Capturing Federalism: Imposing Centralized Ideological Control

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

— James Madison, The Federalist No. 47 (1788)

5.1 Introduction: Federalism as Myth and Weapon

Having mapped the capture of executive and judicial machinery, we turn to federalism, the connective tissue between national power and local autonomy, not as a static doctrine, but as a dynamic battleground in the integrated architecture of regime capture detailed throughout this volume. The concept of “federalism” has always functioned as both an emancipatory principle, enabling local self-government, and an exclusionary one, often invoked to shield regressive or anti-democratic practices from national correction. Yet what distinguishes Project 2025 is not simply its invocation of this duality, but its unprecedentedly explicit instrumentalization of federalism as a tactical lever to be deployed selectively to empower regime allies and swiftly discarded when local autonomy threatens central priorities.

What makes this chapter integral to Cluster B is that federalism capture is more than a struggle over administrative structure, it is a central mechanism for nullifying democratic self-governance itself. By selectively empowering or overriding states based on regime utility, P2025 severs local majorities’ ability to resist central imposition or register dissent through normal political channels. In effect, it engineers minority rule by design, not just at the ballot box but at every level where citizens might otherwise hold power to account.

P2025 cloaks itself in the language of “constitutional federalism,” promising to restore the delicate balance of power between Washington and the states and to return control to local communities. The Mandate for Leadership explicitly calls that ”Executive Order 13132 should be strengthened so that state regulatory and fiscal operations are not commandeered by the federal government through so-called cooperative federalism programs” (P2025, p. 49). Under close inspection, federalism is not treated as a principled commitment to decentralized governance but as a tactical lever, a form of instrumental legalism (the strategic use or disregard of legal principles, such as preemption or states’ rights, based solely on whether they advance regime objectives), to be pulled or ignored depending entirely on whether it advances regime interests or disables political resistance. When conservative states seek to dismantle regulations or restrict rights, the principle of “states’ rights” is held up as a sacred constitutional shield. Yet, when progressive states or municipalities attempt to protect civil liberties, expand voting access, or pursue their own policy priorities, the same coalition that invoked local control pivots swiftly to centralize authority, override local choices, and preempt democratic outcomes.

P2025 calls for a national campaign to excise

[t]he noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’…from curricula in every public school in the country.

P2025, p. 5

and goes further:

States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds.

P2025, p. 6

This explicit threat exposes that P2025’s invocation of “federalism” operates less as principled decentralization than as instrumental legalism, a lever pulled only when it advances regime interests. The contradiction here is not accidental but structural; “federalism,” under P2025’s architecture, functions less as constitutional safeguard than expedient mechanism for entrenching oligarchic control.

5.2 P2025’s Playbook: “Federalism” as Instrument of Oligarchic Consolidation

The instrumental deployment of federalism is nowhere more evident than in the domain of labor policy. P2025’s labor agenda positions itself as an effort to empower states and liberate markets by proposing state waivers from foundational labor laws, encouraging repeal of prevailing wage requirements, and attacking collective bargaining rights (P2025, ch. 18).¹ In practice these measures dismantle protections for workers and fracture organized opposition, while rhetoric about decentralization is maintained only so long as it does not obstruct central regime objectives.

This dynamic emerges with particular clarity in recent regulatory rollbacks proposed by the Department of Labor: removal or weakening of dozens of workplace protections, including rules safeguarding minimum wage standards for home health care workers; safety requirements in mines/construction; protections against retaliation for farmworkers; even basic OSHA enforcement powers.² Though presented as deregulatory innovation enabling state experimentation, these moves function primarily to erode baseline rights, especially when blue states attempt higher standards through ballot initiatives or local lawmaking. In such cases, federal authorities have blocked implementation or threatened funding withdrawals; deference to autonomy ends where regime priorities begin.

A similar logic prevails in financial regulation. P2025 calls for abolishing independent agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) under the guise of restoring market freedom (P2025, chs. 22, 27). But this has resulted not in regulatory pluralism but consolidation within loyalist executive branches: mass layoffs at CFPB in April 2025 transformed an agency responsible for returning billions to consumers into a shell stripped of enforcement capacity.³ Statutorily mandated offices were closed or left with a single staffer while priorities shifted away from protecting ordinary Americans toward serving political allies and donors.

Even in economic domains traditionally associated with free-market orthodoxy (e.g. trade), P2025’s rhetoric breaks down under scrutiny. Debates over trade policy within the administration expose how “free market” language is deployed selectively while protectionist tariffs are embraced whenever they offer tactical advantage against adversaries (P2025, ch. 26). Consistency matters less than immediate utility for regime consolidation. The analysis thus reveals not merely a tug-of-war between centralization and decentralization but an opportunistic alternation: P2025 champions “states’ rights” when it enables policy rollback or minority rule but pivots instantly to central preemption when progressive policies or local resistance threaten regime consolidation.

5.3 The Machinery of Control: Selective Preemption, Enforcement, and New Bureaucratic Leviathans

5.3.1 Selective Preemption & Override

At the heart of P2025’s capture architecture lies a willingness to override state and local authority whenever it threatens regime priorities, most visible when blue states advance policies at odds with regime interests, whether expanding voting access, strengthening environmental protections, or protecting reproductive rights. In such moments, the administration discards its rhetoric about “states’ rights” in favor of direct intervention from Washington.

Legal preemption becomes a preferred weapon: litigation is launched against states and municipalities pursuing independent courses; executive orders are crafted specifically to nullify ballot initiatives or state statutes; federal agencies threaten lawsuits against local election officials who refuse directives that serve national consolidation over local judgment. This weaponization marks a departure from both traditional constitutional doctrine, which has historically limited federal preemption under the Supremacy Clause,⁴ and prior practice where federal override was justified by clear constitutional or statutory mandates rather than shifting partisan utility. These interventions signal that deference to state autonomy is conditional, a principle honored only when it does not obstruct regime utility.

5.3.2 Weaponization of Federal Funding

The threat, and often the reality, of losing federal funding serves as another powerful tool for enforcing ideological discipline across states and municipalities. Grants meant for health care expansion, educational support, infrastructure repair, or disaster relief become bargaining chips rather than stable channels of intergovernmental partnership.

When voters approve Medicaid expansion at the state level or attempt to raise labor standards through referenda, new rules are issued from Washington that render such initiatives moot unless they fully conform with administration preferences. Funds can be delayed indefinitely or withheld altogether if a jurisdiction resists pressure to fall in line.

This dynamic is not ancillary; it strikes at the heart of democratic self-rule. Each time federal authority is invoked to override local initiatives or suppress state-level reforms, particularly those expanding rights or access, it directly contributes to the broader Cluster B project: breaking the feedback loop between popular sovereignty and actual policy outcomes, thereby entrenching oligarchic preconditions for minority rule.

This financial coercion transforms basic public welfare into an instrument of political control, ensuring that communities pay a tangible price for resisting central authority.

5.3.3 Administrative Lawfare & Agency Proliferation

Beyond legal override and fiscal pressure lies a deeper transformation inside federal agencies themselves, a shift from professional stewardship toward partisan loyalty enforced through bureaucratic purges and structural redesigns.

In 2025, DOJ became ground zero for this campaign against institutional independence. The Trump administration initiated sweeping dismissals targeting career officials up and down the chain, including ethics advisers, senior Marshals Service personnel, and prosecutors previously involved in high-profile investigations touching on Trump or his associates.⁵ These firings proceeded without cause or individualized review; instead they relied on broad assertions of presidential authority unconstrained by longstanding civil service norms.

This campaign accelerated after Supreme Court decisions provided temporary legal cover for mass layoffs across federal agencies. Department leadership began openly arguing in court that traditional civil service precedents, and even basic whistleblower protections, no longer applied at DOJ’s discretion. As detailed in Chapter 2’s analysis of Schedule F purges and Chapter 3’s survey of judicial subordination, and, as explored in Chapter 1’s drift–design feedback loop model, these mutually reinforcing moves exemplify how opportunistic interventions become hardened into architecture, each cycle lowering institutional resistance to centralized executive control and setting new precedents for future subversion.

Such tactics do more than chill dissent, they invert logic behind independent public service sector: where expertise once insulated law enforcement from political patronage/retaliation regime architects now treat structures as vessels for personal loyalty alone, radiating outward so state/local officials operate under threat knowing their institutional backers have been hollowed out by purges detailed above.

The pattern repeats across agency lines, and reaches its most dangerous form when top appointees contemplate direct defiance of judicial authority itself.⁷

Inside DOJ’s storied Civil Rights Division, the agency created during the civil rights movement to defend equal protection, the shift was especially stark. By late spring 2025, more than seventy percent of attorneys had departed within months as its mission was recast to enforce presidential executive orders targeting so-called “woke” policies while abandoning traditional anti-discrimination work.⁹ Investigations into voting rights violations and police misconduct were dropped; amicus briefs defending vulnerable communities withdrawn; sections dedicated to protecting minorities left hollow or redirected toward enforcing partisan priorities.

Taken together, these maneuvers amount to nothing less than an internal coup against independent governance, a deliberate campaign to erase boundaries between law enforcement and partisan power. Where once civil servants served as buffers against politicization, now only loyalty determines survival. Where courts could check executive excesses, direct defiance is now contemplated at the highest levels. Local governments can no longer expect deference in core domains like elections or policing; seasoned professionals find themselves prosecuted or purged for failing to comply with shifting regime imperatives.

In this architecture, selective preemption is not an aberration but a systemic feature. Federal power is invoked whenever it serves regime consolidation, whether through threats against noncompliant state officials, withholding critical funding from resistant jurisdictions, or flooding key agencies with appointees unconstrained by law or professional norms. Bureaucratic expansion follows suit: new offices like DOGE are created specifically to bypass traditional oversight mechanisms and concentrate investigatory powers directly under White House control.

This architecture produces a machinery built for capture, not only of institutions but also of norms and expectations that underpin American constitutional democracy itself. What remains is not federalism as principle but preemption as punishment; not administrative continuity but purge-driven governance; not lawful restraint but personalistic rule by waiver and exception. These mechanisms are not limited to traditional domains of governance; their most potent, and least reversible, application is found in the reengineering of America’s economic order itself.

5.4 Reengineering Economic Federalism for Oligarchic Rule

The true measure of P2025’s “federalism” is revealed not in its rhetoric about local empowerment or constitutional fidelity, but in the concrete reengineering of America’s economic governance. Here, the regime’s selective devolution and centralization serve a single end: to concentrate power in the hands of an emergent cryptoplutocracy while disabling organized opposition across all layers of society. This moves beyond policy preference or ideological drift; it is systemic design, an architecture for minority rule built atop three interlocking vectors: the demolition of worker protections and organized labor, the weaponization of financial regulators for political discipline and enrichment, and the transformation of trade policy into a blunt instrument for regime advantage.

5.4.1 Assault on Worker Protections and Organized Labor

P2025 deploys “restoring local control” as a euphemism for a radical assault on national labor standards, a campaign that would have been unthinkable in previous eras of bipartisan consensus around basic worker rights. The plan calls for sweeping waivers from foundational statutes such as the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), encourages states to opt out of prevailing wage requirements like Davis-Bacon, and explicitly targets collective bargaining through efforts to weaken or eliminate the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). These measures are presented as deregulatory modernization or “empowering workers,” yet their operational intent is unmistakable: to fragment organized labor, suppress union power at its roots, and render any opposition structurally impotent.

This dynamic does not operate in isolation. National guardrails are dismantled precisely so that loyalty tests, once reserved for federal employees, cascade downward into every sector reliant on public contracting or regulatory oversight (see Ch. 2). The ultimate effect is a labor landscape where wage floors can be lowered at will by regime-aligned statehouses; where union recognition is rendered virtually impossible; where even basic safety standards become negotiable favors rather than enforceable rights. In this way, “federalism” becomes a tool for ensuring that resistance, political or economic, is both isolated and easily crushed.

This case demonstrates how P2025’s version of federalism operates less as decentralization than demolition by design, removing baseline protections wherever they impede regime utility.

5.4.2 Weaponizing Treasury and Financial Regulators

Nowhere is federal economic power more nakedly instrumentalized than in P2025’s blueprint for Treasury, CFPB, FTC, and related agencies. The ostensible goals—“ending regulatory overreach,” “protecting American finance”—mask an agenda that retools every major financial regulator as an armature for political discipline and elite enrichment.

The abolition or functional gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) illustrates this logic with chilling clarity. Stripped of enforcement capacity through mass layoffs (see earlier Case File), the CFPB becomes a hollow shell: no longer protecting ordinary Americans from predatory lending or corporate fraud but serving as a warning to other agencies about the price of professional independence. Meanwhile, Treasury is directed to eliminate ESG initiatives outright, not out of principled neutrality but because such frameworks threaten fossil fuel interests central to regime patronage networks.

Antitrust enforcement at the FTC is similarly reoriented, not toward consumer welfare but toward punishing companies deemed insufficiently loyal or “woke.” State power now signals that business neutrality is no longer tolerated; active support is required, and dissent invites investigation or exclusion from public contracts.

The purge of the CFPB is the template for a broader assault on the administrative state, a clear signal that any agency whose mandate relies on impartial enforcement or objective analysis is a target for political annihilation. This logic of capture extends beyond regulatory bodies to the foundational institutions of economic truth itself, transforming the production of inconvenient data into an act of political subversion. This war on measurement is not merely a byproduct of the regime’s agenda but a central pillar of its power, a subject to which we will return. The weaponization of fact is mirrored by the weaponization of trade, where economic policy ceases to be a tool of national interest and becomes another lever of loyalty enforcement and political punishment.

5.4.3 Trade Policy as Political Weapon

The mythos of American federalism has long included spirited debate between free-market orthodoxy and protectionist intervention, but under P2025 this debate becomes mere theater. In practice, trade policy is wielded not according to any consistent philosophy but as an opportunistic weapon against both foreign adversaries and domestic dissidents.

The internal contradictions, Peter Navarro’s tariff maximalism versus Kent Lassman’s deregulatory market purism, are not weaknesses but features: they provide ideological cover while real decisions are made according only to regime utility. Tariffs are imposed on foreign competitors when it serves donor interests; exemptions are granted when politically convenient; retaliatory duties target corporations seen as insufficiently cooperative with administration priorities.

The outcome is an economy governed less by rules than by personalistic discretion, a system in which public goods are allocated through patronage networks rather than democratic accountability or market logic.

The devastation wrought in Lesotho is not an isolated consequence of U.S. trade weaponization; it is part of a broader pattern in which tariffs are deployed unpredictably, often with only vague or shifting rationales. Nowhere is this clearer than in the administration’s escalating tariff campaign against China and its global supply network.

If the transshipment crackdown demonstrates how regime discretion can destabilize entire sectors of the global economy, its use against American firms reveals that no actor, foreign or domestic, is exempt from discipline when political utility demands.

These strategies reveal P2025’s core innovation: economic federalism stripped down to its instrumental essence, a set of levers pulled solely in service of oligarchic consolidation and minority rule. Worker protections are dissolved so that resistance cannot organize; financial regulators are weaponized so that dissent cannot fund itself; trade policy becomes a tool not for national prosperity but factional reward and punishment.

This architecture not only entrenches inequality, it renders reversal ever more difficult by fragmenting solidarity across states and sectors while channeling resources upward into increasingly unaccountable hands. In this way, P2025 completes its transformation of American federalism from constitutional safeguard into systemic engine for authoritarian extraction, a pattern whose feedback loops now radiate outward into every other domain mapped in this volume.

As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, these dynamics do not remain confined within economic policy: they serve as precondition and accelerator for further capture across information systems. The feedback loop thus established ensures that each domain reinforces every other, until democracy itself becomes little more than spectacle masking oligarchic rule.

5.5 The Erosion of Local Self-Government: Structural Harms & Democratic Decay

The systematic subordination of both local governments and professional public service leaves lasting scars on American democracy. As P2025’s architecture takes hold, genuine autonomy for cities and states becomes conditional on ideological alignment with Washington rather than grounded in constitutional principle or community need.

This loss is felt most acutely when direct democratic action collides with federal priorities. Ballot initiatives expanding Medicaid access or enacting new civil rights protections are blocked or invalidated by executive fiat whenever they threaten the coalition’s grip on power. City officials who refuse demands, whether related to voter roll purges or immigration enforcement, now face not only administrative override but credible threats of prosecution from a Justice Department stripped of its traditional professional independence.

The impacts extend far beyond institutional design into everyday life and public safety. When Congress rescinded funding for public media through the Rescissions Act of 2025,¹³ a move justified by accusations of bias at NPR, the real consequences fell on small rural stations serving as vital lifelines during natural disasters.¹⁴ As these stations lose capacity to provide emergency coverage during floods or wildfires, entire communities are left more vulnerable, not because they lack need but because their voices do not serve current regime interests.

Perhaps most troubling is the effect on civil rights enforcement itself. The exodus from DOJ’s Civil Rights Division hollowed out one of the last lines of defense against discrimination and abuse.¹⁵ As experienced attorneys departed en masse rather than enforce partisan priorities at odds with established law, communities have lost access to recourse against unlawful discrimination in voting, housing, education, and policing.

5.6 Interlocking Feedbacks: Federalism Capture within the Systemic Architecture

None of these developments occur in isolation; each reinforces and accelerates others mapped throughout this volume. By disabling blue-state resistance through selective preemption and administrative purge, P2025 enables minority rule, a dynamic explored earlier in Chapter 4, and clears obstacles for sweeping executive takeovers described in Chapter 2. As detailed in Chapter 3’s documentation of internal federal purges and judicial subordination, these same feedback loops operate externally against states and municipalities as soon as local autonomy threatens regime priorities. The federal machinery honed for loyalty at the center is then deployed downward, preempting local initiatives, threatening funding, or prosecuting dissenting officials with impunity. Regulatory demolition removes independent guardrails just as information ecosystems come under coordinated attack; public goods become tools wielded only when convenient for regime consolidation.

In practice, these dynamics are mutually reinforcing across domains. By disabling blue-state resistance through selective preemption and administrative purge, P2025 enables minority rule at the national level, a pattern explored earlier in Chapter 4, and clears obstacles for sweeping executive takeovers described in Chapter 2. These same feedback loops operate externally against states and municipalities as soon as local autonomy threatens regime priorities; thus the loss of genuine federalism disables not only economic opposition but also any effective resistance within information systems (Chapter 6), education policy (Chapter 7), civil rights enforcement (Chapter 8–9), or global standing (Chapter 10). The systemic effect is self-reinforcing capture, where initial institutional victories radiate outward until all checks on central power are neutralized.

5.7 Conclusion: Instrumental Federalism in Service of Oligarchic Power

Across all domains surveyed here, from labor deregulation to law enforcement purges, the guiding logic remains relentlessly instrumental rather than principled. Deregulation proceeds only when it benefits patrons; centralization occurs whenever resistance emerges; legal doctrines are deployed tactically rather than consistently upheld; even internal debates about policy direction ultimately resolve themselves according to what best consolidates regime advantage at any given moment.

This approach transforms “federalism” into little more than rule-by-waiver: loyalty is rewarded with autonomy while dissent brings swift preemption or legal sanction. Rather than functioning as a constitutional guardrail against excesses of central power or local abuse alike, as originally envisioned, federalism becomes another mechanism for exclusionary control.

The contradictions between stated principles and actual governance are neither accidental nor signs of confusion within P2025’s coalition; they reflect a deliberate strategy where only utility matters in determining which rules apply, and who will be protected or punished under their shifting terms. The instrumentalization of federalism not only erodes local self-government but also primes the ecosystem for further assaults on information sovereignty and educational autonomy, the subjects of the next chapters.

The precedents set by mass firings, judicial defiance, and loyalty-based appointments at the federal level (see Chapter 3) are soon mirrored, and magnified, in Washington’s approach to states and municipalities. What begins as internal regime hardening quickly becomes external regime imposition.

In sum, P2025’s manipulation of federalism is a linchpin in its broader blueprint for nullifying democratic accountability. By ensuring that even decisive local majorities can be overruled, or coerced into compliance through fiscal blackmail, administrative lawfare, or direct preemption, the regime guarantees that voting power becomes ever more disconnected from real authority. This closes yet another escape hatch for pluralistic resistance and locks in minority rule by design, fulfilling the core logic of Cluster B.

Having rendered federalism an instrument rather than a safeguard, rewarding loyalty with autonomy while punishing dissent with preemption, the regime turns next to capturing America’s shared reality itself: information systems (Chapter 6), educational content (Chapter 7), and ultimately civil society’s very capacity for resistance.