Trump at 16 Months: What Actually Changed in the Surveillance State

The dome of the United States Capitol building photographed at dusk against a deep blue sky

TL;DR: Sixteen months into Trump's second term, the changes are not abstract. ICE has a $170 billion budget. A national citizenship database is being built by an agency that fired its own civil rights office. Eighteen inspectors general were fired in one Friday night email. Four law firms got hit with executive orders for representing the wrong clients. James Comey and John Bolton were indicted. Harvard had $2.2 billion frozen. Three universities have either settled or been ordered to pay nine-figure sums. Schedule Policy/Career reclassifies 50,000 federal workers to at-will. The Pentagon was handed a 200-mile strip of the southern border. The National Guard has been deployed to Washington, Memphis, and Los Angeles. Paramount paid Trump $16 million. ABC paid $15 million. The Supreme Court let DOGE access Social Security data on 300+ million Americans. V-Dem downgraded the US from "liberal democracy" to "electoral democracy" for the first time in over 50 years. Freedom House dropped the US three points. Allies, including Canada and the UK, are writing their own surveillance laws to match. This piece is a receipts-first accounting (names, dates, dollar amounts, court rulings) of what has actually happened.

How to Read This

This is a long piece. It is long because the list is long.

It is organized into eight sections: the data infrastructure, the immigration apparatus, the oversight purge, the use of prosecution as a political weapon, the campaign against universities and law firms, the war on the press and the platforms, the federal workforce, and what all of this looks like from outside the United States. Every claim is sourced. Where something is contested, alleged, or unresolved in court, we say so.

We are a surveillance and privacy publication, so the throughline is the same one we have been writing about for years: who can watch you, who can compel data about you, who can punish you for what you said online, and what protections exist to stop them. The honest answer in May 2026 is that the answers to those questions look different than they did in January 2025.

1. The Data Infrastructure: A Single Federal Profile Per American

The most important surveillance change of the second term is not a new agency or a new gadget. It is the dismantling of the walls between federal databases.

Before January 2025, your tax records lived at the IRS. Your Social Security file lived at SSA. Your Medicaid enrollment lived at CMS. Your student loan data lived at the Department of Education. Your immigration history lived at USCIS and DHS. These silos were not accidents. They were created, in many cases, by the Privacy Act of 1974, written in the wake of Watergate to keep one administration from weaponizing the federal record against citizens.^[1]

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), set up by executive order on day one and initially run by Elon Musk, spent the first half of 2025 pulling those walls down. By April 2025, DOGE personnel had been embedded at the IRS, SSA, CMS, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Education, DHS, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with access to records covering Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, bank account numbers, medical records, military and mental health records, and student loan data on more than 300 million Americans.^[2]

A District of Maryland judge enjoined SSA from giving DOGE its records in April 2025, finding plaintiffs had shown likely irreparable harm. The Supreme Court stayed that injunction on June 6, 2025, in a 6-3 vote (the three liberal justices dissenting) and DOGE access continued through the litigation.^[3] In April 2026, the Fourth Circuit vacated the lower-court injunction entirely.^[4] An SSA whistleblower disclosed that 300+ million Americans' records had been moved onto an unauthorized Cloudflare server outside the agency's control.^[2]

The Privacy Act lawsuits are ongoing. By April 2026, at least 12 separate suits had been filed against the centralized-database effort. We covered the litigation map in detail here. The short version: the courts have slowed the project in places and signed off on it elsewhere, but no court has stopped the underlying data fusion.

The infrastructure those lawsuits are trying to stop is the platform on which the rest of this article rests. Once SSA, IRS, CMS, and USCIS data sit in the same searchable layer (and Palantir's federal contracts nearly doubled in 2025 to $970.5 million, much of it on exactly this kind of data fusion^[5]) every other government action gets easier. Including the ones you do not want to make easier.

2. The ICE Apparatus: $170 Billion, 73,000 in Custody, and a Body Count

On July 4, 2025, Trump signed the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." The headline numbers are still hard to internalize. The law directed roughly $170 billion to immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation over four years. ICE detention funding alone went up by about $45 billion through September 2029: more than quadrupling its annual detention budget. Another $29.9 billion went to ICE enforcement and removal operations, including hiring 10,000 new ICE officers over five years.^[6][7]

By January 16, 2026, ICE was detaining about 73,000 people on any given day: an 84% increase from the previous January and an all-time record. The stated goal is 100,000.^[8] We covered that milestone here.

The death toll moved with the detention numbers. ICE reported 33 deaths in custody in fiscal year 2025, up from 11 in 2024 and fewer than ten in earlier years.^[9] By March 18, 2026, the total since the start of the second term had reached 46. By April, Detention Watch Network counted 17 deaths in 2026 alone: one a week on average.^[10] A San Francisco Chronicle investigation concluded more than a dozen of those deaths were preventable with proper medical care.^[9]

Renée Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, was shot in the head and killed by ICE deportation officer Jonathan Ross on a Minneapolis street on January 7, 2026. Body and dashcam footage showed Good in her car when masked agents reached through her window. She reversed, then began moving forward; Ross fired three shots through the windshield from the front-left of the car. He was placed on three days of administrative leave and reassigned out of state.^[11] Our coverage of the shooting and aftermath is here.

The surveillance stack that made the detention numbers possible has been documented in detail across this site. The short list of what ICE bought or expanded in the second term:

ImmigrationOS: $30 million Palantir contract for an AI deportation-targeting platform, signed May 2025, running through September 2027. Capabilities include "target prioritization," "self-deportation monitoring," and detention-to-removal logistics. We covered the mission creep into citizens here.^[12]
ELITE: Palantir-built tool pulling HHS, USCIS, and Thomson Reuters CLEAR data to generate address-confidence scores on deportation targets. Fortune reported in January 2026 that ELITE drew on Medicaid databases.^[13]
Mobile Fortify: NEC's smartphone facial recognition app, matching faces against 200+ million federal photos. Used more than 100,000 times since June 2025.^[14]
Penlink Webloc: geofencing tool that pulls every phone inside a drawn box on a map. ICE bought a subscription in September 2025.
Clearview AI: $3.75 million contract for access to billions of scraped social media photos.
BI2 Technologies iris scanners: $4.6 million for smartphone iris scanning at 15 inches.

Palantir's overall federal contracting nearly doubled in 2025, to $970.5 million from $541.2 million the year before. ICE-specific contracts alone exceeded $81 million in the period after January 2025.^[5]

The data sharing that fuels these tools went from contested to court-approved. In April 2025, a federal judge initially blocked an IRS-DHS agreement to hand over taxpayer records for immigration enforcement, finding 42,695 likely Privacy Act violations. The D.C. Circuit later split the case and let parts of the data flow continue. Our coverage of the IRS-ICE fight is here and the appeal is here. A separate ruling in early 2026 allowed HHS to share basic Medicaid biographical and location data with ICE for enforcement purposes.^[15]

On March 31, 2026, Trump signed Executive Order 14339 directing DHS to build "State Citizenship Lists" from a database called SAVE and have the Postal Service block mail ballots to anyone not on the list. When Missouri tested SAVE against its voter rolls, 81% of the people the system flagged as noncitizens were verified Americans. Full coverage here.

None of this was a partisan policy debate that took place inside normal congressional channels. The budget passed 51-50 in the Senate on Vance's tie-breaker and 218-214 in the House. The data sharing happened by executive action and was contested in court after the fact, mostly unsuccessfully.

3. The Oversight Purge

On the night of January 24, 2025 (four days into the term) Trump's office sent a single email to at least 17 federal inspectors general, the independent watchdogs whose job is to investigate fraud, waste, and abuse inside their own agencies. The notice gave no case-specific reason. It cited "changing priorities."^[16]

Among the fired: the inspectors general of the Department of Defense, State, HUD, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Transportation, and others. The Inspector General Act requires 30 days' advance notice to Congress and a substantive case-specific explanation for any IG removal. The administration provided neither. Critics, including former IGs who had served under both parties, called it the "Friday night purge."^[17]

Federal Judge Ana Reyes ruled on September 24, 2025, that the firings were unlawful. She declined to reinstate the IGs, noting Trump could simply re-fire them after the 30-day notice. Several have since been "re-fired" with paperwork.^[18] By October 2025, the total IG removals had reached nearly 20, several of them at agencies that had been investigating matters connected to administration business interests.^[19]

The collapse of independent oversight has had concrete downstream effects on the systems described in section 1 and section 2. DHS shuttered its Civil Rights and Civil Liberties office and the USCIS ombudsman in early 2025, eliminating roughly 600 ongoing civil rights investigations and removing the main internal mechanism that flags abuses in immigration enforcement.^[20] ICE detention facility inspections dropped 36% in 2025: covered here. even as the detained population nearly doubled and deaths in custody hit a 20-year high.

This pattern matters because surveillance abuse, historically, has been documented after the fact by inspectors general, agency ombudsmen, and civil rights divisions reading their own employer's mail. Most of those people no longer work in government.

4. Prosecution as Political Weapon

On September 20, 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social: "They're all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done... We can't delay any longer." He was addressing Attorney General Pam Bondi, and naming James Comey, Letitia James, and Senator Adam Schiff. Within five days, Comey was indicted on five counts by U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan in the Eastern District of Virginia.^[21]

The Comey indictment was thrown out in November 2025 by Senior District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, who ruled Halligan's appointment had been unlawful and described the case as "indict first, investigate second." The U.S. Attorney's office in Miami subpoenaed Comey in March 2026 in a separate "grand conspiracy" matter, and indicted him again in April 2026 for "knowingly and willfully making a threat to take the life of the President": a charge built on a public Instagram post.^[22]

The list of named retribution targets is longer than three:

John Bolton, Trump's first-term national security adviser turned critic, indicted October 2025 on 18 counts (eight transmission, ten retention of national defense information). Bolton denied wrongdoing and called the case politically motivated.^[23]
Letitia James, the New York Attorney General who won the civil fraud case against Trump's business, charged with mortgage fraud after Trump's Truth Social order.^[24]
Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator from California, under DOJ investigation for the same alleged mortgage fraud type.
Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two federal indictments against Trump in 2023-24, under investigation after Trump called him "a criminal" in the Oval Office on October 15, 2025.^[24]
Andrew Weissmann and Lisa Monaco, former DOJ officials connected to the Mueller and Biden eras, under investigation per the same October 15 order.
Hannah Dugan, a Milwaukee circuit judge, arrested by the FBI on April 25, 2025, on charges of allegedly helping a defendant evade immigration enforcement in her courthouse.
Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, had federal corruption charges dropped on February 10, 2025: reportedly in exchange for ICE access to Rikers Island. Seven federal prosecutors resigned rather than carry out the dismissal.
Lisa Cook, a sitting governor of the Federal Reserve, faced a Trump firing letter posted on Truth Social in August 2025 over alleged mortgage misrepresentation. The Supreme Court heard argument January 21, 2026, and appeared inclined to keep her on the board pending the merits.^[25]

Protect Democracy's retaliatory-action tracker logged at least 75 documented federal actions (prosecutions, investigations, security clearance revocations, contract terminations) taken against critics, opponents, or perceived enemies of the administration in the first 12 months of the second term.^[26]

The argument that any one of these actions has independent merit is technically possible to make. The argument that all 75 have independent merit, and that the prosecutorial machinery happens to keep landing on people who criticized Trump publicly, is not one any honest observer is making.

5. Universities, Law Firms, and the Cost of Representing the Wrong Client

The second-term move against universities started March 7, 2025, when the administration cut $400 million in federal funding to Columbia over alleged civil rights violations. Columbia agreed to administration demands, including a federally backed definition of antisemitism and a $21 million compensation fund for affected employees.^[27]

Three weeks later the administration placed Harvard's $8.7 billion in federal grants and $256 million in contracts under review. In April 2025, $2.2 billion was frozen. Harvard refused the administration's demands, which included changes to hiring, admissions, governance, and the end of DEI programs. The retaliation escalated: civil rights investigations, threats to end tax-exempt status, a presidential proclamation banning foreign students from Harvard, and by February 2026 a public demand for a $1 billion settlement to restore funding.^[28] A federal judge ruled in September 2025 that Trump's funding freeze had violated Harvard's First Amendment rights.^[29]

By early 2026, the University of Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, and the University of Michigan were also under federal investigation for foreign funding disclosures. NPR reported in January 2026 that the administration had used litigation and funding threats to extract settlements from multiple universities.^[30]

The law firm campaign ran in parallel. Between March 6 and March 27, 2025, Trump signed at least four executive orders (EO 14230 (Perkins Coie), EO 14246 (Jenner & Block), EO 14250 (WilmerHale), and one targeting Susman Godfrey) that revoked security clearances, restricted federal building access, and ordered review of every government contract touching those firms.^[31] The orders explicitly cited the firms' past work on cases against Trump or for Democratic clients.

All four firms went to court. All four won. Three D.C. federal judges struck the orders down as unconstitutional. The Justice Department, after losing, dropped its appeals and voluntarily dismissed.^[32] But several other major firms (Paul Weiss, Skadden, Willkie Farr, Milbank, and others) quietly cut deals before reaching the courthouse, pledging hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono work on administration-aligned causes in exchange for being left alone.

The chilling effect on the legal profession was the point. Representing a plaintiff in a case against the executive branch (or having represented one in the past) could cost your firm its security clearances and its government contracts within 24 hours. The four firms that fought won. The fact that they had to fight at all was the lesson.

6. The Press, the Platforms, and the Settlement Economy

In May 2025, Reporters Without Borders dropped the United States to 57th on the World Press Freedom Index (the lowest US ranking in the index's history) and reclassified the country as having a "problematic" press environment.^[33]

The mechanism is not formal censorship. It is settlements, license threats, and lawsuits used as a pressure tool.

Settlements: Disney paid $15 million to settle Trump's ABC defamation suit in early 2025, with the money going to the future Trump library. Paramount paid $16 million to settle the CBS 60 Minutes lawsuit in July 2025, again with proceeds to the library, while a Paramount-Skydance merger requiring FCC approval was pending.^[34][35] The total paid by media entities to settle Trump suits in 2025 exceeded $30 million, even though legal experts described the underlying cases as without merit.^[36]

FCC pressure: Brendan Carr, Trump's FCC chair, opened DEI investigations into Disney/ABC, issued a public threat over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue, opened an "equal time" probe into The View, and in May 2026 ordered ABC to file early license renewals for all eight of its owned stations even though the current licenses don't expire for years. ABC filed "under protest in response to an unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional order."^[37]

Direct litigation: In September 2025, Trump filed a $15 billion defamation suit against The New York Times and four named reporters. The Knight First Amendment Institute called the suit "frivolous on its face." It is still pending.^[38]

Funding cuts: The administration ended funding for the US Agency for Global Media, which runs Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and dismantled USAID. These were the primary international press freedom and journalism funding mechanisms operated by the US government.^[33]

On the platform side, the TikTok deal that closed January 22, 2026, transferred US operations to a joint venture half-owned by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Emirati state fund MGX. ByteDance retains 19.9%. Oracle stores all US user data, validates source code, and provides board representation. The Trump administration reportedly received $10 billion as part of the deal structure.^[39]

The national security community is unimpressed. Senator Ed Markey wrote in May 2026 that Trump "managed to keep TikTok online only by ignoring the law's central goal and relying on vague, unproven safeguards."^[40] Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison's public statement that AI will usher in an era when "citizens are on their best behavior" (combined with ICE's documented push for around-the-clock contractor-staffed social media surveillance of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube^[41]) has prompted security researchers and digital rights groups to describe the new TikTok ownership as a federal surveillance partner rather than an independent platform. Our coverage of the TikTok-Oracle-ICE pipeline is here.

On encryption, the administration's posture has been mixed and revealing. The FCC under Carr voted 3-2 in November 2025 to repeal new telecom security protections (including mandatory multi-factor authentication) that had been adopted in response to the Salt Typhoon Chinese intrusion into US telecoms.^[42] On the international side, DNI Tulsi Gabbard publicly opposed the UK's January 2025 Investigatory Powers Act demand that Apple build an iCloud backdoor, calling it a threat to American civil liberties. The UK Home Office dropped the public order but, per Financial Times reporting in October 2025, served a fresh secret order on Apple in September.^[43] The Apple challenge is still in tribunal. We covered the UK fight in detail here.

7. The Federal Workforce: Schedule Policy/Career

Schedule F was a Trump-1.0 executive order signed in October 2020 and rescinded by Biden before it could be implemented. It reclassified federal employees in "policy-related" positions out of the competitive civil service, stripping them of for-cause firing protections and turning them into effective at-will employees.^[44]

Day one of the second term, Trump re-signed it. In February 2026, the Office of Personnel Management published the final regulation creating "Schedule Policy/Career," the rebranded version. The rule covers roughly 50,000 federal positions: about 2% of the workforce. Employees moved into the schedule lose their right to appeal adverse actions, lose eligibility for Presidential Rank Awards, and can be suspended, demoted, or fired without going through standard procedures.^[45] Federal News Network reported in February 2026 that reclassified employees may also lose loan aid and pay incentives.^[46]

The final OPM regulation described existing civil service protections as "unconstitutional overcorrections."^[47] The American Federation of Government Employees and other federal unions sued.

The downstream effect on surveillance is harder to see but matters in the same way the IG purge matters. Most federal whistleblowers on programs like the IRS-ICE data sharing, the SAVE database, or the centralized DOGE database have been career employees protected by civil service rules. A career FBI analyst who tells Congress something embarrassing about a domestic surveillance program under Schedule Policy/Career rules can be fired the next morning with no appeal. That changes what gets reported.

8. Domestic Military Deployments and the Border Zone

This is not a surveillance story in the narrow sense, but it changes the physical environment in which surveillance happens.

In April 2025, Trump used a national security designation to hand the Pentagon jurisdiction over a 60-foot-wide strip of federal land running 200 miles along the southern border. The "Roosevelt Reservation" area, covering parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, was effectively turned into a military installation: a workaround for the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally bars the military from doing domestic law enforcement.^[48] Anduril, the Palmer Luckey defense startup, picked up large pieces of the resulting border surveillance buildout. We covered the contract structure here.

National Guard deployments to American cities followed:

Washington, D.C.: August 2025. Trump federalized the city's police force and deployed National Guard, citing crime.
Los Angeles: June 2025. 700 Marines and 4,000 National Guard troops deployed during anti-ICE protests over Governor Newsom's objection. On September 2, 2025, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled the deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act and the rationale was "contrived." In December 2025, a separate judge ordered Trump to end the LA National Guard mission entirely, calling it "profoundly un-American."^[49]
Memphis: September 2025. National Guard deployed despite Memphis crime hitting a 25-year low and murder a six-year low for the first eight months of 2025.^[50]
Minnesota: January 2026. After Renée Good's killing and the resulting protests, Trump deployed 3,000 additional ICE agents to the state and publicly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act.^[51]

Trump weighed invoking the Insurrection Act at least four times in 2025: at the border in January, during the LA protests in June, against Portland and Chicago in October, and against Minnesota in January 2026. Each time he was talked down by advisers. The Brennan Center has called the use of the border military zone "an end-run around Congress" specifically designed to avoid the political cost of an actual Insurrection Act invocation.^[52]

9. The View From Outside: Allies, Copycats, and Indices

The Trump second term is not happening only inside the United States. It is being watched, measured, and in some cases copied.

V-Dem Institute. The Sweden-based democracy index, the most respected academic measure in the field, downgraded the United States in its 2026 report (covering 2025) from "liberal democracy" to "electoral democracy": the first such downgrade in over 50 years. The US democracy score now sits below every other G7 nation.^[53]

Freedom House. The 2026 Freedom in the World report scored the US at 81, down from 84 in Biden's last year. Since 2005, the US has dropped 12 points on the index. Freedom House cited "an escalation… in the executive branch's unilateral authority," "a multiyear rise in threats and reprisals for political speech," and the weakening of anti-corruption safeguards.^[54]

Bright Line Watch and a number of other expert-survey democracy projects found similar declines through 2025 and into 2026, with majorities of surveyed political scientists naming the same flashpoints: directing Bondi to prosecute political enemies, FBI Director Kash Patel shutting down the FBI's public corruption unit, the January 6 pardons, and the IG firings.^[55]

The Orbán comparison. The European Council on Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council have both published analyses describing the second term as an explicit attempt to apply Viktor Orbán's Hungarian playbook: hollow out the civil service, capture or pressure the media, weaponize tax and regulatory tools against opponents, redraw electoral maps and rules to favor the ruling party. Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, the architect of Project 2025, has publicly described Hungary as "the model." The Danube Institute, a Hungarian government-linked think tank, has had a formal consulting agreement with Heritage to advise on implementation.^[56][57]

Allies. Five Eyes intelligence cooperation has come under measurable strain. The UK has reportedly suspended intelligence sharing with the US on the Caribbean strikes after concluding the boat sinkings were unlawful. DNI Gabbard issued a memo classifying Russia-Ukraine peace-talks intelligence as NOFORN (no foreign dissemination) explicitly cutting allies out.^[58] Former CIA Director Brennan warned that Trump's pattern of private diplomacy with adversaries risks exposing sources.

Canada. Mark Carney's Liberal government tabled Bill C-2, the "Strong Borders Act," in June 2025. The bill creates the legal framework for Canada to ratify a CLOUD Act agreement with the US, letting US authorities (including the NSA, FBI, and ICE) demand data on Canadians stored in Canada. It also lets Canadian police and CSIS get subscriber information without a warrant on a "reasonable suspicion" threshold. After a 300-organization opposition campaign, the bill was split in late 2025 into a revised C-22 and C-12; the surveillance provisions remain on the table.^[59] EFF called it a law that "opens the floodgates to U.S. surveillance."^[60]

EU digital sovereignty. The European Commission accelerated its tech sovereignty package in response to the Trump administration's open hostility and tech-CEO entanglement. On November 18, 2025, EU member states adopted the Declaration for European Digital Sovereignty. By May 2026, the Commission was actively considering restricting use of US cloud platforms for sensitive government data.^[61] France's Health Data Hub left Microsoft Azure for the French sovereign cloud provider Scaleway. France announced "Visio" as a state-built replacement for Microsoft Teams and Zoom by 2027. The trigger for these changes is explicit: a French Senate hearing got Microsoft France's own legal director to admit, under oath, that the company cannot guarantee French government data stored in France will not be handed to US authorities under the CLOUD Act.^[62]

EU Chat Control. The EU's parallel push for client-side scanning of encrypted messaging (the CSAR regulation) has continued through 2025 and into 2026. The voluntary scanning derogation expired April 3, 2026; trilogue negotiations on the next version are ongoing. We have covered the EU push here and the expiration here. The Trump posture has made it harder, not easier, for EU privacy advocates to argue that Western governments can be trusted with encryption-breaking authority.

10. FISA Section 702: The One Surveillance Authority Congress Did Vote On

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (the warrantless surveillance authority used to collect on foreign targets that inevitably sweeps in Americans' communications) was set to sunset in April 2026.

The fight was the most public test of whether the second-term Congress would impose any real check on executive surveillance. After months of back-and-forth (we covered the running countdown here, here, here, here, and here), the House passed a 10-day extension at 2 a.m. on April 30 to keep the authority from lapsing.^[63]

On April 29, 2026, after the broader reform package collapsed, the House voted 235-191 for a three-year extension of Section 702 with no warrant requirement. The bill added some new oversight (attorney approval before reviewing Americans' data, written justification per query) but the warrant amendment that would have required actual court authorization to search Americans' communications failed.^[64]

It was a bipartisan vote in both directions. 98 House progressives and a meaningful chunk of MAGA Republicans voted against the no-warrant extension. They lost. The fact that Trump's own administration was, by this point, openly using surveillance authorities against political opponents did not change enough Republican votes to force a warrant requirement.

What This Adds Up To

If you read this top to bottom, the through-line is not the personality of any one official. It is the systematic dismantling of the procedural and institutional speedbumps that have historically slowed federal surveillance and federal retaliation.

The data silos that contained your records: down.
The inspectors general who would have caught the abuse: fired.
The career civil servants who would have refused unlawful orders: reclassified to at-will.
The law firms that would have sued: warned with executive orders, four of which had to litigate to keep their security clearances.
The universities that would have hosted dissenting research: under federal funding pressure, with at least one ordered to pay $1 billion.
The press that would have reported on it: paying nine-figure settlements, facing license renewal threats, and dropping to the worst US press freedom ranking ever recorded.
The Congressional check via FISA reauthorization: produced a three-year no-warrant extension.
The intelligence allies who would have shared independent assessments: cut out of Russia-Ukraine reporting and writing their own laws to match.

None of these moves, taken individually, is unprecedented. Presidents have fired IGs. Presidents have feuded with networks. Presidents have used executive orders to bend agencies. What is new is the simultaneity, the speed, and the explicit naming (by Project 2025's architect and by Trump's allies in Hungary) of the Orbán playbook as the model.

The most useful frame, for a privacy-and-surveillance publication, is the one EFF used to describe Canada's C-2: a floodgate. Once the gate is open, what flows through depends on who is standing at the controls. The architecture is now built. The question is no longer whether the second-term administration can do these things. The question is what the next administration (of either party) does with the same machine.

What You Can Actually Do

This is a surveillance and privacy site, so the obligation is to give you something to act on. The honest answer in May 2026 is: a lot of the structural fights are happening above your head, but personal exposure is still reducible.

Cut your data broker exposure. ICE's biggest leads come from commercial data brokers: Thomson Reuters CLEAR, LexisNexis, and the ad-tech location pipeline. California's DELETE Act lets residents request removal from broker databases through a single portal. Other states have weaker but real options. Our DOGE-era privacy guide is here.
Move your messaging to end-to-end encrypted apps that you control the keys to. Signal remains the standard. iMessage on Apple devices with iCloud Advanced Data Protection on (where available) is the other reasonable option. If you are in the UK, Advanced Data Protection is off; assume your iCloud backups are reachable.
Take location services off by default. Penlink Webloc and the broader ad-tech location pipeline catch every phone in a defined area. Airplane mode at protests. Burner phones for sensitive contexts. Recording ICE operations is constitutionally protected: but park your car away from the operation to avoid plate readers.
Use a non-US email provider for sensitive correspondence. Proton (Switzerland), Tutanota (Germany), and Mailbox.org (Germany) are not bound by the CLOUD Act for their European operations. This matters more now than it did a year ago.
Support the organizations actually litigating this stuff. ACLU, EFF, the Brennan Center, EPIC, Protect Democracy, the Knight First Amendment Institute, FIRE, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press are the names that keep appearing in this article's footnotes for a reason.
Vote in the 2026 midterms with no illusions about what surveillance the executive branch already has on you, and call your senators on FISA reform. The next 702 reauthorization fight starts now.

None of this is sufficient. All of it is necessary. The machinery built in the last 16 months is not coming back down on its own.