Weaponizing the Economy for Political Control & Elite Enrichment

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

— Honeré de Balzac

8.1 Introduction: The Extractive State; Public Wealth as Private Spoils

The American vision of the state, at its apex, is a system where the rules of competition are set in public, the fruits of innovation are widely shared, and the power of government is exercised with a degree of transparency that discourages personal enrichment and arbitrary exclusion. Even in its deepest moments of corruption, the republic has depended on professional public administration, legal checks, and a shared evidentiary baseline, a tradition of governance that treats expertise and neutral rulemaking as essential foundations for public trust and effective policy.¹ The Project 2025 program is not a conservative reform of this tradition. It is a wholesale, engineered inversion. The doctrine that “personnel is policy” (P2025, p. 664), when placed in the hands of a regime intent on permanent minority rule, becomes the blueprint for the systematic subordination of the public interest to the factional, the patronal, and ultimately, the personal.

What unfolds is an Extractive State, a structure whose central logic is not the provision of public goods but their conversion into a private asset base for the regime and its allies. The old mechanisms of corruption (bribery, petty graft) have been replaced by a more sophisticated architecture. Here, recruitment and reward are formalized through donor dinners, monumental construction, the rewriting of procurement law, and the strategic demolition of regulatory and statistical institutions. Each move is architected for durability: the weakening of oversight and measurement is not accidental but precedes, enables, and then protects the ongoing transfer of wealth upward.

This is not a drift, but design. The P2025 texts make clear that the professional protections of the administrative state, the independence of regulatory and statistical agencies, and even the physical infrastructure of the state itself are to be stripped from the domain of pluralist oversight and placed directly under presidential, and by extension, factional control (P2025, p. 665). The American project is thus recast: what was once a public compact is now a private market, with every lever of power and every public asset up for auction to the highest bidder, or the most loyal client.²

This chapter examines how this transformation is operationalized, not only through formal policy but through spectacle, patronage, and the engineering of dependence. It traces the logic from the ballroom auction to the privatization of policy, the disabling of measurement, the weaponization of economic reward and punishment, and the construction of a self-reinforcing system in which public wealth, like public meaning, is hollowed out from within.

8.2 Selling the State, Auctioning the Future: The Ballroom as Kleptocratic Engine

The construction of the White House ballroom is not merely a piece of architectural excess, nor simply a scandal of self-dealing. It is a teachable moment for a new political order in which the boundaries between public office, personal fortune, and the monetization of loyalty are not only blurred, but continuously dissolved. Around the world, the construction of palaces, party headquarters, and presidential estates has been a reliable sign of a regime’s intent to fuse public spectacle with the consolidation of oligarchic networks.³ In the American context, the ballroom’s emergence represents both a culmination and a signal, a culminating act of privatization and a visible rebuke to every remaining norm of stewardship, accountability, and equal access.

The event’s choreography was designed to maximize both exclusivity and transactional clarity. The guest list, as reported by The New York Times, included the CEOs and senior leadership of Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Oracle, Palantir, Google, oil and gas interests, and cryptocurrency giants, firms and individuals for whom proximity to executive power is not a social honor but a direct investment in policy outcomes.⁴ The president’s open humor about the sums involved (“Would $25 million be appropriate?”) only further naturalized the conversion of access into profit. The project itself—proceeding without congressional authorization, with the Commission of Fine Arts purged and replaced by loyalists, and contracts issued without competition—was a real-time demonstration that public property is, under the new regime, indistinguishable from a leader’s private asset portfolio.⁵

This is not simply the erosion of ethical boundaries. It is the performative reversal of public service as a legitimate, non-transactional act. The ballroom stands as a warning to every level of American civil society: that law, heritage, and budgetary constraint are only as enduring as the regime finds convenient; that public space, once reimagined as a private rewards system, becomes both the means and the message for a new order of economic extraction. The lesson is not lost on universities, corporations, and local officials: to survive, one must pay, play, or display visible signs of loyalty—or risk being excluded from the new circuits of reward and protection.

Comparative scholarship on autocratic reversal has long noted the centrality of spectacle and architectural transformation to the consolidation of extractive orders.6 In regimes from Moscow to Budapest, Ankara to Caracas, grandiose construction projects have signaled not only a leader’s personal power but the redefinition of the state as the property of a closed network. The White House ballroom is the American iteration: a physical anchor for the regime’s message that democracy and national identity are now available, quite literally, for purchase.

8.2.1 Comparative Lens: Palaces of Power, Monuments of Corruption

The construction of such an edifice is not unique to the United States. Authoritarian regimes from Moscow to Ankara, Budapest to Caracas, have long used monumental building projects as both signals and engines of state capture. Putin’s palaces, Erdoğan’s presidential complexes, Orbán’s stadiums, and Maduro’s “peoples’ palaces” are not mere vanity, they are architectures of impunity and oligarchic distribution. Each serves as a hub for the reward of loyalists, the laundering of elite wealth, and the training of society to accept personalized power as normal.

The White House ballroom, built by and for the donor class, is the extension of this logic to the American context. Its walls do not enclose only music, art, or ceremony; they enclose the rights to contracts, regulatory leniency, and policy access. The message to the world, and to the domestic elite, is unambiguous: to do business with the United States is to negotiate directly with a ruling family and its clientelist network. Those unwilling or unable to secure an invitation find the doors to opportunity, compliance relief, or government support closed.

Such construction is not a sideshow or a scandal that will pass. It is a feedback mechanism: every brick laid, every contract issued, and every donor rewarded accelerates the dismantling of accountability, the normalization of extraction, and the softening of resistance in the administrative, judicial, and civic domains. As with all monumental state-capture projects, the ballroom’s ultimate value is not measured by square footage or cost but by the enduring permissions it grants, the precedents it sets, and the future it forecloses.

8.3 Neopatrimonial Architecture: Crony Contracting, Privatization, Direct Extraction

The commodification of public architecture is mirrored by an even broader reengineering of the state’s economic machinery. Where the professional civil service once provided insulation against the rapid transfer of public assets into private hands, P2025 prescribes not only mass purges (“Schedule F”), but a comprehensive reorientation of procurement, industrial strategy, and regulatory oversight toward the selective enrichment of loyalists and regime investors (P2025, p. 664).

This logic is visible in the regime’s approach to both foreign and domestic contracting. P2025’s blueprint for the Department of Commerce emphasizes that career staff, advisory boards, and agency “gatekeepers” are to be replaced with political appointees who serve as direct conduits between external donors and the executive’s priorities (P2025, p. 665). The practical result is a government in which major contracts—from military procurement to health data collection, from mining rights (as in Alaska’s Ambler Road) to technology infrastructure—are awarded not through competitive processes, but through the cultivation and reward of direct loyalty. The same hands that sign off on donor dinners are those that channel federal resources to the most rewarding, and rewarded, clients.⁸

Privatization, under these conditions, is not a matter of efficiency or modernization, but of asset transfer. The state’s capacity to deliver public goods is deliberately atrophied, its most valuable holdings transferred to private firms whose executives or board members have already demonstrated their political reliability. This was the logic behind the push to dismantle NOAA, privatize weather and climate data, and transfer environmental monitoring to “trusted” commercial partners (P2025, p. 675). It is also visible in the transfer of disaster funding streams and infrastructure contracts to politically connected corporations, often at terms far more favorable than any public tender would have allowed.

The consequences are both immediate and durable. Not only does public money flow directly into the pockets of a new oligarchic class, but the institutional and informational infrastructure required for future reform is systematically disabled. Regulatory knowledge, statistical expertise, and even the basic capacity to track contracts or outcomes are eroded. The result is a feedback loop: each act of privatization or crony contracting further entrenches the networks that make reversal, exposure, or remediation all but impossible.

The implications radiate across every domain the state touches. When foreign policy is converted into a bidding war for loyalty and profit—as with the Argentina bailout, which funneled public risk and private gain to a regime-aligned investment class—domestic actors learn that rules are only as durable as their political utility. Regulatory compliance, competitive bidding, and even statutory budget controls become tools for consolidating power and multiplying personal fortune, not for improving public welfare.

8.4 Regulatory Demolition as Engineered Extraction

The regime’s campaign against independent regulatory power is neither improvisational nor simply ideological. It is structural, deliberate, and foundational to the new extractive order. The playbook is clear: regulatory science, environmental enforcement, and occupational safety are reframed as unnecessary obstacles to profit and “bureaucratic obstructionism” unless “wholly in sync with Administration aims” (P2025, p. 677). In reality, these are the last substantive barriers standing between the American public and oligarchic expropriation.

Historically, agencies like the EPA and OSHA emerged in response to periods of catastrophic market failure—when pollution, workplace injury, and fraud reached levels so intolerable that even business leaders acquiesced to regulation as the price of social stability. The Trump-era regime, guided by P2025, treats such agencies as hostile fortresses to be captured and repurposed or, where possible, demolished outright. This is not the rolling back of “red tape” but the selective destruction of the state’s capacity to resist elite extraction.

The rollback of fence-line chemical monitoring is emblematic. In the years prior to 2025, the EPA’s own pilot projects revealed that self-reporting by major polluters routinely underestimated carcinogenic emissions by factors of 30 to over 1,000. Industrial giants, emboldened by the regime’s hostility to oversight and its explicit call to restructure environmental agencies, lobbied successfully for the rules to be suspended, with the administration granting exemptions to regime-aligned companies almost immediately after taking office.¹¹ The result is a regulatory environment where compliance is voluntary, transparency a matter of negotiation, and enforcement a tool for selective punishment or reward.

The logic is recursive: as industry donors are rewarded with regulatory forbearance, their profits flow back into the political patronage system—whether as cash contributions, in-kind support for policy, or public advocacy on behalf of the regime. At the same time, the health risks, environmental costs, and long-term economic harms of deregulation are both externalized and rendered invisible, as the statistical and scientific agencies capable of measuring such costs are themselves purged or merged under political appointees (P2025, p. 670).

The consequence is the systematic production of ignorance. Local communities lose the ability to document or litigate against harm, future administrations find themselves unable to reconstruct missing data, and the very idea of public stewardship is replaced with a transactional, extractive relationship between business and the state. This is not mere “drift” or a series of isolated scandals, but the “design” phase of democratic deconstruction: a lock-in of private gain and public loss.

The rollback of environmental and safety enforcement creates a climate in which corporate risk calculation is no longer tethered to law or public well-being, but to political loyalty and the favor—or threat—of the central state. Firms with the right connections are permitted to pollute, cut corners, or shift social costs to the most vulnerable, knowing that regulations exist to be either nullified or enforced only against regime outgroups. The cumulative effect is a radical redistribution of costs and benefits: profit and legal impunity for the donor class, suffering and premature death for those least able to move, organize, or speak out.

This is not simply a deregulatory wave, but a conscious construction of what Robert Kuttner and others have called a “predatory state”—one in which public institutions serve as the instrument of a rentier elite, and citizenship confers neither protection from harm nor meaningful recourse against it.¹³

8.5 Statistical Sabotage and the Erasure of Economic Reality

No autocratic project can survive the revelation of its own consequences. The regime’s deconstruction of fact-based economic measurement is therefore as strategic as any purge of civil servants or hollowing out of regulatory authority. Under P2025, the merger of BEA, BLS, and the Census Bureau under direct political supervision is justified as a way to “increase efficiency and better coordinate cross-departmental issues,” but its function is clear: to produce economic data that aligns with “conservative principles” (P2025, p. 670), and to punish or remove officials who provide inconvenient numbers.

For much of the twentieth century, the United States was a global model for the integrity of statistical agencies. Economic data was by law insulated from day-to-day political manipulation, and even autocratic regimes abroad relied on American indices to set baselines for their own planning. That insulation is now gone. The firing of the BLS Commissioner following a poor jobs report, and the subsequent data blackout created by the shutdown of 2025, mark a new threshold: the intentional production of economic fog.¹⁴

When the government ceases to produce basic employment, inflation, or trade data, the effect is more than technical. The Federal Reserve, investors, business owners, and households are left with nothing but partial, private, or outdated signals. The result is an environment of radical uncertainty, where the true state of the economy—rising unemployment, regional depression, hidden inflation—can be dismissed as “fake news” or “manipulation” by any official with access to a microphone. This is the inverse of the democratic ideal: rather than empowering citizens to hold leaders accountable, the state renders itself unaccountable by design, retreating behind a wall of curated ignorance.

The blackout is not simply a temporary crisis. Its effects persist long after the lights come back on, as gaps in data create lasting ambiguity. Policymakers are denied the ability to craft targeted relief or course correction, opposition parties cannot mount evidence-based critiques, and the public cannot even track the costs of mismanagement. As with the purge of environmental data, the loss is cumulative and self-reinforcing, locking in ignorance and disabling the possibility of democratic renewal.

The data blackout is not collateral damage; it is a feature. With official statistics suspended or manipulated, the regime can conceal economic distress among the working class, the destabilizing effects of tariffs, or the regional impact of sudden funding withdrawals. Without reliable data, oversight collapses, partisan narratives become unchallengeable, and private actors are left to navigate an economy governed not by rules, but by rumor and presidential whim.

8.6 Trade, Tariffs, and Economic Weaponization

Trade and tariff policy under the P2025 blueprint is not merely transactional; it is reengineered as an instrument of regime loyalty and personal retribution. The trade chapter’s invocation of “reciprocal tariffs” and “strategic decoupling” (P2025, p. 765) serves as a permission slip for the president to punish foreign adversaries, pressure domestic out-groups, and reward economic allies—all with minimal oversight or public justification.

The pattern is clear: tariffs are imposed or lifted not for strategic economic reasons, but as retaliation for perceived insults or as leverage for political gain. The abrupt imposition of tariffs on Canadian goods in response to an ad campaign critical of Trump’s trade policy is emblematic of this shift.¹⁶ The message to the international community—and to domestic actors dependent on global supply chains—is that economic security hinges not on adherence to the law or market logic, but on visible deference to the regime’s priorities.

Domestically, this approach is mirrored by punitive economic actions against states, municipalities, and firms perceived as hostile. Public procurement, regulatory enforcement, and even disaster relief are routinely manipulated in ways that discipline dissent and reinforce a culture of compliance. The consequences, though sometimes hard to measure in the fog of official data, are evident in the form of rising costs, diminished investment, and growing precarity , for those outside the regime’s favor.¹⁷

This strategy is not limited to foreign economic partners. At home, the same logic is deployed against states, industries, and corporations perceived as hostile, insufficiently loyal, or simply unlucky enough to cross the regime’s interests. The result is a climate of pervasive uncertainty, where compliance must be demonstrated, and opposition or independence is rapidly punished.

8.7 Industrial Policy and Resource Extraction as Oligarchic Reward

P2025’s call for a “whole-of-government” approach to strategic industries is operationalized not as a plan for national renewal, but as a means of tying the future of American critical infrastructure to the regime’s patronage network. Industrial projects, resource licensing, and infrastructure contracts are not awarded to the most efficient or innovative, but to those with the closest personal or political ties. The Alaska Ambler Road project, justified as a means of “winning the AI arms race,” demonstrates how resource extraction is fused with donor reward and regime consolidation.¹⁹

This approach combines the language of national security with the practices of asset stripping and elite enrichment. Major infrastructure and resource projects are justified through appeals to competition with China or “critical minerals,” but the underlying contracts, equity stakes, and regulatory waivers flow to regime-aligned firms—guaranteeing profits regardless of public need, environmental cost, or long-term viability. Oversight institutions are marginalized, tribal and local interests are preempted, and even the financial risks are often socialized through federal guarantees or off-books appropriations (P2025, p. 675). The result is the effective privatization of the nation’s most valuable material assets.

8.8 The War on Labor and Inclusive Institutions

No architecture of economic capture can survive without the neutralization of countervailing power—above all, organized labor and the institutions of inclusive economic governance. P2025’s demands for “flexibility,” “streamlining,” and “removal of outdated regulatory barriers” (P2025, p. 664) are, in practice, a plan for the systematic destruction of collective bargaining, worker rights, and the shared public goods that enable resistance to elite domination.

The decapitation of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the hollowing out of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the proliferation of “independent contractor” loopholes are not technical reforms but mechanisms for atomizing the workforce and destroying the infrastructure of solidarity (P2025, ch. 21). As a result, the costs of extraction—ranging from stagnant wages and rising workplace injuries to the rollback of anti-discrimination protections—are borne almost entirely by those least able to escape or protest. The legal and institutional means for challenging corporate or state abuse are not simply weakened but inverted, weaponized to punish resistance rather than protect the vulnerable.

The long-run consequences are both economic and civic. The destruction of labor guardrails entrenches a system where upward mobility, wage growth, and basic safety are subordinated to the interests of capital and the regime’s patrons. Resistance becomes dangerous; compliance becomes the price of survival. Over time, the absence of organized opposition erodes not only the bargaining power of workers but also the very conditions for democracy itself.

8.9 Feedback Loops and the Capture Mesh

Each vector of economic capture—statistical sabotage, crony contracting, regulatory demolition, labor suppression, and weaponized trade—feeds and accelerates the others. The ballroom serves as both keystone and mirror for this architecture, broadcasting to every participant, from the local factory to foreign capitals, that American democracy is now convertible into private profit for those who pay and pledge fealty.

Once the informational infrastructure is blinded, the legal accountability mechanisms are hollowed out, and organized labor rendered inert, the regime’s economic project becomes self-reinforcing. Contracting, procurement, and regulatory policy are no longer instruments of public stewardship, but tools for engineering dependency, preempting resistance, and rewarding those who contribute to regime perpetuation.

The ultimate result is not merely increased inequality or the concentration of wealth, but the systematic reconstitution of the American state as an armature for personal, familial, and factional enrichment. The auctioning of the White House, the privatization of environmental and labor guardrails, and the replacement of economic data with regime propaganda all serve a single end: the consolidation of a cryptoplutocratic oligarchy, immune from both electoral reversal and public scrutiny.

8.10 Economic Punishment as Political Discipline: Education, Civil Rights, and the Weaponization of Federal Funds

The regime’s approach to public funding is a logical extension of its broader extractive logic: every public resource, from federal education grants to disaster assistance, is a potential tool for rewarding compliance and punishing dissent. As case after case demonstrates, the selective withdrawal of funding from “noncompliant” states, municipalities, and institutions is not a bug, but a feature of the emerging economic order.²²]

The threat or reality of funding withdrawal has chilling effects far beyond the intended targets. Local governments preemptively censor their own policies or speech for fear of triggering reprisals; universities and school boards gut diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to stay in the regime’s good graces; social service agencies abandon advocacy work to preserve access to grants. The result is a climate of demoralization, preemptive obedience, and self-censorship, where the conditions of public debate are defined by the preferences of the most powerful and punitive actors.

This economic discipline does not only target liberal or dissenting enclaves; it is deployed opportunistically, wherever it can consolidate regime power or send a warning to those considering future resistance. Over time, the distinction between public merit and political loyalty is effaced, and all who rely on federal funds—directly or indirectly—are drawn into the web of transactional compliance.

This logic is repeated across domains. Federal grants for health care, infrastructure, scientific research, and disaster relief are distributed on the condition of loyalty, withholdings imposed on political adversaries or jurisdictions perceived as “woke” or uncooperative. The long-term result is not efficiency but dependency and demoralization: states and cities are left to choose between surrender and fiscal starvation, while the national government consolidates the power to reward or ruin at will.

8.11 The Privatization of State Functions: From Asset-Stripping to Permanent Privatized Control

The regime’s war on the public sector is not limited to direct extraction of money, contracts, or data. P2025 proposes to “streamline," “privatize,” or “eliminate” vast areas of federal governance, from environmental monitoring and weather forecasting to patent and trademark oversight, disaster relief, and even the provision of basic business data (P2025, ch. 21). In practice, this means the transfer of critical state functions to private actors whose loyalty and utility to the regime are already established.

8.12 Feedback Loops: How Extraction Becomes System

The cumulative effect of these interlocking mechanisms—privatized spectacle, regulatory demolition, statistical sabotage, labor atomization, and the weaponization of public funds—is a feedback loop that systematically disables pluralist correction. Each component strengthens the other: the destruction of oversight and measurement makes it harder to challenge or even identify abuses in procurement and contracting; the weakening of labor rights and civic institutions makes resistance both economically and physically dangerous; the use of economic punishment as a lever for political discipline reduces the risk of open opposition and incentivizes new actors to seek favor through transactional loyalty.

This is no accidental drift, but a designed system of interlocking capture. It is not unique to the United States but follows patterns seen in other contemporary cases of democratic decay—Hungary, Turkey, Russia—where legal, regulatory, and economic power is concentrated, not only in the hands of an individual, but within a durable, self-reinforcing oligarchic network.²⁵ The American version is distinguished not by its methods but by the scale and depth of its institutional inheritance, a legacy now at risk of irreversible loss.

8.13 Conclusion: The Material Substrate of Autocracy

The American economy, once heralded as a system of innovation, broad-based opportunity, and shared prosperity, has been reengineered as an auction house for state power. The ballroom, with its donor plaques and purged oversight, is less a symbol and more the keystone of a new architecture, one that rewards the purchase of loyalty, punishes dissent, and monetizes every element of the public trust. This is not simply “corruption” in the ordinary sense, but a systemic reengineering of the conditions under which economic and political power are contested, held, and transferred.

The consequences extend far beyond the present crisis. The institutional, legal, and informational infrastructure needed for democratic renewal is not only hollowed out, but actively weaponized against future reform. Every feedback loop, every privatized function, every data gap makes reversal more difficult and the cost of dissent higher. Only by diagnosing these mechanisms, naming their interconnections, and exposing the architecture of capture can any future project of renewal hope to begin.

The path forward, should one exist, requires not only technical reform but a reimagining of the public compact: a restoration of the principles of stewardship, transparency, and solidarity that have been systematically auctioned away. The next chapter will reveal how, atop this economic substrate, the regime engineers a new hierarchy of civil rights and social stratification, consolidating a system built for endurance and immune to ordinary forms of democratic correction.