The Steady State: The Weekly

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

Who Will Stand for the Republic?

The Steady State — Sun, 17 May 2026 10:01:22 GMT

Photo: With appreciation to Roll Call

Republics Do Not Survive Automatically

The Steady State sounds the warning bell that republics collapse when citizens, leaders, and institutions decide preserving comfort matters more than defending constitutional principle. Constitutional democracy endures only when citizens, public servants, military officers, and political leaders are willing to defend law and democratic principles even when doing so carries personal or political cost. The United States is approaching a moment in which neutrality, silence, and passivity may themselves become forms of complicity.

THE ESSENTIALS

Steady State Board Chairman speaks to NYTimes on the targeting of US businesses in Ukraine

The Social Media Take-Away of the Week

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The Slow Unraveling

The Steady State — Sun, 10 May 2026 10:02:04 GMT

What Happens When Democracy’s Guardrails Fail?

The Steady State focused this week on the growing erosion of democratic institutions in the United States and the broader West. Politicized intelligence, weakened diplomacy, judicial overreach, corruption, hybrid warfare, and fear-driven politics reveal a common thread: the replacement of expertise and truth with loyalty, ideology and personal power. Corruption, manufactured fear, attacks on professional institutions and the normalization of executive overreach are indicative of a slow collapse of the norms, institutions and shared realities that sustain constitutional government.

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The Essentials

Trending on the Twitterverse

The Mission

The Chairman of the Board of The Steady State, The Honorable James C. O’Brien, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the security of critical Baltic Sea infrastructure. Noting that addressing these threats requires not just technical solutions but also a workforce and leadership “entrusted with the use of force and the protection of civil liberties” to operate with the highest degree of integrity.” He further emphasized that “safeguarding democratic institutions requires competent, experienced, and principled leadership, especially in positions entrusted with extraordinary power.”

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The Weekly: The New Rules Are No Rules

The Steady State — Sun, 03 May 2026 20:01:19 GMT

This week The Steady State reveals the gradual but consistent nature of the autocratic decline we are experiencing: not in sudden crisis but in steady transformation, where democratic institutions are increasingly bent toward political ends rather than breaking outright.

Law enforcement and national security tools show signs of being used for retribution, while whistleblowers and accountability mechanisms face growing pressure, weakening the system’s ability to self-correct. At the same time, purges and politicization are eroding professional expertise across government, degrading capacity in ways that are gradual but lasting.

No single development is conclusive on its own; rather, it is the cumulative effect—each step normalizing the next—that is reshaping governance into something more personalized, less constrained by rules, and more dependent on loyalty than law. This is not collapse, but a quiet adaptation with profound implications.

As norms erode and retaliation rises, governance shifts from predictable law to discretionary power.

This week’s trending post from social media! Join us on your favorite platform.

A free press does not exist to protect presidents from uncomfortable evidence. It exists to put relevant facts before the public.

MISSION

As part of The Steady State purpose to to both warn and educate the American people about threats to our constitutional democracy, members regularly visit college campuses for discussions with students and faculty. Executive Director Steven A. Cash was recently invited to his alma mater, Vassar College, for such an event.

In this episode of Vassar College’s “What is Engaged Pluralism Podcast,” Kimberly Williams Brown hosts Steven Cash as he discusses the event, a campus talk that was disrupted. Cash urges civic engagement, dialogue and constitutional literacy, while warning that both rising political polarization and attempts to control speech, whether by protesters or government, reflect broader risks to pluralism and democratic norms.

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The Weekly: The Erosion Is the Event

The Steady State — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:01:49 GMT

This week the Steady State zeroes in the misperception that what looks like political turbulence is in fact a structural drift; the repeated normalization of institutional overreach, manipulation of truth, and declining restraint across government and civic life is gradually hollowing out the guardrails of American democracy.

THE ESSENTIALS

The Weekly: Anatomy of a Breakdown

The Steady State — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 20:01:20 GMT

This week lays bare the consequences of improvised and personality-driven statecraft: The loss of coherence and credibility. As expertise is sidelined, and negotiation gives way to coercion and spectacle, foreign policy becomes less predictable and more prone to miscalculation.

The Essentials

Quoted

“The Steady State, an organization of retired national security officials dedicated to opposing Trump, hailed Orbán’s defeat as “signal event” that could serve as a template for the US. Orbán is not only an autocrat whose loss demonstrates the resilience of democratic opposition; he is also directly relevant here,” said Steven Cash, the group’s executive director.”
Read The Guardian article,

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The Weekly: Sowing the Storm

The Steady State — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:01:01 GMT

Welcome to expert analysis from former senior national security leaders—spanning intelligence, diplomacy, the military, and the law. Catch up on the week’s critical insights or dive deep into the issues defining our moment.

If you feel like the guardrails are thinning, you’re not imagining it. This week’s digest exposes the widening gap between executive rhetoric and national security reality—highlighting how broken windows in global diplomacy and a "see no evil" approach at the ODNI are leaving the door wide open for autocracy.

The Essentials

The Mission

“The integrity of our legal system depends on the principle that no one is above the law, including government attorneys,” said Steven Cash, Executive Director of The Steady State, and an attorney. “This proposed rule would create a mechanism for shielding Department of Justice attorneys from independent professional accountability. It is inconsistent with federal statute, and it is inconsistent with the basic expectations of a constitutional democracy.” —The Steady State this week objected to a proposed DoJ rule that undermines independent attorney oversight.

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