President Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans love to rail against the “deep state.” In both terms, Trump has argued that his enemies were operating from the bowels of the federal government: FBI agents were out to investigate him, bureaucrats were determined to subvert his policies, and opponents everywhere were willing to leak embarrassing information. In his national address on voting and elections last week, Trump claimed the deep state had kept evidence of election fraud from him in 2020.
There was a notable change between 2017 and 2025. During his first term, Trump complained about these cabals as a foil (along with undocumented immigrants, the “rigged” media and “radical Democrats”) to explain to supporters just what he was up against. During his second term, Trump has tried to purge anyone whom he doesn’t consider trustworthy and to staff his cabinet with loyalists. For example, the Senate appears poised to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general, the highest law enforcement position in the land, after he proved his bona fides when he worked as the president’s personal attorney. While pundits often discuss the unitary executive theory as some sort of esoteric academic concept born out of conservative legal networks in the 1980s, it is just as much a crass power grab to make sure that nothing and nobody can stand in the president’s way.
President Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans love to rail against the “deep state.” In both terms, Trump has argued that his enemies were operating from the bowels of the federal government: FBI agents were out to investigate him, bureaucrats were determined to subvert his policies, and opponents everywhere were willing to leak embarrassing information. In his national address on voting and elections last week, Trump claimed the deep state had kept evidence of election fraud from him in 2020.
There was a notable change between 2017 and 2025. During his first term, Trump complained about these cabals as a foil (along with undocumented immigrants, the “rigged” media and “radical Democrats”) to explain to supporters just what he was up against. During his second term, Trump has tried to purge anyone whom he doesn’t consider trustworthy and to staff his cabinet with loyalists. For example, the Senate appears poised to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general, the highest law enforcement position in the land, after he proved his bona fides when he worked as the president’s personal attorney. While pundits often discuss the unitary executive theory as some sort of esoteric academic concept born out of conservative legal networks in the 1980s, it is just as much a crass power grab to make sure that nothing and nobody can stand in the president’s way.
The fears about an out-of-control executive branch are not new. In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of a “military industrial complex” that influenced national security decisions. “In the councils of government,” Eisenhower said, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” President Richard Nixon certainly felt that he had enemies everywhere in his federal government—that’s why he ran most of his foreign policy through National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, circumventing the State Department bureaucracy.
But there are also liberal origins of the fear of civil servants acting without any kind of accountability, though their concerns were quite different from those of Presidents Nixon or Trump. They were less about what these forces do to them personally than to the nation’s democratic fabric, and their proposals about how to tackle the problem produced reforms that reigned in executive power.
Fifty years ago, liberals were attacking what today is called the deep state—that is, the unelected members of the federal government. At the center of this liberal coalition was Idaho Sen. Frank Church, who in 1975 and 1976 headed high-profile hearings into the national security apparatus that had been created at the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s, but which seemed to be pursuing interests very different from what elected officials were telling voters.
At the time Church raised his complaints, Americans were living in a period of great turmoil. The war in Vietnam had stirred immense distrust in large parts of the electorate about whether political and military officials could be believed when explaining the use of force overseas. The release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 had revealed the lies and disinformation that drove the deadly war in Southeast Asia. Claims that the United States was always fighting for democracy abroad were supplanted by a sense that imperialism and economic interests were really driving foreign policy. Anti-war groups had experienced so much government harassment for their efforts that for many of them, Washington was a force to be feared.
In 1975, as the nation prepared to celebrate the bicentennial, some members of Congress wanted to learn more about what was happening behind the closed doors of national security policymaking. The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh had raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill with a story that he published in the New York Times on Operation CHAOS, a top-secret program that the CIA had conducted to spy on and to disrupt anti-war activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He also reported on secret operations in Chile. The covert operations were detailed in a massive internal study of the agency known as the “Family Jewels.” Reporting to President Gerald Ford, CIA Director William Colby said, “I think we have a 25-year-old institution which has done some things it shouldn’t have.” Hollywood also triggered alarm bells: In Three Days of the Condor (released in the early fall of 1975), the CIA attempts to kill one of its own researchers, played by Robert Redford.
There were multiple investigations to find out more. Republican President Gerald Ford set up a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. He was worried about congressional investigations and wanted to contain the fallout by doing something under his control, though he was unsuccessful. The House of Representatives conducted its own investigation, led by New York Democrat Otis Pike.
But none of these inquires achieved the same impact as the one chaired by the World War II veteran and Stanford educated Church. His Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, known as the Church Committee, heard from witnesses and studied the data for over a year. Over 800 witnesses appeared before his panel, and they revealed shocking information. A staff of almost 150 people poured through the documentation they obtained.
As a result of the Church Committee hearings, the public learned of a series of shocking revelations that undermined confidence in what national security officials had been doing.
The public, for instance, discovered that the FBI’s COINTELPRO program regularly ran surveillance on and harassed domestic anti-war groups. Under director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI threatened Martin Luther King Jr. with transcripts of wiretaps documenting his infidelity. The U.S. government had supported secret coups against democratically elected governments and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders without congressional authorization. Intelligence operatives conducted LSD experiments on citizens. Under Operation SHAMROCK, the government collaborated with telegraph companies to examine private correspondence. At one point, Church revealed the existence of a poison dart gun—something more out of a thrilling James Bond movie than the committee rooms of Washington.
The committee released its final six-volume report on April 29, 1976. The publication constituted the most comprehensive account of how national security officials, under the protection of secrecy, had operated without accountability and regularly violated the law. They had proven, according to the New York Times, how presidents “of both parties succumbed to the temptation to use intelligence agencies, with their capacities to act in secrecy, as instruments to perform political magic for the Oval Office.”
The Church Committee’s goal was not simply to generate distrust, but to establish confidence in the system: “The Committee does not believe that the acts which it has examined represent the real American character. … We regard the assassination plots as aberrations. Despite our distaste for what we have seen, we have great faith in this country. The story is sad, but this country has the strength to hear the story and to learn from it. We must remain a people who confront our mistakes and resolve not to repeat them.”
The Democratic Congress acted. Both the Senate and House established intelligence oversight committees in 1976 and 1977, respectively. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 was landmark legislation that set up the FISA court, responsible for approving national security surveillance warrants. The law, President Jimmy Carter said upon signing the bill, “helps to solidify the relationship of trust between the American people and their Government.”
By imposing mechanisms to restrain national security operations, the reforms achieved a much greater degree of accountability. Until, that is, the system was remade again in the aftermath of 9/11.
In recent years, Trump has managed to reverse the politics of the deep state. As Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Beverly Gage recounted in my book, The Presidency of Donald J. Trump, after 2017, many Democrats abandoned older fears of the national security state and federal law enforcement that were born out of the Church Committee and emerged as defenders of the agencies they once railed against. Meanwhile, lining up behind Trump, the supposedly “law and order” Republican Party spoke about officials such as FBI Director James Comey as dangerous villains who could not be entrusted with power.
But the rightward attacks by Trump have been very different from what occurred under Church. Trump’s attacks on the so-called deep state have been driven by personal vendetta and a thirst for revenge rather than a broad concern about the health of the democracy. Other than the effort to set up a $1.8 billion fund to compensate alleged victims of “lawfare,” which the courts stopped, the idea of substantive reform to ensure accountability and transparency has been absent from the conversation.
Most important, the Church Committee revolved around Congress attempting to rein in runaway executive power; Church did not trust the Rockefeller Commission to honestly police itself. The Church Committee also built its case on painstaking bipartisan investigation, mountains of credible evidence, and public findings rather than innuendo, conspiracy theories, and smear.
Today, Trump has fought this battle as part of his effort to centralize and strengthen presidential power, creating a situation that threatens to diminish rather than restore democratic institutions.
The Church Committee offers an example for a healthy Congress that takes its constitutional responsibilities more seriously. When the Trump era comes to an end, if not sooner, there is an urgent need for thorough and comprehensive investigations into what has happened to the national security system under the current president and how reforms could start to reestablish the guardrails that legislators once understood to be vital to all citizens.
