In their 2018 book ‘How Democracies Die’, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt warned that the USA wasn’t immune to the processes of democratic erosion seen in countries like Venezuela. They pointed out that the guardrails against authoritarianism the USA once prided itself on – strong institutional norms, political tolerance and acceptance of the legitimacy of opposition – were weakening. Their words were a warning that authoritarian regression wasn’t something the USA was immune to.

In 2025, that warning has proved prophetic. Since returning to office in January, Donald Trump has evidently been hell-bent on the rapid implementation of Project 2025, a comprehensive blueprint developed by the Heritage Foundation and allied conservative groups aimed at radically reshaping the federal government by concentrating executive power.

The first few months of the second Trump presidency show all the hallmarks of authoritarian regression: systematic concentration of power in the executive branch, institutional capture through loyalist appointments, suppression of independent media, targeted persecution of excluded groups and criminalisation of legitimate dissent. These tactics have targeted civic space – the arena where people exercise their fundamental rights to speak out, assemble peacefully and participate in democratic processes.

The assault on civic freedoms has been so severe that in March 2025, the CIVICUS Monitor – our collaborative research initiative tracking the state of civic space around the world – added the USA to its Watchlist, reserved for countries experiencing rapid and pronounced declines in core freedoms.

Institutional capture

In his first 100 days in office, Trump signed 217 executive orders, arbitrarily dismantling federal policies and agencies with profound implications for democracy, human rights and the rule of law. His approach is grounded in the ‘unitary executive theory’, a legal doctrine asserting that the president should exercise direct and absolute control over the entire executive branch, including independent agencies and the Department of Justice. This doctrine serves as the theoretical justification for circumventing Congress and the judiciary, eroding the separation of powers that is fundamental to the US constitutional order.

The most visible manifestation of this consolidation of power was the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by billionaire Elon Musk. This isn’t a real government department, as these can only be established by Congress, and while officially only a ‘senior advisor’, Musk has exercised extraordinary authority to slash entire agencies, cancel contracts and access sensitive government data.

One of DOGE’s first victims was the world’s biggest development agency, the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Its dismantling has wreaked havoc on a global scale. DOGE has terminated thousands of other federal jobs, weakening critical government functions across numerous departments. The ideological purge began with the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, which the Trump project falsely frames as discriminatory.

In some agencies, employees have faced disciplinary action or dismissal solely for their alleged involvement in DEI-related activities, with some targeted despite having no formal DEI responsibilities. This rollback has extended beyond government to influence the private sector, as major corporations have reversed internal diversity policies and slashed equity-focused programmes under political and financial pressure from the administration.

But the administration’s assault on government soon expanded further. The Department of Energy terminated between 1,200 and 2,000 jobs, including staff from the National Nuclear Security Administration. The Forest Service cut around 10 per cent of its workforce, affecting crucial wildfire prevention and land management roles. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has seen 11 per cent cuts and also ended its globally important climate monitoring. Several other agencies made sweeping cuts, often overnight and without warning. In March, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and related ombudsman offices within the Department of Homeland Security were closed.

Overall, workforce reductions appear to have affected at least 12 per cent of 2.4 million civilian federal employees, with this figure likely to keep rising. Reductions have ranged from 11 per cent at the Internal Revenue Service and 13 per cent at the Department of Energy to 24 per cent at the Department of Health and Human Services, 46 per cent at Education, 85 per cent at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 93 per cent at AmeriCorps, the federal agency for national service and volunteerism, and over 99 per cent at the Agency for Global Media and USAID.

Four months into Trump’s four-year term, DOGE remains largely unchecked by a Republican-controlled Congress.

Attacks on the judiciary

In contrast to congressional inaction, Trump’s policies have faced numerous legal challenges, with multiple courts issuing orders to temporarily halt their implementation. The administration’s response has been increasingly hostile toward judicial oversight, with Trump publicly calling for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against the government in a deportation case and Republican legislators advancing measures to weaken judicial oversight.

On 9 April, the House of Representatives passed a bill that, if passed by the Senate, would prohibit federal district courts from issuing nationwide injunctions, restricting relief only to those involved in a specific case. This would effectively limit courts’ ability to halt potentially unconstitutional executive actions nationwide.

The government is also targeting prosecutors who’ve previously investigated Trump. On 5 February, the Attorney General issued a directive accusing two prosecutors of pursuing ‘improper investigative tactics and unethical prosecutions’ in relation to the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters. Over 50 federal prosecutors were reportedly dismissed.

This campaign against legal opposition expanded on 22 March when the administration instructed the Attorney General and Homeland Security Secretary to sanction lawyers deemed to be engaging in ‘unreasonable’ or ‘frivolous’ litigation against the federal government. This deliberately vague terminology created a pretext for targeting around 200 law firms that had challenged administration policies, including some of the most prominent ones.

Trump issued an executive order against a prestigious New York law firm that had employed a prosecutor to investigate Trump’s finances. The order accused the firm of ‘unlawful discrimination’ for its diversity initiatives and threatened to revoke security clearances for its lawyers. Just a week later, Trump withdrew the order after the firm caved in, reportedly agreeing to provide US$40 million in pro bono services supporting administration priorities and eliminate its diversity programmes.

Media restrictions and censorship

On top of consolidating power over government institutions and intimidating the legal profession, the administration is targeting independent media and journalists. On 15 April, the White House announced it would no longer reserve a regular slot in the presidential press pool for three independent news agencies, marking a departure from decades of established practice.

This followed a protracted legal dispute with The Associated Press (AP) over access. On 11 February, two AP journalists were banned from White House press briefings due to the agency’s editorial policy of continuing to call the Gulf of Mexico its internationally recognised name rather than the presidentially decreed ‘Gulf of America’. AP filed a lawsuit against administration officials, but a federal judge denied its request for the immediate restoration of full access. Two months later, another federal judge ruled that the administration’s actions violated constitutional First Amendment provisions on press freedom – but the White House responded with a revised press policy that allows occasional rather than routine access to events. Instead of independent media, the White House is increasingly inviting far-right social media influencers to its briefings.

On 14 March, Trump signed an executive order initiating the dismantling of seven federal entities, including another key tool of US soft power, the United States Agency for Global Media. This is the public body responsible for overseeing Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia and other international broadcasting networks.

Almost overnight, over 4,600 employees were placed on administrative leave and funding grants were abruptly terminated. At least 84 staff members risked deportation if their contracts were terminated, including 23 facing persecution or imprisonment in countries such as Belarus, Myanmar, Russia and Vietnam. In early April, the government switched off its satellite transmitting RFE/RL into Russia. The implications are straightforward: there’s now far less competition for Vladimir Putin’s propaganda.

Between January and April, the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission initiated a series of regulatory proceedings against major media outlets, prompting concern about the use of state authority to exert pressure on journalists and restrict independent reporting.

The government is also targeting academic institutions. In April it issued a formal letter to Harvard University demanding extensive changes as a condition for continued federal support, including reducing the role of students and faculty in university governance, the immediate referral of foreign students with conduct violations to immigration authorities, the discontinuation of all DEI programmes and the imposition of external audits on several academic departments.

When Harvard rejected these demands, the Department of Education announced the freezing of around US$2.2 billion in grants and US$60 million in contracts, alleging the university had failed to protect Jewish students on campus from antisemitic discrimination and harassment. The government also threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

Harvard is among at least 60 universities targeted with allegations of non-compliance with anti-discrimination legislation.

Protest criminalised

The government has aggressively targeted free speech and peaceful assembly rights, particularly focusing on student activists, including by deporting or threatening to deport numerous non-citizens for participating in peaceful protests supporting Palestine.

On 8 March, four plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents unlawfully arrested and arbitrarily detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist, while he was walking home on the campus of Columbia University, New York. Despite being a lawful permanent resident, ICE transferred Khalil to a detention facility in Louisiana, some 1,600 kilometres away, without notifying his family or legal representatives. The government revoked his visa, invoking an obscure legal provision that had been applied in only 15 out of over 11 million removal cases since 1990, and an immigration judge ruled he could be lawfully deported.

A new joint programme of the departments of Homeland Security, Justice and State, ‘Catch and Revoke’, uses AI to monitor thousands of student visa holders’ social media accounts. Drawing on public demonstration reports and legal complaints, including from anti-Palestinian groups, it identifies people for visa revocation and removal proceedings. The number of revoked visas has reportedly exceeded 1,800 across dozens of institutions nationwide.

An April executive order expanded military-style weaponry for local police, authorised military support for domestic law enforcement and enhanced legal protections for aggressive policing tactics, which human rights groups denounced as a recipe for abuse and impunity.

Numerous state legislatures have also increased restrictions on protest rights, with the introduction of at least 41 state-level bills that could expose protesters to heightened surveillance technologies and intimidation tactics. In March, one such bill was passed in New Jersey, significantly expanding the scope of criminal liability for protest-related activities. It introduced a new offence of ‘inciting a public brawl’, defined broadly to include any act related to the organising or promotion of a group of four or more people to engage in ‘disorderly’ or ‘tumultuous’ conduct or causing ‘public inconvenience’.

Excluded groups targeted

Consistent with the contemporary authoritarian playbook, the government is targeting migrants, making mass deportations without due process the cornerstone of its brutal and racist anti-migration policy. It has expanded the use of isolated detention facilities such as the Guantánamo military base, revoked over half a million temporary protected statuses for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans and implemented expulsions to countries they have no connections with, including Costa Rica, Honduras, Mexico and Panama. Invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a law intended for wartime, on 15 March the administration forcibly disappeared at least 238 Venezuelan migrants, transferring them to a prison in El Salvador known for its cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees.

The government has also intensified efforts to restrict reproductive rights. On 24 January, the State Department announced the USA would rejoin the so-called Geneva Consensus Declaration, a non-binding agreement that seeks to restrict abortion access and undermine reproductive autonomy. Trump has also nominated officials opposed to reproductive rights to lead key federal agencies responsible for overseeing access to reproductive healthcare. These actions are taking place amid a profound crisis for reproductive rights following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn the legal right to abortion, with many states passing increasingly extreme abortion bans.

Trump has also issued numerous executive actions affecting LGBTQI+ health policies. These have rescinded Biden-era executive orders that protected LGBTQI+ equity and non-discrimination and limited DEI programmes that served LGBTQI+ communities. Trans people have been particularly targeted. The orders have defined sex as a binary biological classification, removed recognition of gender identity, significantly restricted access to gender-affirming care for young people, removed transgender protections from health plans, prohibited the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program from covering some gender-affirming care services and directed the Department of Justice to investigate and potentially prosecute providers of gender-affirming care.

The administration has also used federal funding mechanisms to discourage LGBTQI+-inclusive programmes, removed gender identity questions from federal surveys and encouraged states to review Medicaid programmes to limit gender-affirming care. Multiple legal challenges have been filed against these orders, with some resulting in temporary restraining orders that have paused implementation.

Resistance is on

With legislative oversight largely dormant, the defence of democracy and human rights has fallen to civil society, the judiciary, state governments and academic institutions.

On 5 April, the USA experienced its largest single-day mobilisation since 2020, with over 1,100 protests held across all 50 states under the ‘Hands Off’ banner. Coordinated by grassroots networks including Indivisible and the 50501 movement, protesters denounced the actions of the Trump administration, from DOGE’s dismantling of federal institutions to rollbacks on migrants’ rights, reproductive autonomy and environmental protections.

A second nationwide mobilisation on 19 April drew thousands more to the streets in major cities. The 50501 movement led over 400 coordinated actions advancing a common message: resistance to authoritarianism and defence of democratic principles. People held solidarity demonstrations in other countries. During a protest that coincided with commemorations of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolutionary War, protesters held placards with slogans such as ‘It’s our turn to fight tyranny’. Teachers, healthcare workers and government employees organised strikes, protests and workplace actions. On May Day, people rallied against the government’s anti-union and anti-worker agenda.

While mobilising public sentiment and public attention through protest, civil society has developed legal strategies to challenge executive actions, bridging grassroots organising and formal institutional responses. The Centre for Constitutional Rights is at the forefront of challenging unlawful detentions, filing petitions for habeas corpus writs on behalf of detained activists. The American Civil Liberties Union has launched multiple legal challenges against executive overreach, including cases related to immigration enforcement, the funding freeze, protest rights and academic freedom. Other organisations are providing legal representation to sacked workers and arrested student activists.

These civil society actions have created crucial test cases for the judiciary, which is currently the most effective institutional counterweight to executive power. Judges have so far issued hundreds of rulings challenging government actions, with at least 160 such rulings temporarily halting some of the administration’s orders, including layoffs across government agencies and attempts to suspend habeas corpus and restrict voting rights. By late March, federal courts had issued at least 40 orders blocking executive decisions on immigration, and on 20 April the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the administration from carrying out further deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, following a previous ruling that allowed removals to continue if detainees were accorded minimal due process rights.

Individual legal victories illustrate the judiciary’s crucial role in protecting civil liberties, as seen in the case of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University who ICE arbitrarily detained. On 30 April, a federal judge ordered his release, emphasising his deep ties to the community and finding no indication he posed a threat to public safety. The court reviewed over 90 statements submitted by community members, academic experts and professors, many of whom identified as Jewish, attesting to Mahdawi’s peaceful character.

Beyond the federal judiciary, state governments have stepped into the breach as defenders of constitutional norms. States such as California and New York have enacted sanctuary policies to counter federal immigration crackdowns. And in the academic sphere, over 150 presidents of US colleges and universities have signed a joint statement condemning ‘unprecedented government overreach and political interference’ in higher education.

Democracy in danger

While traditional constitutional guardrails have been weakened, a vibrant ecosystem of resistance has arisen that goes beyond opposition to specific policies to engage in a fundamental struggle over democratic values.

What sets this moment apart is the way civil society, the judiciary and state governments have stepped in to fill the void left by congressional inaction. The crucial question is whether these distributed forms of resistance are enough to sustain democracy in the absence of congressional action. While courts can block individual actions and protesters can voice opposition, only Congress has the constitutional authority to systematically restrain executive overreach. It’s imperative that it reasserts its role as a co-equal branch of government and fulfils its oversight responsibilities.

Today, authoritarian regression increasingly happens surreptitiously rather than through dramatic military coups. It occurs through accumulated transgressions that often reveal their full impact when it’s too late to reverse them. The USA is now approaching a potential tipping point, with its 250-year evolving experiment in constitutional democracy, often compromised in reality, now confronting its most formidable challenge: subjecting a hyper-empowered authoritarian populist to the constitutionally established boundaries essential for preserving basic freedoms.

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