The Year That Was (2025)

Introduction

– Natalie Orpett, Executive Editor

The year 2025 made a mockery of my opening remarks in the past few years’ editions of Lawfare’s The Year That Was, in which I’d said it had been a busy year in “hard national security choices.” This year was—to use an expression as tired as we are—like drinking from a firehose.

The year kicked off in the early hours of Jan. 1 with a car-ramming terrorist attack in New Orleans and a truck bomb in Las Vegas. On Jan. 10, Donald Trump, who had been convicted on 34 felony counts in New York state court, was sentenced to unconditional discharge, officially marking the end of the criminal prosecutions of the once and future president (and the end of Lawfare’s Trump’s Trials project). Within days, confirmation hearings were underway for the incoming Trump administration’s key national security positions. That same week, the Supreme Court upheld the TikTok ban and Special Counsel Jack Smith released his two-volume Jan. 6 report.

The Biden administration ended with a series of pardons to several public servants and members of the Biden family. The second Trump administration began with a slew of executive orders, including many relating to national security: orders declaring an emergency at the border, banning transgender people from serving in the military, removing civil service protections, ending birthright citizenship, “realigning” U.S. foreign aid, withdrawing from international environmental agreements, establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), changing security clearance requirements, expanding migrant detention facilities at Guantanamo, and more. Over the following two weeks, Trump fired 17 inspectors general and all Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, continued reshaping the federal civil service, announced major tariffs, and implemented a freeze on federal government spending.

Meanwhile, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza continued, Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek released the r1 language model, the U.S. eased sanctions on Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard oral argument on whether the 9/11 defendants’ guilty pleas in Guantanamo were still valid, and the Justice Department proposed material changes to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) regulations.

And that was just January.

But with the help of our extraordinary community of contributors, we did our best to keep up. We relied on their remarkably diverse areas of expertise, which span everything from 18th century statutes to emerging technologies, from intelligence authorities to congressional procedure, from federal employment law to the law of war.

It was only possible because of Lawfare’s in-house team, who are—if I may be so bold—exactly the kind of people we need right now. They worked tirelessly to share their own expertise, to boost that of our contributors, and to support an organization that published more than 1,000 articles, podcasts, videos, research papers, and primary source documents last year alone. We did weekly livestream litigation roundups and rapid-response videos, built data visualizations, tracked litigation, and compiled analysis and resources on key national security issues. We produced Escalation, a narrative podcast series on the U.S.-Ukraine relationship and, in cooperation with SITU, Deportation Inc., an investigative video series on the business of immigration enforcement. We sat through hours and hours of legal proceedings to bring our audience inside the courtroom. And we did it all in the timely, rigorous, nonpartisan way that makes Lawfare, well, Lawfare.

As the year comes to a close, it’s only fitting to take a breath. So, as in previous years, I asked my colleagues to reflect on what happened in 2025 in their respective areas of focus. We’ve included links to some of what Lawfare has published on those topics to give snapshots of our work this year. It’s a lot—and yet it’s only a sampling.

It’s The Year That Was: 2025. We’ll see you next year.

DOGE

– Anna Bower, Senior Editor

One of the most significant domestic governance developments of 2025 began with an executive order issued within hours of President Trump’s second inauguration: the reconstitution of the U.S. Digital Service as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Initially framed as a software modernization and cost‑savings initiative, DOGE quickly evolved into a far‑reaching effort to reshape the federal bureaucracy. Within months, it oversaw the effective dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, implemented large‑scale reductions in force across multiple civilian agencies, and gained access to sensitive data held by the Social Security Administration and the Treasury Department. Taken together, these actions represented one of the most aggressive attempts in decades to reorder the administrative state and the civil service through unilateral executive action.

Unsurprisingly, DOGE’s operations triggered an avalanche of litigation, which Lawfare covered closely. Plaintiffs challenged its actions on a wide range of grounds, including alleged violations of the Appointments Clause and the separation of powers, unlawful circumvention of congressional appropriations, and breaches of statutory safeguards such as the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Lower courts initially appeared receptive to at least some of these concerns, with several district judges issuing orders halting program terminations, pausing workforce reductions, or prohibiting access to sensitive data. But those victories proved fragile. Again and again, the Supreme Court stepped in to stay injunctions or narrow relief, effectively permitting DOGE’s work to continue.

DOGE’s sweeping influence over federal operations also gave rise to a central and enduring question: Who, exactly, was in charge? Or, to phrase it in a way with which many of Lawfare’s readers will be all too familiar, who is the administrator of DOGE? Early on, Elon Musk was widely described as the head of DOGE—including by the president and Musk himself. But the White House provided shifting accounts of Musk’s formal role, and not even the administration’s own lawyers seemed to know who was running the U.S. DOGE Service. Lawfare obsessively chronicled the search for clarity—and explained why it matters. By the time of writing, the White House has officially named Amy Gleason as administrator, but the question of who truly wielded authority—and who bears responsibility for the damage DOGE wreaked—remains unresolved.

Now, at the end of 2025, DOGE has largely faded from public view, with some reports suggesting the initiative effectively ended following Musk’s departure in May. But DOGE has already reshaped the administrative landscape, leaving commentators and policymakers to grapple with long-term implications for federal norms, civil service protections, and the balance of power between Congress and the executive branch. Meanwhile, courts continue to wrestle with the fallout, as multiple legal challenges to DOGE’s various actions remain pending, including with regard to large-scale layoffs, the Appointments Clause, and FOIA. Lawfare will be watching them in 2026.

The Alien Enemies Act and the Kilmar Abrego Garcia Case

– Roger Parloff, Senior Editor

On March 14, President Trump secretly signed a proclamation invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA) for the first time in history outside the context of a declared war. The next day, he unveiled the order and claimed that the United States was under “invasion” or “predatory incursion” within the meaning of the law.

In February, a month before Trump even invoked the act, Lawfare had already begun analyzing whether he had the power to do so. And we have been watching key AEA litigation from the beginning, including J.G.G. v. United States, which was filed on behalf of Venezuelans whom Trump had declared members of Tren de Aragua and immediately removed to a Salvadoran prison without notice or hearings. The case has raised a slew of legal questions: Did a D.C. district court judge have jurisdiction to hear a case filed on behalf of plaintiffs who were now in El Salvador, and could he order their return? After the judge issued an order that the government appeared to defy, what would the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals do? What did the Supreme Court later say about the due process rights of those removed under the AEA? We’ve been watching the J.G.G. case and its ripple effects ever since, including the still-pending question of whether the government can be held in criminal contempt for defying the district court’s original order.

Our analysis of the AEA went beyond the J.G.G. case to include other key AEA litigation—which we’ve been methodically following in our AEA Tracker—as well as cross-cutting legal questions, such as the availability of class-action relief.

But the AEA was only one of the legal authorities the Trump administration invoked to expedite removal of immigrants. On the same day that two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) aircraft removed the Venezuelans under the AEA, giving rise to the J.G.G. case, a third aircraft took close to 100 other aliens to the same Salvadoran prison, purportedly under different legal theories. One of those aboard the third flight was Salvadoran Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose removal a government attorney initially said was accidental; that attorney was then fired. The case wound its way up to the Supreme Court, which ordered the government to “facilitate” Abrego’s return. Soon after, the government revived a closed criminal investigation of him, filing charges of human smuggling, which it used as the basis to bring him back to the U.S. to face an indictment in Nashville on such charges June 6.

Throughout Abrego’s saga, our court reporters have provided detailed reporting and analysis.This included minute-by-minute coverage of hearings held on April 17, April 28, July 8, Aug. 25, Aug. 28, Oct. 6, Oct. 10, and Nov. 20, as well as two deep dives into the facts of Abrego’s cases. We considered many of the legal and systemic issues arising out of Abrego’s cases, including the interplay of Abrego’s immigration and criminal cases, how to understand the government’s criminal detention decisions, the legality of third country removals, and various aspects of the U.S.-El Salvador agreement to detain immigrants in a Salvadoran prison for terrorists.

Politicizing the Justice Department and Prosecuting Perceived Enemies

– Molly Roberts, Senior Editor

“The saddest thing is,” President Trump lamented early in his first term, “I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department.” This time around, he seems to have changed his mind. Now referring to himself as the nation’s “chief law enforcement officer,” he started his second stint in the White House by purging the Justice Department of many of its civil servants and installing loyalists in leadership positions.

Over the year that followed, Lawfare chronicled the ways in which the administration has laid a heavy hand on the scales of justice. The president’s allies have been rewarded, with pardons granted to more than 1,200 people convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and cases dropped against everyone from Trump’s co-defendants in the Mar-a-Lago documents case to New York Mayor Eric Adams (who made concessions on immigration policy) to major crypto companies (which made big campaign contributions as well as invested in the First Family’s myriad blockchain ventures).

Lawfare also watched as the White House’s enemies were punished. Our editors analyzed how the administration disciplined and discouraged dissent by using the civil disorder statute to go after protesters and the material support statute to bring terrorism charges against “Antifa-aligned individuals.” (Trump has also purportedly designated Antifa a domestic terrorism organization—a legally impossible act, we’ve written, that nonetheless could have profound First Amendment consequences.) And we tracked the punishment of high-profile Trump opponents, whose prosecutions the president explicitly ordered in a Truth Social post addressed to his attorney general.

These perceived enemies start with former FBI Director James Comey, who was charged with counts related to lying to Congress. His indictment has been dismissed on the grounds that Lindsey Halligan—the former insurance lawyer handpicked to pursue the case, as well as another case against New York Attorney General Letitia James, after career prosecutors declined—was improperly appointed. The dismissal has, at least for now, deprived the presiding judge of the ability to rule on manifold other motions from the defense. One of these is a claim of vindictive and/or selective prosecution. Another is an objection to the process by which the government obtained its indictment: The prosecution possibly collected material illegally; violated attorney-client privilege; misstated the law to the grand jury; and, to top it off, presented in open court an indictment that the grand jury did not actually vote on.

The James case was similarly riddled with prosecutorial incompetence and potential misconduct. We broke the story of the highly unusual texts Halligan sent directly to Lawfare’s own Anna Bower, in which Halligan spoke about the case against James. Meanwhile, mortgage fraud charges like those against James have become a favorite tool of the president in his retributive ventures, and Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte and Special Attorney for Mortgage Fraud Ed Martin have played so fast and so loose with the law that now a grand jury is looking into their behavior as they’ve tried to build a case against Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

The charges against former national security adviser John Bolton for mishandling classified information aren’t absurd on their face, in contrast to those against Comey, James, and many of the everyday people—from anti-ICE protesters in the streets of Chicago to the man who hurled a hoagie at a Customs and Border Protection officer in D.C.—targeted for opposing the president. But the context presents cause for caution nonetheless.

Apparently, not being involved with the Justice Department was too sad for Trump to bear. Now he has involved himself as intimately as can be, picking and choosing when, where, and against whom the law will be enforced.

The FBI

– Michael Feinberg, Public Service Fellow

“There will be no politicization at the FBI,” averred Kash Patel during his confirmation hearings, “There will be no retributive actions taken.” But as Lawfare detailed, Patel’s public record provided fertile ground for skepticism about the sincerity of his promises. We documented an array of concerns: His underwhelming record as federal prosecutor, his insistence that the Steele dossier precipitated the investigations into the Trump campaign and Russia, his colleagues’ doubts about his abilities throughout the first Trump administration, and his conspiracy theorizing about the 2020 election—which culminated in his production of a bizarre musical number sung by a choir of convicted criminals who had, in many cases, assaulted federal officers.

Those concerns proved prophetic, as a bevy of senior FBI executives were forced into retirement immediately following the inauguration. Over the following months, Patel and his deputies further thinned out the ranks of senior leaders and line agents—which we detailed from an FBI insider’s view. These experiences proved relatively commonplace, as further firings culled the community of investigators who had worked on cases examining President Trump or who had made tactical decisions viewed with political disfavor in the current environment.

The FBI also came under fire for its actions in the aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021, and the subsequent special counsel investigation, as the president’s allies in Congress took the agency to task over its subpoenaing of their phone records without prior notification by passing legislation that imposes severe costs for doing so in the future (costs, it should be noted, that would be borne entirely by taxpayers).

While the FBI was being remade in an image more palatable to its new director and his political patrons, its investigative priorities were also changing, particularly in the realm of domestic terrorism. In early October, Patel announced the indictment of a group of individuals he collectively referred to as “Antifa-aligned.” While the related arrests had occurred months earlier, the criminal charges followed months of activity during which the Justice Department had laid the groundwork for more aggression in operations against what it characterized as left-wing terrorism.

As the year drew to a close, this groundwork reached its apotheosis in a new memorandum drafted by Attorney General Pam Bondi, which—eschewing the lessons of the Church Committee and the experiences of the FBI in the decades that followed it—treads dangerously close to opening investigations on the basis of First Amendment-protected activity. The memo—especially when read alongside other policy directives—redefines domestic terrorism with reference to “Antifa-aligned extremists” and directs prosecutors, law enforcement agencies, and Justice Department components to take action accordingly. Given these marching orders, it appears that the FBI’s priorities will continue being politicized in the new year.

Courts, Lawyers, and the Rule of Law

– James Pearce, Public Service Fellow

Even a passing glance at Lawfare’s litigation tracker (or the other entries in this year-end review) reveals the extraordinary amount of national security- and executive branch-focused litigation that courts—and the lawyers practicing before those courts—have undertaken in 2025. That volume alone makes it difficult to neatly identify themes in the area of courts, lawyers, and the rule of law. But here are three: the explosion of fast-paced litigation leading to systemic unpredictability, executive branch attacks on actors in the legal system, and judicial questioning of executive branch lawyering. For better or worse—and probably for worse—these trends appear poised to continue into 2026.

Since January, courts at every level of the federal judiciary have faced a flood of expedited litigation. The flurry of executive orders on Jan. 20 and the administration’s efforts to remove individuals to third countries on short notice prompted legal challenges that had district courts acting at all hours. In many instances, those courts provided relief, including by issuing universal injunctions, but the Supreme Court closed the door on that practice in Trump v. CASA (while appearing to leave in place other tools for lower courts).

Some of that fast-moving litigation has found its way onto the Supreme Court’s non-merits docket—variously referred to as the “emergency,” “interim,” or “shadow” docket. There, the Court has shown an appetite to rule for the administration, often by staying lower court rulings. Those rulings, sometimes with minimal or no reasoning, have whipsawed litigants and frustrated judges, leaving uncertainty in their wake.

Notwithstanding its high success rate at the Supreme Court, the executive branch in 2025 has lashed out at actors within the legal system. Startlingly, those attacks have included executive branch lawyers themselves, deemed insufficiently loyal for being candid with the court about the government’s mistaken deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia or for accurately describing the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The administration has targeted law firms, and while some successfully fended off those attacks in court, others signed deals that may end up exposing the firms to more risk than they anticipated. The president and other executive branch officials have also trained their firepower on the judiciary, with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche going so far as to declare “war” against those he deemed to be “rogue activist judges.”

As Lawfare has discussed, lower court judges have not backed down in the face of these attacks. Exhibiting the independence constitutionally committed to the judiciary, judges have implicitly raised whether government attorneys—and government action more broadly—should benefit from the “presumption of regularity” that has long informed how courts have (deferentially) assessed executive branch conduct. Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, for example, initiated contempt proceedings following concerns that an executive branch lawyer was not truthful about the government’s efforts to comply with Boasberg’s order in a case involving the removal of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. In another case, Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick lambasted Lindsey Halligan, whom the executive branch tried to install as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, for embarrassing errors before the grand jury in the James Comey prosecution.

These themes seem unlikely to abate in 2026. Fast-paced litigation abounds, and the Supreme Court’s non-merits docket is still busy. Indeed, the Court will hear argument in a case from that docket—whether the president can remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board—in January. The executive branch has shown no signs of cooling its pugnacious rhetoric. And after a hiatus, Judge Boasberg is again holding contempt proceedings. Strap in for another tumultuous year.

The Jan. 6 Pardons

– Katherine Pompilio, Associate Editor

On the first day of his second term, President Trump issued a proclamation to grant full and unconditional pardons to any individual convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol—more than 1,500 people. Trump’s proclamation, which referred to the prosecution of these individuals as a “grave national injustice,” also commuted the sentences of 14 individuals convicted of crimes connected to the Jan. 6 riots—including seditious conspiracy—and directed the attorney general to ensure that those held in prison on charges stemming from the Jan. 6 attack are “released immediately."

In the weeks prior to Trump’s return to office, Lawfare evaluated the (at the time) potential pardons of Jan. 6 defendants as well as the high-water-mark figures for the arrests and convictions the Justice Department had amassed over its largest investigation in history. At the time of the pardons, approximately 1,100 of the 1,583 arrested in connection to Jan. 6 had been convicted and sentenced, 170 individuals were found guilty and awaiting sentencing, and more than 300 individuals had been charged but had not yet received a guilty or not-guilty verdict. Also in the days before Trump’s return to office, we unpacked new reports on the attack from the Justice Department’s inspector general, as well as from House Republicans, which revealed new information about the pipe bombs planted outside the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican National Committees.

Following Trump’s proclamation, Lawfare editors—in conversation with those who worked on these prosecutions—were quick to call out the president’s attempt to rewrite history. While in the short term Trump may have been successful in rewarding his allies and political supporters, he will fail in his long-term goal in attempting to alter the historical record: He cannot erase the records of Jan. 6 defendants’ guilty pleas and criminal convictions; the president cannot obviate the words of Special Counsel Jack Smith, who said that Trump was the “individual most responsible for what occurred” that day.

In the months following the pardons, however, Trump made the Justice Department “his own.” He nominated members of his personal legal team to top posts within the department, forced out high-level FBI officials, and purged 15 young assistant U.S. attorneys who had worked on the Jan. 6 prosecutions, claiming that these individuals were “probationary employees” who could be fired “at will.”

Rolling Back Internal Checks and Corruption Enforcement

– Olivia Manes, Associate Editor

In the first month of his second term, President Trump fired 17 inspectors general—watchdogs who investigate and audit fraud, waste, and abuse within the executive branch—in one fell swoop. The move sparked concern and criticism, in part because the president failed to provide the legally required 30 days’ notice to Congress. Lawfare contributors weighed in on both the legality of the dismissals and their consequences for the functioning of government.

The firings seemed to fall into a pattern of actions that strike at the heart of internal democratic accountability mechanisms, particularly at the Justice Department. Lawfare published early warnings that the department’s independence was being systematically degraded as the new administration pushed out career staff, including positions like the heads of the Office of Professional Responsibility and Office of Special Counsel.

But the Trump administration’s wholesale remaking of the administrative state went far beyond the Justice Department. It announced a slate of new policies apparently aimed at stifling internal dissent. It took action to erode civil service and whistleblower protections within the U.S. government, forcing federal employees to navigate an unsettling new reality. It quietly made seemingly mundane bureaucratic changes that may facilitate politicization of democratic institutions, including personnel changes at the Merit Systems Protection Board, in the Senior Executive Service, and even at the Library of Congress. It made efforts to hobble independent agencies. It made a string of controversial appointments—such as those of Lindsey Halligan and Alina Habba—and faced legal challenges to them.

As the systems intended to preserve the government’s integrity were being dismantled, so too was the Justice Department’s ability to counter public corruption. The administration disbanded the department’s Kleptocracy team and announced a pause in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement. It gutted the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division, tasked with investigating and prosecuting government officials for corruption. And it set new priorities for a Justice Department under Trump: a shift away from prosecuting corruption cases and toward a singular focus on immigration enforcement.

Impoundments and Rescissions

– Eric Columbus, Senior Editor

As part of its vast effort to expand presidential power, the Trump administration immediately began refusing to spend massive sums appropriated by Congress as a means of prioritizing its own policy priorities. So far, it has largely gotten away with it due to lack of congressional pushback and favorable Supreme Court decisions.

The Impoundment Control Act (ICA) of 1974 is supposed to limit the president’s ability to “impound”—that is, not spend—appropriated funds. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued opinions on seven occasions in 2025 finding that the administration had violated the ICA—likely a small subset of the actual number of impoundments. The ICA expressly authorizes the GAO comptroller general—a presidential appointee subject to Senate confirmation—to sue to challenge illegal impoundments. But Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, whose 15-year term expired on Dec. 29, did not do so.

The ICA allows the president to cancel appropriated spending lawfully by proposing a “rescission” to Congress. Specifically, the president may place designated spending on hold for 45 days while Congress determines whether to approve the rescission. Rescissions are exempt from the 60-vote threshold required for typical congressional legislation—that is, 50 senators plus the vice president may undo spending that 60 senators had previously approved. In 2025, this process was used successfully for the first time since 1992, resulting in the July rescission of $9 billion in appropriated funds, including $7 billion in foreign aid and $1.1 billion for public broadcasting.

The Supreme Court aided the administration via three decisions on its emergency docket that made it either more difficult to challenge impoundments or easier to effect rescissions. The Court granted stays largely on procedural grounds in each case, but the consequence for all of them was that the administration was permitted to continue withholding funds that Congress had appropriated. Lawfare analyzed the broader impact of the Court’s decisions, including on the separation of powers and other potential legal challenges to impoundment.

In late August, the administration proposed a so-called pocket rescission of an additional $4 billion in foreign aid. A pocket rescission is intended to sidestep the 45-day requirement by being proposed less than 45 days before funds expire at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. GAO and many commentators have concluded that pocket rescissions violate the ICA. That legal question was presented in court in the form of Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, in which a district court judge agreed that the government could not withhold the foreign aid funds at issue, and ordered it to spend those funds by Sept. 30. However, on Sept. 26, the Supreme Court granted a stay pending appeal, which had the effect of ratifying the pocket rescission of those funds. Whether the Court intended to bless pocket rescissions as a general matter remains to be seen.

In addition to analyzing the legal questions around impoundment and rescissions, Lawfare has also been monitoring their real-world repercussions, including in the realms of foreign aid, the Defense Department, global public health, counterterrorism, and beyond. One thing is clear: That fallout is just beginning.

Domestic Deployments

– Loren Voss, Public Service Fellow

This year saw an increase in federal military domestic deployments—that is, instances in which the president sent federal troops into American streets rather than operations abroad—that was unprecedented in both scope and scale. In fact, the president’s use of the military was so unusual that Lawfare launched a federal domestic deployment tracker to make sense of it all. As it turned out, merely collecting the facts was a herculean effort—which itself reflected a disturbing lack of public information about a critical topic.

The first military deployment, in June, responded to civil unrest in Los Angeles. President Trump invoked a never-before-used provision, 10 U.S.C. § 12406, as the mobilization authority to call up members of the National Guard. Section 12406 allows for the mobilization of National Guard troops in three situations: invasion or danger of invasion by a foreign nation; rebellion or danger of rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States; and a situation in which the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States. Across several U.S. cities this year, the president determined that protests were threatening “faithful execution of Federal immigration laws.”

The president deployed 600 active-duty Marines to Los Angeles, arguing that he had the inherent power to do so under Article II of the Constitution. The administration also used this Article II protective power argument to justify actions by the National Guard that would generally be considered violating the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA), which forbids the use of the military to execute the laws except when expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. Lawfare’s analysis of the protective power found the administration’s interpretation to be generally unmoored from constitutional text and not an exception to the PCA, although case law on the exact line of activity that would violate the PCA is ambiguous. We also discussed the ability of courts to address PCA violations by the president, which requires a valid ultra vires claim.

In August, the president turned to the National Guard again, this time for the purported purpose of making D.C. safer and more beautiful. He invoked his power as the commander in chief of the D.C. National Guard to put the troops in militia status, and also invoked 32 U.S.C. § 502(f)

to mobilize out-of-state National Guard members for a deployment to Washington, D.C. We analyzed the two statutory provisions the president could use to deploy the D.C. Guard and found a lack of evidence that either was properly invoked for the deployment. After the deployments were challenged in federal court, a D.C. district court judge found both unlawful. On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an administrative stay.

The administration attempted additional deployments of National Guard troops in Portland, Oregon (September), and Chicago, Illinois (October), under § 12406, but as of now has only mobilized—but not deployed—troops due to various court orders. In Illinois v. Trump, the administration petitioned the Supreme Court on the emergency docket. We discussed the core debate in the case, which relates to the proper interpretation of the authority the president had invoked, § 12406(3). Specifically, it relates to the meaning of the phrase “regular forces” in the statute’s requirement that the president be “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States” before mobilizing the National Guard. At the end of December, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 denying the government’s application for a stay, concluding that “regular forces” likely refers to the regular forces of the U.S. military and that the government “has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois.”

As 2025 comes to a close, there remain significant questions on the legal authorities the administration is using to deploy federal troops, including the scope of judicial review and the level of deference courts should give to presidential determinations. Next year may bring some of those answers but is likely to raise additional questions as additional novel legal arguments are made, possibly invoking new deployment authorities.

War Powers

– Scott R. Anderson, Senior Editor

President Trump’s return to the White House put questions about constitutional war powers and related international law on the use of military force back on the agenda for 2025 in a major way. For in spite of his stated desire to be “a peacemaker,” Trump’s approach to foreign policy has always involved a willingness to leverage the threat and use of military force in unconventional ways. And one year into his second term in office, he has only doubled down on this trend.

The question of the president’s authority to use military force first arose in regard to two unlikely contexts: efforts to secure U.S. control of the Panama Canal and Greenland. As early as Trump’s inaugural address, he lamented the “foolish gift” of returning the Panama Canal to Panama’s control more than a century earlier and threatened to “tak[e] it back” from alleged Chinese control. As for Greenland, Trump resurrected it as a peculiar obsession from his first term, noting in the State of the Union that “[w]e need Greenland for national security and even international security” and that “[o]ne way or another, we’re going to get it.” Both implied a potentially extraordinary invocation of presidential authority: a willingness to use military force offensively to secure U.S. control of overseas territory. But neither has come to fruition to date. The pending sale of the Hong Kong-based company that operates the Panama Canal to U.S. and European investors appears to have satiated the drive for the former (though the deal may have hit a snag in the past few weeks). Interest in the latter, meanwhile, has continued to complicate transatlantic (and particularly U.S.-Danish) relations but has largely reduced to a simmer in the background in recent months.

Instead, Trump’s first real use of military force came as a continuation (and moderate escalation) of his predecessor’s efforts to secure maritime shipping from attacks by the Houthis in Yemen. But any desire to signal strength and resolve was swiftly undermined by his second administration’s first real scandal: the choice by his senior national security staff to communicate about the attack—including sensitive operational details, courtesy of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—on a Signal thread to which Trump’s national security adviser had inadvertently added The Atlantic’seditor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. The ensuing controversy eclipsed various other aspects of the military campaign, which wound down two months later after a hastily negotiated “ceasefire” with the Houthis, in which they agreed to stop targeting U.S. shipping unrelated to Israel—but not other maritime traffic.

Trump’s next notable military foray also occurred in the Middle East—this time in Iran, during its brief but destructive conflict with Israel. The culmination of years-long regional hostilities, the two-week war saw Israel devastate Iran’s military capabilities and come close to weakening the Iranian regime to what some feared might be the point of collapse—all without substantial U.S. involvement. But before the regime in Tehran reached the tipping point, the Trump administration intervened to strike Iran’s subterranean nuclear weapons facilities with U.S. arms uniquely capable of penetrating them, removing one of the main stated objectives of Israel’s military operations. While experts debated the wisdom, likely effectiveness, broader implications, and domestic and international legality of the U.S. strikes (as well as Israel’s broader military campaign), the Trump administration quickly took the opportunity to pressure Israel into a cessation of hostilities, limiting further U.S. involvement.

These operations occurred alongside a continuation—and, in some areas, expansion—of the sorts of global counterterrorist operations the United States has pursued in recent decades, pursuant to the 2001 Authorization for the Use of MIlitary Force (AUMF). While the Trump administration has reduced the U.S. military presence in both Iraq and Syria, it’s also continued military operations against the Islamic State there. This includes Dec. 19 strikes against more than 70 Islamic State-affiliated targets in Syria, which President Trump himself described as “very serious retaliation” for an earlier attack that killed two U.S. servicemembers and a civilian translator. Meanwhile, the scale and tempo of U.S. counterterrorism operations in other countries increased. The number of U.S. airstrikes in Somalia, for example, increased dramatically in 2025 compared to prior years. And on Christmas Eve, the Trump administration pursued strikes against alleged Islamic State targets in Nigeria, whom Trump accused of attacking Christians.

The Trump administration’s most significant military undertaking, however, it saved for the Western Hemisphere. In September, it kicked off a controversial military campaign targeting ships in international waters in the southern Caribbean (and later western Pacific) alleged to be operated by narcotics trafficking organizations that the Trump administration had labeled as “designated terrorist organizations.” The Trump administration’s rhetoric has persistently tried to paint these operations as akin to the global U.S. counterterrorism operations that have become relatively commonplace since the 9/11 attacks. But this deliberately obfuscates the radical nature of the Trump administration’s actions, as the domestic and international legal basis for the Trump administration’s actions—which it has not fully publicly articulated to date—appears to be premised on the unprecedented and highly dubious assertion that smuggling narcotics into the United States is itself the legal equivalent of pursuing a conventional armed attack against it. This effort to apply the legal framework for armed conflict to civilian (if criminal) activities has in turn contributed to other military activities raising serious legal questions, including a Sept. 2 follow-on attack that killed two survivors of an earlier boat attack, in apparent contravention of long-standing Defense Department guidelines. Experts have queried whether this shift is being facilitated by the Trump administration’s seemingly deliberate sidelining of military lawyers and open embrace of “lethality” over conventional legal and policy constraints on the U.S. use of military force. The international community has in turn gradually ramped up its criticism of the Trump administration’s actions, with legal experts raising the possibility of potential international accountability. But the Trump administration’s military campaign has continued, killing 106 individuals in 30 attacks as of the time of publication.

Yet the Trump administration’s campaign against narcotics traffickers may prove to be just a prelude to something bigger. Senior administration officials have not been shy about the fact that a major goal of the counternarcotics campaign is to push Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro out of power. Toward this end, the Trump administration has also pursued an unprecedented military buildup in the vicinity of Venezuela, publicly authorized covert action against the Maduro regime, and recently started an embargo on its oil shipments. And it’s been quite public that it is weighing plans for potential direct military action in Venezuela—something that may have begun earlier this month, when the CIA reportedly conducted a drone attack on a port in Venezuela allegedly used in narcotics smuggling. To date, Trump has otherwise resisted reported calls from within his administration to pursue more direct action in Venezuela. Whether this will change and the United States will once again find itself intervening militarily to force regime change—as it once did disastrously in Iraq, a choice no one has criticized more harshly and publicly than President Trump—remains the big question as we enter 2026.

O America, Where Art Thou? U.S. Foreign Policy in 2025

— Ariane Tabatabai, Public Service Fellow

U.S. national security policy in 2025 was characterized in part by high-level diplomatic efforts to end conflicts against the backdrop of mounting tensions with allies. But perhaps the biggest takeaway from this first year of President Trump’s second term resides in the clear break it represents not just from decades of U.S. policy but even from his own first term—as illustrated by the recent National Security Strategy. Unlike its predecessors, this document is not framed around great power competition or strategic competition, but spheres of influence. It adopts a confrontational stance toward Europe, whose values it dismisses, while positing that the U.S. should abandon its decades-long activist approach to Middle Eastern nations’ “traditions.”

On the campaign trail and then immediately after returning to office, President Trump came out swinging against Europe and NATO—raising questions about the very future of America’s alliances. He mused about turning Canada into America’s 51st state and taking over Greenland. And he imposed tariffs on U.S. allies, often targeting significant sectors of their economies—going as far as declaring a “Liberation Day,” which raised tariffs to the highest level in more than a century. Lawfare published analysis on these developments, including how Europe should respond to this new version of America, whether the tariffs represent an illegal usurpation of the legislative power, what role Congress might play in reversing the tariffs, and how it might go about doing so. We reviewed public attitudes toward NATO and argued for the expansion of the Five Eyes and other intelligence sharing arrangements.

As the year progressed, the administration’s Asia policy began to take a backseat to its activities in the Americas—even as the president visited a number of Asian allies and partners in the fall. At Lawfare, we continued to focus on the Indo-Pacific, examining a range of issues relating to China, including its use of the U.S. national security toolkit, its activities in Africa, its legal warfare, and its coercive tactics. We also evaluated U.S. policy toward China, including with respect to restrictions on Chinese students, cooperation on a joint artificial intelligence lab, tech regulation, and cyber contingency campaigning.

In South Asia, an April 22 terrorist attack further heightened long-simmering tensions between two nuclear-armed states, India and Pakistan. The two countries engaged in escalating confrontations but relatively quickly reached an agreement for which the United States claimed credit.

In the Middle East, which continues to be reshaped by the conflict between Israel and Hamas, U.S. policy was full of contradictions as the administration prioritized personalist diplomacy. The administration pursued a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, conducted airstrikes on key Iranian nuclear facilities, and hit Houthi positions (the episode that gave us Signalgate). Lawfare provided regular updates on the conflict, and other developments in the region, including the lawfulness of Israel’s airstrikes in Doha and the impact of Israel’s domestic matters like judicial reforms. And we analyzed the strikes on an Iranian nuclear facility from a number of angles, including assessing its strategic value, evaluating the prospect of going to war, reflecting views from Congress, and describing what happens next in the diplomatic realm.

Russo-Ukrainian War

– Mykhailo Soldatenko, Legal Fellow

After taking office, President Trump made a rapid negotiated end to the Russia-Ukraine war one of his foreign policy priorities and repeatedly pushed both parties toward a settlement, including by exerting pressure, making threats, and putting peace proposals on the table. Lawfare meticulously covered this negotiation saga, including U.S.-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia, the resumption of Ukraine-Russia negotiations in Istanbul, the Trump-Putin Alaska summit, and recent discussions of a framework agreement proposed by the U.S.

Lawfare weighed in on challenges related to a potential armistice or ceasefire and the United States’s controversial contemplation of de jure or de facto acceptance of Russian control over the occupied Ukrainian territories. Our team also compared the peace plans released by Ukraine and Russia and explored negotiation strategies to enable Ukraine to end the war on acceptable terms. Within our team, views on the timing and prospects of a negotiated settlement varied, ranging from fierce criticism of the administration’s approaches and a skeptical assessment of the short-term prospects of peace to cautious optimism that Ukraine can obtain an acceptable negotiated outcome. Our civic disagreements were on full display during our discussion of the Alaska summit.

Ukraine continued its relentless efforts to obtain reliable security guarantees, among other things, relying on the failure of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that provided the country with shallow security commitments in exchange for giving up its right to possess nuclear weapons. Our contributors put forward different visions of Ukraine’s security arrangements. One contributor supported long-term Western security commitments limited to the provision of weapons and other support similar to what Ukraine received during this war, without permanently abdicating Ukraine’s NATO prospects. Another contributor leaned toward a neutrality or nonalignment model that complements Ukraine’s robust defense and deterrence capabilities with security guarantees—promised military measures of the U.S. and other partners, including the potential use of force, in defense of Ukraine after this war ends—in exchange for Ukraine dropping its NATO aspirations for good. Despite fiery discussions on the issue earlier in the year, including the disastrous Oval Office meeting, the U.S. eventually decided to propose binding security guarantees to induce Ukraine to settle.

Following explosive negotiations, including the United States’s leveraging its military assistance to Ukraine, the U.S. and Ukraine concluded an agreement establishing the U.S.-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund to invest in critical minerals, oil and gas, and infrastructure projects in Ukraine. Lawfarebroke down the agreement’s terms and Ukraine’s difficult trade-offs to incentivize American support, and analyzed the agreement’s status and relevant transparency requirements under U.S. law. Our contributors also opined on how the U.S. can make the most of the agreement. Lawfare also discussed Ukraine’s reparation strategy with its “founding fathers,” analyzed legal ways of using Russian frozen assets in Europe, and explored a negotiated path to reparations.

Despite negotiations, or rather because of them, the war of attrition kept escalating, with Russia and Ukraine targeting each other’s energy infrastructure, and Russia making air incursions into NATO members’ airspace and continuing to make slow and costly territorial advances. Ukraine surprised many by pulling off an impressive attack on Russian airbases with bomber fleets. As negotiations and fighting remain in full swing, the main question for next year is whether Ukrainians can finally get a chance to win peace.

Escalation: Lawfare’s Narrative Podcast on the U.S.-Ukraine Relationship

– Tyler McBrien, Managing Editor

In 2025, Russia’s war in Ukraine did not let up. Lawfare has been publishing analysis of the war and its many implications since the beginning, but this year we also took a step back to take a much broader view—with a particular focus on understanding how the United States’s relationship with Ukraine became what it is today. On Feb. 24—the third anniversary of the Russian full-scale invasion—we released the first episode of Escalation, a narrative podcast series produced in cooperation with our friends at Goat Rodeo. Escalation traced the history of the relationship with respect to both sides’ efforts to manage the threat from Russia.

Our story begins as the Soviet Union is coming to an end, a time when, after centuries of Russian rule, Ukrainianian independence is imminent. But in episode one, “Chicken Kyiv,” rather than throw its support behind Ukrainian self-determination, Washington proceeds cautiously, fearing that independence could actually make the world more dangerous. In the second installment, “No Guarantees,” the United States, Russia, and Ukraine craft a high-stakes diplomatic deal—the Budapest Memorandum—to disarm the thousands of nuclear weapons newly independent Ukraine had inherited from the former Soviet Union in exchange for national security protection. “Us vs. Them,” the third episode, takes listeners through the late 1990s and early 2000s, as Russia reverts back to its corrupt, authoritarian ways, Ukraine deals with the fallout of a gruesome high-profile murder and cover-up, and the U.S. turns its focus solely to the fight against terrorism after 9/11.

Next, in “The Worst of Both Worlds,” a dirty presidential campaign in Ukraine culminates in an attempted assassination and “The Orange Revolution.” Years later, at the 2008 NATO summit, the U.S. and European allies concoct a high-risk plan to protect Ukraine. That plan falls apart in episode five, “Resets,” as those same allies sit back and watch Russia invade parts of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014. Episode six, “Nothing Else Matters,” picks up the thread in 2019, when the relationship between the United States and Ukraine faces one of its biggest tests during a now-infamous phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. We then flash forward to the 2024 presidential election, taking listeners into the halls of Congress with the Ukrainian Cultural Forces as they struggle to generate support for the war—in part due to the fallout of that infamous phone call. The series finale, “Boiling the Frog,” culminates in the February 2022 full-scale invasion and the Biden administration’s attempts to send weapons to Ukraine.

Escalation was an ambitious project that had taken more than a year to create, but it was an all too prescient one. When we published the first episode on Feb. 24, Ukraine no longer dominated the headlines as it had years prior. But just five days later, a disastrous meeting in the Oval Office between Trump, Vice President Vance, and Zelensky put the war front and center once again. Our investigation of the backstory of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship shed new light on the dramatic rupture that was unfolding—it echoed a long history of misunderstandings and competing, conflicting narratives. Suddenly we could see in full how the fundamentally different perspectives on display in the Oval Office had emerged, and how that schism ultimately leaves Ukraine's fate uncertain and its relationship with the United States in jeopardy.

Banning and Unbanning TikTok

– Alan Rozenshtein, Senior Editor and Research Director

The TikTok saga began in 2025 with a legal triumph and ended as a case study in institutional failure. On Jan. 17, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACAA), which prohibited American technology companies from doing business with TikTok, effectively banning the app in the United States, unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, divested. Lawfare analyzed the decision's implications for internet freedom and the potential precedent it set for governments worldwide seeking to control speech through ownership regulation.

Then the law simply stopped mattering. TikTok went dark briefly on Jan. 19, the day before Trump’s second inauguration. But within hours, TikTok’s cloud providers, Oracle and Akamai, restored service—exposing themselves to hundreds of billions of dollars in potential statutory liability—based on nothing more than informal assurances from the Trump campaign. President Trump then issued an executive order directing non-enforcement of PAFACAA. We examined why those assurances provided no real legal protection and why companies' reliance on them reflected a dangerous willingness to treat presidential whims as superior to enacted law.

The executive order required the Justice Department to send letters to tech companies assuring them they would not be prosecuted, and the legal arguments were, unsurprisingly, as astonishing in their sweep as they were deficient in their reasoning. The administration claimed that the president’s Article II foreign affairs authority permitted him to override duly enacted statutes whenever he deemed them inconvenient—a position that, if accepted, would gut Congress’s power over foreign commerce, immigration, and any number of other core Article I powers. Nevertheless, the Justice Department's letters were apparently enough for Apple and Google, which restored TikTok to their app stores in February.

As the months passed and Trump kept signing more executive orders delaying PAFACAA’s enforcement, the ban simply withered away. U.S. companies had no incentive to comply with the law if it would never be enforced. Congress, despite passing PAFACAA with overwhelming bipartisan support, conducted no hearings and mounted no resistance. Finally, in September, President Trump certified a murky “deal” that (still) raises more questions than it answers about whether the law’s requirements will actually be satisfied.

Several sobering lessons emerge from the TikTok saga: The executive branch cannot be trusted to faithfully execute a law it disfavors; Congress cannot be relied on to defend its own statutes when they become politically inconvenient; and corporate America cannot be counted on to adhere to express legal obligations when they’re promised (credibly or not) that they won’t be penalized for ignoring them. In the end, the TikTok story was less about TikTok than about whether legal constraints on executive power mean anything when institutions refuse to enforce them. This year we learned the depressing answer.

Mr. Vance Goes to Europe: Tech Policy Under the Trump Administration

– Kate Klonick, Senior Editor

In early 2025, Vice President Vance and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr each used high-profile trips to Europe to recast the European Union’s prominent new tech platform regulation—the Digital Services Act (DSA)—from a technocratic content-moderation regime into a symbol of “censorship” aimed at Americans’ speech. Their interventions, delivered on European stages but aimed squarely at U.S. audiences, helped foment and then harden a transatlantic rift over online speech and tech platform regulation.

Vance’s tour came first. On Feb. 11, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, the new U.S. vice president warned that Europe’s “massive” regulations on AI risked “strangling” the technology and denounced content moderation as “authoritarian censorship.” Although the Paris remarks focused formally on AI, Vance folded them into a broader narrative about European regulators building an ideological “censorship apparatus” that would inevitably extend across platforms and into politics.

The remarks in Paris were oddly specific about censorship but simultaneously broad on “tech regulation”—and left many wondering what, if anything, the Trump administration was trying to signal to European regulators.

But three days later, at the Munich Security Conference, Vance made clear the administration’s opposition to Europe’s regulatory tech apparatus. In his first major international security address, he argued that Europe’s greatest threat was “from within”—a threat he characterized as a drift toward censorship and suppression of dissent—rather than from Russia or China. He explicitly linked this critique to the DSA and to EU officials’ talk of shutting down social media during unrest. The reception in the room in Germany was overwhelmingly negative: Reporting from Munich and subsequent analysis in European outlets described “stony-faced” silence, open rebukes from figures such as German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, and comparisons to Vladimir Putin’s 2007 Munich speech in terms of confrontational tone.

A few weeks later, Carr doubled down on Vance’s attack. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March, he used a telecoms industry forum to attack the DSA directly, telling the audience that the EU’s social media and platform rules were “incompatible with [the] free speech tradition in America” and warned that DSA-driven “censorship” was fundamentally at odds with U.S. commitments to a diversity of views. He framed the law as an “attack on free speech” that would pressure U.S. tech firms to over-remove content to avoid heavy fines. And he said he was in contact with Apple, Meta, Alphabet, and others about how to resist being “excessively fined for doing business in Europe” while staying true to “American free speech.” Lawfare contextualized these remarks in the policy debate—and questioned whether they were even about policy at all.

Now with a year in retrospect, it’s even more clear the Paris-Munich-Barcelona sequence marked a pivot. The DSA ceased to be merely an EU internal market instrument and became, in U.S. conservative politics, Exhibit A in an argument that Europe is exporting censorship to American platforms—and even to American users. As we look ahead to 2026, we’re listening to how tech policy is being discussed. Will good-faith debates be further displaced by claims of censorship? And what will it mean for regulating tech platforms and online speech—and for fissures between the U.S. and Europe?

Foreign Influence, Censorship, and Election Integrity

– Renée DiResta, Contributing Editor

Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election jolted both the public and private sectors into establishing more robust protocols to counter propaganda, shore up cybersecurity, and bolster election integrity. While Trump denied collusion, interference was never in doubt—it was corroborated through bipartisan congressional investigations. The first Trump administration, therefore, saw the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the retasking of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the launch of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), and the formation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC). In the private sector, tech companies staffed up “integrity” teams to hunt for state-sponsored disinformation campaigns and created moderation rubrics such as “remove, reduce, inform.” Some platforms employed fact-checkers to triage false claims and present accurate counterspeech to the public.

By 2024, this had all been reframed as “censorship.” The president who’d presided over the creation of the public-sector efforts soured on them when they refused to indulge his false claims of a stolen election. While he was out of power, his allies in the House of Representatives set about investigating the tech companies that had moderated—and nongovernmental organizations and academic institutions that had researched—content about the Stop the Steal movement and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Fact-checking, too, became “censorship.”

As 2025 began, the president announced an executive order against “censorship.” Within weeks, the infrastructure built to counter foreign interference began to disappear. Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded FITF, citing vague concerns about “weaponization and abuse of prosecutorial discretion.” CISA’s election security teams were placed on administrative leave pending “assessment” of their counter-disinformation work. The GEC, already defunded by Congress in December, shuttered entirely. Lawfare chronicled this dismantling from the start, contextualizing the delegitimization campaign.

The tech companies also grappled with the power shift. Meta quickly ended its fact-checking program in favor of Community Notes, framing it as realignment with free speech priorities. It settled a court case with Trump. We reported on tech’s intersection with free speech—including the platform capitulations that an emboldened Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) began to secure—for example, a letter from Google saying the Biden administration had exerted moderation pressure and that YouTube wouldn’t hire fact-checkers (which it never had in the first place). YouTube, too, settled a Trump lawsuit. The platform integrity ecosystem transformed dramatically—successfully reframed as an enemy of free speech rather than a defender.

The justification for the full-scale demolition of America’s election integrity capacity ultimately came from its own director of national intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard’s decision to begin declassifying swaths of documents may have been surprising to some, but, as we explained at the time, this broader context suggested that it was part of an effort to advance remarkable historical revisionism. Specifically, the new narrative claimed that Russian interference had been intentionally miscategorized, perhaps even fabricated, by Obama and his intelligence chiefs, in what was tantamount to a treasonous coup.

But Gabbard wasn’t just disputing collusion. In characterizing the newly declassified documents, she began denying the documented, bipartisan-confirmed reality of the Internet Research Agency’s operations, the GRU’s hack-and-leak campaigns, and the efforts to hack voting machines. Gabbard reframed that interference as a lie—thus rendering institutions created in response to it illegitimate. If meddling had never happened, then FITF was always a pretext for domestic control, the story went. If Russian trolls were a hoax, then platform integrity teams were always censorship squads. By attacking the reality that justified these institutions’ work, Gabbard provided the circular logic necessary for their destruction: The infrastructure built to identify foreign interference was the real interference all along.

The Trump Administration Making Its Mark on AI

– Jakub Kraus, Tarbell Fellow in Artificial Intelligence

Upon entering office for his second term, President Trump immediately began defining his own approach to modern artificial intelligence policy by rescinding former President Biden’s AI executive order and declaring a national energy emergency. Three days later, he issued an executive order prioritizing “global AI dominance” and directing the development of an AI action plan. The new administration’s AI agenda continued taking shape as the year progressed, with national security stakes as high as ever following the success of China’s DeepSeek.

February saw Vice President Vance speak at the Paris Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, where he outlined the administration’s intention to deregulate the AI industry and avoid “hand-wringing about safety.” This laissez-faire vision made its way into other international AI governance discussions, from the Group of 7 to the Munich Security Conference, which increasingly emphasized unleashing the technology rather than constraining it.

Over the next few months, federal AI policy remained relatively quiet. Efforts to downsize the bureaucracy led to tech-savvy employees leaving the government. Amid geopolitical tensions surrounding Taiwanese chips, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company planned a $100 billion investment in new U.S. facilities. The Office of Management and Budget issued policies to accelerate federal use of AI and make the acquisition process more efficient. President Trump signed an executive order seeking to expand AI-related educational opportunities in the U.S. He also signed the Take It Down Act into law, which created criminal liability for people who publish sexually explicit imagery without consent, including AI-generated photos and videos. During a trip to the Middle East, the administration announced plans to expand AI chip exports to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates while rescinding the prior administration’s “Diffusion Rule” that limited such exports. 

July’s long-awaited AI Action Plan proposed policies spanning a wide range of issues, such as AI-related infrastructure, open-source software, AI interpretability research, biological threats, military adoption, security by design, export control enforcement, AI model evaluations, and labor market impacts. Alongside the release of the AI Action Plan, President Trump signed three executive orders: one to curb “woke AI” in the federal government, another to accelerate federal permitting for AI data centers, and another to boost exports of AI-related technologies.

Two other eye-catching developments occurred over the summer. First, the Trump administration lifted its earlier restrictions on exports of Nvidia’s H20 chip to China and announced an unprecedented arrangement under which the U.S. government would receive 15 percent of Nvidia’s revenue from Chinese H20 sales. Second, the administration took a 9.9 percent equity stake in the U.S. chipmaker Intel. 

Though the Trump administration has been active on many AI issues, it has not articulated a clear strategy to attract foreign-born AI talent. Nor has it taken formal action to address when AI training violates U.S. copyright law, a topic that many Lawfare contributors have analyzed.

State AI Regulation and Federal Preemption

– Kevin Frazier, Senior Editor

When 2024 drew to a close, the tech policy community was unsure of how the balance of power to regulate artificial intelligence between the states and federal government would play out. As 2025 nears its end, the scales still have yet to settle.

Early signs suggested some federal momentum to affirmatively regulate AI. Lawfare outlined the policy recommendations set forth by the Bipartisan House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. Its report, released late in 2024, detailed numerous proposals with the goal of sparking congressional action. Soon after, President Trump rescinded Biden-era AI executive orders and called on his AI policy team to work on an AI Action Plan, due by late July.

States opted not to wait for the details of Trump’s vision or wait to see if Congress would follow the task force’s plan—many of them took their own actions to regulate AI. Amid hundreds, if not thousands, of AI-specific proposals, two major proposals stood out for their reach and potential impact: the RAISE Act in New York, which Gov. Kathy Hochul signed in December, and SB 53 in California, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in September.

Lawfare published a number of pieces on the ongoing discussion about the pros and cons of various regulatory frameworks. We considered whether those arguing for federal leadership on AI policy fully appreciated the positive attributes of narrow state AI policies. We detailed the arguments for state leadership on AI regulation and the risks of the federal government foreclosing that experimentation. And we assessed some of the legal shortcomings of state AI proposals, such as a failure to adequately consider trade secrets law.

The release of the administration’s AI Action Plan in late July helped clarify how President Trump thought about the proper AI regulatory framework, but it did little to settle the broader question of regulatory authority. The plan’s status as a policy statement left plenty of uncertainty around which of its provisions would be implemented, when, and to what effect. Congress, perhaps responding to ongoing state regulation and President Trump’s signal for federal leadership, then attempted to pass a moratorium on a wide range of state AI-related bills. Procedural hurdles partially doomed the effort, which was ultimately shot down in the Senate after passing the House. 

Months later, federal interest in AI regulation is again on the rise. Congress contemplated, though eventually backed away from, affirmative AI policy to include in the National Defense Authorization Act, and President Trump is soliciting feedback on an executive order. We’ll see what 2026 brings.

The Situation

– Benjamin Wittes, Editor in Chief

The Hebrew word “hamatzav” (“המצב”) translates to “the situation” and functions—as Ha’aretz explains—as “a euphemistic catchall for [Israel’s] security-related afflictions: the bombs and the wars, the guns and the rockets.”

The day after President Trump was elected to his now nearly year-old second term, I borrowed the term “the situation” to reflect our new American reality. The country would be dealing with chronic security-related afflictions. They would constitute an ongoing complex of disruptions of our democratic fabric that would require commentary and chronicling over time. 

Since then, I have written two or three columns on “The Situation” every week. They have tried to treat the predations of the administration on the legal system, the federal government, and traditional American foreign policy values much in the way one might think about any other chronic security emergency—the way an Israeli might think about “hamatzav” or the way a Ukrainian might think about nightly Russian air strikes and an ongoing war.

For America, it’s not bombs, wars, guns, and rockets; the column, instead, has focused on four themes more particular to the Trumpian situation. 

The first is lawlessness. There are the boat strikes. There are the bribes and corruption schemes. There is the impunity and the pardon patronage—and the effort to erase historical memory of prior crimes. There is the violation of court orders. There is the contracting of detention to authoritarian states. There is this question hanging over the whole administration of whether courts are really up to the job of restraining the man and his minions. 

A second theme is shamelessness: The incompetence and malevolence of the Lindsey Halligans, the Pete Hegseths, the Kash Patels, and the many other horsepeople of the Trumpocalypse. This theme incorporates the cult of unqualified authenticity. It includes the war on the bureaucracy and quality in government service. It also covers the pervasive lying among senior officials. It covers the brazen betrayal of Europe and particularly of Ukraine. 

A third major theme is the attempts at repression, which of course overlaps with lawlessness. There is repression particularly of dissenting aliens: disappearing students, plaintiffs who just vanish. But there is also repression of other institutions by way of keeping foreigners out. There’s repression of law firms, and of the press (much of which complies in advance these days and some of which you can just defund), and universities, and fake organizations. And there is, of course, repression of political enemies. The Situation has required me to spill a lot of ink on Letitia James and James Comey (here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here) and some on John Bolton. It’s made me think a lot about how much less free we are in this country.

A final theme involves what we are all to do about The Situation. Here are my suggestions: Stop cooperating. Make fun of it. Draw on the sidewalks. Don’t pretend nothing is happening and go on with your life as normal. For heaven sake, don’t congratulate yourself for giving up on your country—especially if you have tenure at Yale. But be strategic in how you follow the news. Slow down. Don’t be naive about where this country is.

And keep reading, watching, and listening to Lawfare.