The Bunker State:
Continuity of Government planning, or COG, was devised during the Cold War to ensure that the federal government could survive a Soviet nuclear attack. If Washington were destroyed, surviving officials would disperse to secure locations, maintain command and eventually reconstitute constitutional government.
The goal, at least in theory, was survival long enough to restore constitutional order.
But 9/11 changed the equation.
Nearly twenty-five years later, we are still living with the consequences.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did more than kill nearly 3,000 people. They gave Washington the crisis it needed to dramatically expand emergency powers, surveillance and the national-security state.
COG was part of that transformation.
The government has spent billions making certain that it can survive almost anything. But survival of the government is not the same as preservation of the republic.
Presidents, agencies, military commands, intelligence operations and critical records can all be relocated so that the machinery of government can keep functioning underground.
But what about the Constitution?
Those questions matter because COG is no longer merely about bunkers.
It is part of a much larger emergency state—a government that has learned to govern through crisis, fear and claims of necessity.
After 9/11 came the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, secret courts, watchlists, military detention and a vastly expanded national-security state. COVID showed how quickly emergency orders could intrude on movement, assembly, commerce and ordinary constitutional processes in the name of public safety.
The emergencies change. The response does not: government claims extraordinary powers, and the extraordinary gradually becomes ordinary.
The most dangerous words in government are often some variation of: this is an emergency.
That is when temporary measures become precedents, precedents become policies, and policies become permanent powers.
This is how the police state grows—incrementally, across administrations and parties.
Every president inherits the emergency powers, secret directives, surveillance machinery, militarized forces and weaponry assembled by his predecessors. Every president adds something to the arsenal. And every president leaves the next occupant of the White House more powerful than the one before.
Trump inherited Obama’s powers. Obama inherited Bush’s. Bush inherited those accumulated before him. And whoever follows Trump will inherit everything Trump leaves behind.
That is the lesson of the modern police state: presidents are temporary. The powers they leave behind are not.
The government beneath Trump was built over decades, with the complicity of presidents, Congresses and courts that repeatedly allowed extraordinary powers to become permanent.
And behind it all sits another government—a shadow government—that elections rarely disturb.
More than a decade ago, we warned that America effectively had two shadow governments: Continuity of Government, the emergency government waiting in the wings for catastrophe, and the Deep State, the permanent government that carries on regardless of who occupies the White House.
Today, it’s hard to tell them apart.
One operates in the background. The other waits for the so-called emergency. But both run on the same machinery.
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