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Defederalized

Status Check: Faster than Expected

Status Check: Faster than Expected
Photo by Mike Newbry / Unsplash

I ran the contents of Defederalized into Claude and asked it to compare the predictions in the book with current events.

Things are moving faster in many ways than what I wrote about in the book. It's a bit wild considering how many people seemed to think I was being too pessimistic.

Even if Trump leaves office (for whatever reason) before the midterms, the replacements would be Republican. The succession line would change if the Democrats take control of the House this November (thereby taking over the Speaker of the House position) and then somehow both the President and Vice President are removed. Anything is possible, but it's hard to see how Republicans in the Senate would agree to remove Trump and/or Vance in an impeachment in order to hand the presidency to a Democrat.

So, yes, the next few years are almost certainly going to accelerate the overall trend of defederalization.

I'm thinking about doing an update to the book and retitling the update Soft Secession - that's the term that people coalescing around, not defederalization. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Stay safe, everyone.

Defederalized: Predictions vs. Reality

A Review of Defederalized: Rebuilding After The Constitutional Crisis Against Current Events (April 2026)

Executive Summary

Defederalized argued that the federal government was entering a phase of structural collapse — not through dramatic secession or civil war, but through a quieter process of institutional decay, deliberate dismantlement, and the steady migration of governing capacity to the states. The book framed this not as a partisan wish but as an emerging inevitability, driven by anti-federal coalitions gaining control of federal institutions and using that power to hollow them out from within.

Fifteen months into the second Trump administration, the book's central thesis looks less like political speculation and more like a working description of current events. The scale and pace of federal dismantlement underway in 2025-2026 has, if anything, exceeded what the book projected. Nearly every major prediction finds a concrete, sourced analog in today's headlines.

Part 1: The Core Predictions and Where They Stand

1. "Anti-Federal Coalition Defederalization" — Dismantlement From Above

The Book's Claim: Political coalitions unified primarily by antagonism toward the federal government would use control of federal institutions to "devolve federal programs to states, slash federal agencies, and reduce Washington's power." The book called this "defederalization from above" and described "systematic efforts to weaken federal regulatory capacity, environmental protection, and social programs."

The Reality (2025-2026):

This is the book's most dramatically confirmed prediction. The Trump administration, operating through Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has conducted the most sweeping dismantlement of federal agencies in modern American history:

  • Over 260,000 federal workers have left government service through firings, reductions in force, deferred resignations, and hiring freezes (PBS News; NPR)
  • USAID was effectively destroyed, losing 97% of its staff — from roughly 16,000 employees down to 15. Workers were given 15 minutes to gather belongings. (NPR; Federal News Network)
  • The Department of Education is being dismantled from within. Secretary McMahon described closing it as the department's "final mission." Staff was cut by 20%, programs are being transferred to other agencies, and the administration proposed a 15.3% budget cut. (NEA; Federal News Network)
  • The CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) was targeted for defunding, prompting a 21-state lawsuit. (NPR)
  • The Agriculture Department lost more than 20,000 employees between January and June 2025.
  • The VA is on track to eliminate 30,000 positions.
  • Over 10,000 federal contracts worth approximately $71 billion were terminated by DOGE. (ABC News; Newsweek)

Assessment: Confirmed, and arguably understated by the book. The book anticipated a gradual process. What occurred was a blitz.

2. "Strategic Debt Accumulation" — Tax Cuts as a Weapon Against the Safety Net

The Book's Claim: A key component of anti-federal strategy was to "dramatically increase federal debt through massive tax cuts while maintaining minimal social entitlements," deliberately creating fiscal pressure that "eventually forces cuts to social programs." The book predicted that "debt service consumes an ever-larger portion of the federal budget," leaving the government with "diminishing capacity to maintain, let alone expand, its social safety net."

The Reality (2025-2026):

This prediction is playing out with striking precision:

  • The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed July 4, 2025, enacted what the Center for American Progress called "the largest-ever cuts to basic needs programs in U.S. history" to fund tax cuts. The bill adds an estimated $4.1 trillion to deficits over the decade. (Center for American Progress; Bipartisan Policy Center)
  • Medicaid was cut by approximately $990 billion over 10 years — the largest cut in the program's history. (Crowell & Moring)
  • Medicare's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund lost 12 years of projected solvency in under a year. Per updated CBO projections, the fund is now expected to be exhausted by 2040 instead of 2052, directly due to tax cuts that starved the trust fund of revenue from taxing Social Security benefits. (Fortune; CBO Budget Outlook 2026-2036)
  • Federal interest payments now exceed $1 trillion annually (3.3% of GDP), surpassing defense spending for the first time. (Fortune; PGPF)
  • Moody's downgraded the US credit rating from Aaa to Aa1 in May 2025 — the last major agency to do so. For the first time in history, no major credit agency rates US debt at the top tier. Moody's projects federal debt reaching 134% of GDP by 2035. (Moody's; PGPF)
  • The CBO projects a potential debt spiral where interest rates on federal debt exceed the rate of economic growth by FY2031. (CRFB)

Assessment: Confirmed. The book's fiscal analysis reads as prescient. The mechanism it described — tax cuts creating fiscal pressure that forces safety net cuts — is exactly the sequence the OBBBA followed.

3. "Ignoring Court Orders" — The Constitutional Crisis

The Book's Claim: The administration would systematically shut down agencies, fire civil servants en masse, and — "perhaps most concerning" — simply ignore court orders. The book warned this "reveals a fundamental weakness in our constitutional system: without Congress willing to invoke its impeachment powers, the judiciary has no effective mechanism to enforce its rulings against an executive branch that chooses to ignore them."

The Reality (2025-2026):

  • The Washington Post reported the Trump administration defied judges and courts in roughly one-third of all cases filed against it. (Washington Post)
  • A federal judge found probable cause for criminal contempt against the administration over deportation flights conducted in violation of court orders (the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case). An appeals court later reversed the finding. (NPR; Washington Post)
  • The administration refused to turn over court-ordered RIF lists detailing federal workforce reductions. (Federal News Network)
  • The Supreme Court repeatedly sided with the administration on appeal, staying lower court injunctions on probationary worker reinstatements and DOGE access to agency data. (PBS; Washington Post)
  • Mainstream media and legal scholars openly discussed whether the US was in a constitutional crisis. (NPR; Democracy Now)

Assessment: Confirmed. The book's description of the judiciary lacking enforcement mechanisms against a non-compliant executive proved accurate. The pattern of lower courts ordering, the administration defying or appealing, and the Supreme Court siding with the executive describes the actual dynamic.

4. State Resistance and the Emergence of Interstate Coordination

The Book's Claim: States would need to form coalitions, file lawsuits, create their own programs to replace federal functions, and build interstate compacts to maintain services the federal government was abandoning. The book specifically anticipated states acting on climate, education, healthcare, and voting rights.

The Reality (2025-2026):

The litigation response has been massive and coordinated:

  • 22 state attorneys general and DC formed a coalition and filed at least 71 coordinated lawsuits against the administration. (NY AG; Rhode Island AG)
  • 21 states sued over USDA funding conditions. (Courthouse News)
  • 21 states sued to prevent defunding of the CFPB. (NPR)
  • 23 state AGs sued over rescission of billions in health funding. A federal judge blocked Trump's plan to cut health grants to Democratic-led states. (PBS; NPR)
  • States like Connecticut sued over illegal termination of energy and infrastructure funding. (CT AG)

States have also begun replacing federal functions directly:

  • New Jersey allocated $5 million for its Office of Climate Change Education after federal defunding.
  • Washington State funded ClimeTime, a climate science professional development program, to replace lost federal support.
  • Multiple states advanced climate initiatives as the US Global Change Research Program was defunded. (Hechinger Report)

Assessment: Confirmed and accelerating. The book's escalation ladder placed this at Stage 2-3 (legal contestation and administrative resistance). Current events show states firmly in this range, with elements of Stage 4 (financial escalation) emerging in funding-related lawsuits.

5. The Escalation Ladder — Where Are We Now?

The Book's Framework: A 10-stage escalation ladder from political disagreement through legal contestation, administrative resistance, financial escalation, and ultimately to formal separation. The book emphasized that most conflicts stabilize at Stages 2-4.

Current Assessment (April 2026):

Stage Description Status
1. Political Disagreement Public opposition to federal actions Active — pervasive
2. Legal Contestation Lawsuits, coalition litigation Active — 71+ multistate lawsuits
3. Administrative Resistance States refusing to implement federal mandates Active — sanctuary jurisdictions, non-cooperation
4. Financial Escalation Funding disputes, alternative revenue Emerging — states fighting funding clawbacks
5. Enforcement Confrontation Law enforcement conflicts Limited — immigration enforcement friction
6. Constitutional Crisis Declaration Formal declarations of breach Rhetorical — media and legal scholars using the term
7. Institutional Alternative Creation States building replacement institutions Early stage — climate, education replacements underway
8-10. Physical/International/Separation Advanced escalation Not reached

Assessment: The country is operating primarily at Stages 2-4, with Stage 7 elements emerging — exactly the range the book identified as the most likely stabilization point for the near term. The book's framework appears to be a useful analytical tool.

6. Tariffs and Economic Disruption

The Book's Claim (Empire in Decline chapter): America exhibits classic patterns of imperial overextension — financialization, trade imbalances, rising inequality, and constitutional rigidity preventing adaptation. The book warned of "dangerous dependencies in critical supply chains" and predicted that economic shocks would accelerate the centrifugal forces of defederalization.

The Reality (2025-2026):

While the book did not specifically predict a tariff war, the economic disruption it anticipated has arrived through that mechanism:

  • Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs (April 2, 2025) triggered the largest global market decline since the 2020 crash. The S&P 500 fell nearly 20% in seven weeks. (Tax Foundation; Wikipedia)
  • The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in February 2026 that IEEPA does not authorize tariffs, limiting the president's tariff authority.
  • JPMorgan raised recession probability to 60%. (JP Morgan)
  • The Penn Wharton Budget Model projects tariffs will reduce long-run GDP by about 6% and wages by 5%. (Penn Wharton)
  • Average household tax burden from tariffs: $1,500 in 2026. (Tax Foundation)

Assessment: Directionally confirmed. The book's "Empire in Decline" analysis of supply chain vulnerability and economic fragility proved relevant. Tariffs represent exactly the kind of self-inflicted economic wound the book warned accelerates institutional fracture.

Part 2: The Book's Structural Analysis

The "Asymmetric Porousness" Argument

One of the book's sharpest observations was that the federal system's checks and balances operate asymmetrically: they effectively prevent the construction of new programs but prove "remarkably porous when it comes to conservative dismantling of government functions." The administration's ability to fire hundreds of thousands of workers, cancel billions in contracts, and effectively eliminate agencies like USAID — all without new legislation — while progressive initiatives require supermajorities to pass a single bill, confirms this structural analysis.

The "Legitimacy Death Spiral"

The book described a self-reinforcing cycle: declining trust → implementation problems → poor outcomes → further trust erosion → states building alternatives → federal capacity decline → more trust erosion. The current moment shows this dynamic in motion. Federal agencies are losing institutional knowledge and capacity through mass firings, states are building replacement programs, and citizen attachment is beginning to shift to the state-level alternatives.

The "Point of No Return"

The book argued that once states develop their own programs to replace federal functions, "institutional path dependency" makes recentralization extremely difficult. With states now establishing climate education offices, filing coordinated lawsuits as blocs, and preparing to absorb federal functions, the early stages of this path dependency are visible.

Part 3: What the Book Got Wrong or Didn't Anticipate

  1. Speed. The book framed defederalization as a multi-decade process. The pace of dismantlement in 2025-2026 has been far faster than anticipated — closer to the book's "emergency implementation" scenario than its preferred "managed transition."

  2. DOGE as a mechanism. The book did not anticipate a specific instrumentality like DOGE — a quasi-governmental entity led by the world's richest man being given access to agency systems to conduct the dismantlement. This is a novel institutional form.

  3. Tariffs as accelerant. The book's economic analysis focused on debt accumulation and financialization. The self-imposed economic shock of a tariff war was not part of the analysis but fits the "Empire in Decline" framework.

  4. The Supreme Court as enabler. While the book correctly identified the conservative supermajority as hostile to progressive legislation, the Court's role in facilitating executive dismantlement of agencies (by staying lower court injunctions) adds a dimension the book discussed but perhaps underweighted.

  5. Red state DOGE replication. At least 26 states have launched their own DOGE-style efficiency initiatives, suggesting the dismantlement ideology is propagating downward — a dynamic the book didn't explore. (EPI)

Conclusion

The central thesis of Defederalized — that the federal government is in a process of structural collapse driven by deliberate dismantlement, fiscal erosion, and institutional decay — is substantially confirmed by events through April 2026. The book's specific predictions about agency shutdowns, mass firings, court order defiance, strategic debt accumulation, state coalition formation, and the emergence of state-level replacement institutions have all materialized, in most cases faster and more dramatically than the book anticipated.

The question the book posed — "whether that change will occur through deliberate design or desperate improvisation" — appears to be answering itself. What is underway is neither a managed transition nor a complete collapse, but something messier: a rapid, ideologically-driven dismantlement from above meeting an improvised, litigation-driven defense from below. The states are building the plane while it's crashing.

For readers of the book, the most relevant question is no longer whether defederalization is happening, but whether any of the book's frameworks for managing it — interstate compacts, phased revenue transition, orderly program devolution — can be implemented quickly enough to prevent the worst outcomes the book also warned about: chaotic disruption to the social safety net, loss of institutional knowledge, and harm to the millions of Americans who depend on federal programs.

Report prepared April 10, 2026. All sources accessed and verified as of this date.