democratic Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioners. The FTC now runs with two, both Republican. A two-commissioner FTC can’t issue final rules or authorize most enforcement actions. The statute requires five commissioners with no more than three from either party - bipartisan balance, explicit in the law. The balance requirement is still on the books. There’s just no one left to balance.
Punish resistance
A March 2025 executive order directed agencies to revoke security clearances at a law firm that represented Hillary Clinton in 2016. A federal judge permanently blocked it. The ruling found violations of the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments and stated plainly that “settling personal vendettas by targeting a disliked business is not a legitimate use of the powers of the U.S. government.” Similar orders targeting other law firms produced similar rulings.
Reuters’ retribution tracker, a Pulitzer Prize winner, documents 470+ targets and 462 punitive acts, including 128 federal workers fired for probing or challenging administration directives. A prosecution doesn’t have to succeed to raise the cost of visible opposition. That’s what makes it work as deterrence.
A June 3, 2026 order making roughly 8,000 senior federal workers easier to fire extends the same logic inside the bureaucracy: independence becomes conditional, and everyone watching understands the risk.
Pay the constituency
Emergency procurement contracts went to vendors created days before award, with politically connected hidden subcontractors. Tariff exemptions moved through a process with no public criteria, opaque enough that the industry group representing one beneficiary said it was “as surprised as anybody” when the exemption appeared. Roughly 1,600 pardons in nine months, nearly all to political allies, erased over $1.3 billion in victim restitution. The formal Office of the Pardon Attorney handled 10 of those 1,600. Its career director was fired and replaced with a loyalist.
Regular people pay the cost
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Yale Budget Lab both confirm tariffs are regressive: the bottom 10% of households pay 0.8% of after-tax income in additional costs; the top 10% pay 0.3%. The One Big Beautiful Bill cut Medicaid, SNAP, and housing vouchers on timelines running through 2034. CBO estimates 5.2 million adults will lose Medicaid coverage under work requirements by 2034. Resources move upward. The explanation points elsewhere.
The redistricting layer
Who draws the maps determines who can contest everything else. It’s the lever that moves all the others.
Three Supreme Court decisions have compounded each other over seven years. Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) removed federal courts from partisan gerrymandering cases entirely. Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP (2024) raised the bar for proving racial gerrymandering. It’s much harder now to prove race drove the map when legislators say it was just politics. Louisiana v. Callais (April 2026) struck down Louisiana’s majority-minority district and made it harder to defend minority-representation maps under the Voting Rights Act. The combined effect: challenging maps as racial gerrymandering got harder, and defending majority-minority maps as Voting Rights Act-required got harder at the same time.
Then there’s the Purcell principle: the rule that courts shouldn’t change election rules close to an election. It’s worked as a one-way ratchet. Courts have been blocked from ordering fixes for maps they found illegal, as far out as nine to eleven months before a general election. But Purcell wasn’t cited when Callais itself produced massive changes to Louisiana’s maps less than three weeks before the state’s primary. Louisiana’s governor suspended the primary after roughly 42,000 voters had already cast mail ballots.
Justice Kagan wrote in dissent: “It should be deeply troubling that the same justices who created and extended the Purcell principle paid no attention to it whatsoever in handing down a ruling that will dramatically change the conduct of elections that are ongoing.”
The playbook Kagan identified: draw an illegal map, run elections under it while legal challenges proceed, wait for a ruling close enough to the next election that Purcell blocks any fix, then repeat. The Louisiana primary suspension shows where that ends up. Short version: you can draw an illegal map, run elections under it for years while the legal fight drags out, and by the time a court agrees it was wrong, it’s too late to change it for the next election.
Forty-three states don’t have independent redistricting commissions. In those states, whoever wins the legislature draws the maps.
What’s holding
Courts are functioning as veto points. The permanent injunction on the Perkins Coie executive order held. NPR and PBS funding was permanently blocked from cutoff. Federal courts blocked nearly all of the March 2025 election executive order. A federal three-judge panel blocked Alabama’s post-Callais redistricting map for intentional racial discrimination in May 2026. Republican-appointed judges ruled against the administration in multiple separate cases on constitutional grounds.
States control their own election administration. Hungary never had that. Seven states have fully independent redistricting commissions. Michigan and Colorado are among them: equal numbers of Democrats, Republicans, and independents make the final calls. No governor appoints them. No legislature approves the maps. They’ve held through party changes.
Investigative journalism and civil society are keeping score. Reuters’ retribution tracker, ProPublica’s procurement investigations, CREW’s emoluments monitoring, Democracy Docket’s redistricting coverage. That documented record is what makes accountability litigation possible.
The pushback crosses party lines. Republican Senator Tom Tillis confronted the DHS Secretary at a Senate Judiciary hearing with documented data on FEMA delay impacts. Republican-appointed judges have ruled against the administration on separate constitutional grounds.
The limits of what courts can do
The IG case shows the gap. The court found the firings violated the law. It still declined to reinstate the IGs. They hadn’t shown “irreparable harm.” You can be right and still lose the ground.
Courts are creating friction. They haven’t reversed the structural changes. The IG workforce is down 16.6%. Schedule F is in effect. The bill’s program cuts are law. Tariffs are in effect. The pardon process has been reorganized. None of that got rolled back by court order.
Most of what’s documented here could be undone by a new administration on day one. That’s different from Hungary, where the courts were gone before the opposition could compete.
But some things won’t flip easily. Redistricting maps are locked in through 2030, no matter who wins in 2026 or 2028. The bill’s program cuts run through 2034. Unwinding them requires the same legislative majority that passed them. The redistricting doctrine from Rucho, Alexander, and Callais takes a constitutional amendment or a court willing to overturn its own recent work.
These mechanisms are stacking up. The question is whether they accumulate toward conditions where a future opposition faces enough structural disadvantage - in maps, enforcement capacity, and institutional memory - that contesting power gets harder before it’s competitive.
What structural fixes are needed
Inspector general protections with enforcement. Written notice requirements that can be ignored are theater, and January 2025 proved it. The fix is legislation with teeth: budget protection, and the legal standing for IGs to contest their own removal.
Independent redistricting commissions. Seven states have them. Forty-three don’t. Michigan and Colorado use equal numbers of Democrats, Republicans, and independents by design - no governor appoints them, no legislature approves the maps. That’s why they hold through party changes. The 2030 redistricting cycle is the next window. The organizing work starts now, before anyone’s paying attention.
Audit requirements on emergency procurement. “Urgency” has become a bypass mechanism. Require independent audit even when competitive bidding timelines are compressed. The emergency exception shouldn’t mean no-receipts spending.
FTC commissioner protections. You can’t run antitrust enforcement with two commissioners from one party. Market consolidation keeps moving while the legal fight over the removals plays out.
Pardon process transparency. When 10 of 1,600 pardons go through the formal Office of the Pardon Attorney - and its career director has been replaced - the process has no usable front door for ordinary citizens. Public criteria and independent review aren’t complicated asks.
The framing that must hold
Hungary’s capture took sixteen years. The courts went first, then the media, then the money. By the time it was obvious, it was mature. Courts in the United States are still blocking unlawful orders. States still control their own elections. Civil society is still producing receipts. That’s meaningful distance from where Hungary was in 2014. “Not Hungary” is a map - where the resistance holds, and what would have to fail.
Here’s the lesson from Hungary: watch the referees. When the IGs are gone, when career civil servants can be fired at will, when the antitrust enforcer can’t act, the other mechanisms run without anyone who can stop them. It doesn’t happen in one dramatic moment everyone sees clearly. It happens through quiet institutional redesign, piece by piece.
Every democracy has these levers. The question is whether the rules protecting them bind the next government too - including the one that weakened them.
One steady action to take this week
Find out whether your state has an independent redistricting commission by searching “[your state] redistricting commission” at ballotpedia.org. If it doesn’t, find the organization doing commission advocacy in your state and sign their mailing list. The 2030 redistricting cycle is the next major window. The work that shapes it starts before anyone is paying attention.
Action ladder
If you’re a voter or concerned citizen: Call your representative’s district office and ask one question: what oversight actions has this member taken on IG removals, emergency procurement, or FEMA disaster aid delays? Also ask whether they support enforceable inspector general removal protections and mandatory audits for emergency procurement contracts. The answer tells you what accountability pressure exists in your congressional district. If the answer is “none,” that’s information worth having and sharing.
If you’re a small business owner or work in a field affected by tariffs: Document the specific impacts (supplier changes, cost increases, jobs) and share them with your congressional representatives. JPMorgan Chase Institute data shows tariff payments by midsized businesses tripled over 2025. Individual cases help translate aggregate data into visible political pressure.
If you work in policy or advocacy: State-level redistricting reform is currently more achievable than federal-level change. Several states have passed independent commission initiatives through ballot measures. Common Cause and the League of Women Voters are doing the multi-year work before the 2030 redistricting cycle matters.
Long-term structural asks: IG protection legislation with enforcement mechanisms. Federal procurement reform requiring independent audit even during declared emergencies. FTC commissioner protections. Redistricting commission legislation at the state level, building toward 2030. SNAP, Medicaid, and housing voucher level funding advocacy at the state level as the bill’s cuts phase in through 2034. These fights are unglamorous. They’re the structural foundation that makes other accountability possible.
How to talk about it
What it is: Public money and state authority are being routed through political discretion without the normal checks that make that routing trackable. Contracts go to vendors created days before award. Tariff exemptions go to the politically connected through a process with no public criteria. Pardons erase over $1.3 billion in victim restitution while the formal pardon process sits unused. Disaster aid flows through a personal sign-off requirement that produces documented bipartisan concern. When the auditors are gone, the audit trails don’t disappear - they just don’t go anywhere.
What to keep distinct: Courts are still blocking specific mechanisms. Redistricting commissions in seven states are still operating independently. That matters. The structural problem is what runs underneath: procurement without competitive bidding, oversight without enforcement, discretion without transparency. The operators change; the machinery stays. The fix is the guardrails.
Bridge language:
- “Whether or not you support the overall policy direction, contracts going to LLCs created days before award while the public can’t see the subcontractor chain - the concern is whether public money is being tracked. Most people across the political spectrum think public money should be trackable.”
- “The disaster aid story isn’t about whether FEMA is funded. It’s about whether the aid reaches the people who need it based on the damage assessment, or whether it waits on a political sign-off. A Republican senator brought the data to the hearing.”
- “The redistricting changes are technical and boring, but they determine whether your vote translates into representation. Three Supreme Court decisions in seven years have made it easier to draw maps that dilute specific communities and harder to challenge those maps in court, regardless of which party benefits in your state right now.”
Related reading
- Winning Is Not Repair - winning an election against a captured system doesn’t undo the capture; the Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Germany cases
- How Organizing Beat the Fear Machine - what the organizing model looked like in Hungary and why it worked
- What Hungary Taught Me About American Politics - the dignity-preserving off-ramp lesson and what transfers to US organizing
- The Authoritarian Playbook in the United States - the full case study with receipts and evidence labels