As the descendant of Soviet dissidents I have spent almost three decades analyzing governance trends slowly getting out of hand on both sides of the Atlantic. But between the creeping technocracy and population oppression of the European Union since the 1990s and Canada in more recent years to the rapid takeover of Washington by corporate and foreign interests, I have rarely encountered a more coherent and more troubling pattern than the one which is currently unfolding in the United States right now.
What is presented as efficiency-driven “modernization” under President Trump appears, upon closer examination of contracts, domain records, executive actions, and financial flows, to function as a parallel governance layer deliberately structured to concentrate power in the Executive Office while channeling economic benefits toward the president, his family, and their aligned private networks.
Sadly, this is no longer the usual government inefficiency or standard politics. It is a systemic shift that should provoke deep skepticism and opposition from any citizen concerned with liberty, accountability, and the integrity of public office.
Jump To Section:
- A Second Government in Plain Sight
- The Monetization Machine
- Connecting the Threads
- Implications for Personal Liberty
- What Can You Do About It?
- Footnotes
The Parallel Digital Layer: A Second Government in Plain Sight
In August 2025 President Trump issued the Executive Order “Improving Our Nation Through Better Design,” creating the National Design Studio (NDS) inside the Executive Office of the President. Nominally led by former Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, the NDS is tasked with redesigning thousands of federal websites and services. The official narrative emphasizes user-friendly, “Apple Store-like” interfaces.
But the reality is far more more ominous.
Multiple .gov domains, most notably variants of passports.gov, are registered not to the State Department but directly to the White House1. These sites redirect to sparse login pages lacking standard government seals, privacy notices, or transparency indicators. Certificate transparency logs also reveal pre-public activity for all these domains on private NDS infrastructure, including dedicated photo servers, which makes these actions/sites highly suggestive of beiong used for bulk biometric data collection.
All this runs parallel to upgrades in login.gov, the centralized identity platform now incorporating “proofing agents” (with LexisNexis2 at the head of the group) that allow third parties to verify identities, including biometrics, remotely, without the citizen’s physical presence being required.
NDS also inherits key personnel and momentum from the controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), positioning it as a streamlined vehicle for executive control over the digital touchpoints between citizens and the state.
Major deliverables, like extensive updates to key government websites and digital services are aggressively timed for the July 4, 2026 “Freedom 250” celebrations, alongside new passport designs, Trump Accounts, and other centralized systems.
Critics rightly question the motivations:
- Why bypass the established agencies and avoid their stronger oversight?
- Why register critical services like passports under the White House, subjecting them to weaker presidential records rules rather than full Privacy Act and FOIA protections?
The architecture strongly suggests the construction of a parallel operational layer; a “second government” on private-sector rails, that reduces transparency while expanding the executive office’s data collection/reach. This almost exactly mirrors concerning European precedents where digital ID systems were sold as convenience while enabling new, expansive surveillance and control systems over the populace.
The Monetization Machine: Public Office as a Family and Ally Profit Center
Meanwhile the digital centralization operates alongside, ‘and likely enables‘ a brazen pattern of private profiteering from public resources and authority.
A few high-profile examples expose the incentive structure:
- The UFC Freedom 250 spectacle on the White House South Lawn (with Lincoln Memorial involvement) allows elite VIP and sponsorship packages reportedly priced up to $1.5 million.
While framed as patriotic celebration, it monetizes federal grounds for a for-profit event, with the Trump family holding stakes in TKO Group (UFC’s parent) and benefiting from associated branding and merchandise. Taxpayers absorb security and logistical costs; private insiders capture the upside. - World Liberty Financial (WLFI) and related crypto ventures have reportedly generated hundreds of millions to over a billion in value for the Trump family through token sales, stablecoins, and strategic partnerships (including pre-inauguration deals with Gulf entities).
These profits coincide with administration policies that have dramatically favored the crypto sector, raising unavoidable questions of insider/self-dealing and regulatory capture. - Donald Trump Jr.’s “Executive Branch” private club in Georgetown charges up to $500,000 in initiation fees for access to administration figures and elite networking, thus directly monetizing proximity to presidential power in the nation’s capital.
- Broader policy moves, like accelerated federal land and resource leasing, mass property sales, and energy dominance initiatives, open trillions in potential value to aligned private interests, often with significant donor and family network overlaps.
None of this is coincidence; instead it reflects a single, overriding motivation:
The transformation of public authority, symbols, facilities, and data infrastructure into vehicles for private enrichment.
Connecting the Threads: A Carefully Designed System of Control and Capture
The linkage between the “second government” and the profiteering is structural and deliberate.
NDS supplies the digital front-end and data ingestion mechanisms, such as streamlined passports, unified logins, tokenized accounts, etc. creating the infrastructure for centralized identity, payments, and behavioral tracking.
Meanwhile, the profiteering examples reveal the economic engine: high-value access on public property, crypto licensing under friendly regulation, clubs trading on insider proximity, and resource policies favoring connected players.
Together, they form a hybrid regime where government services become proprietary platforms, citizens are converted into data-generating users, and value flows upward to the ruling family and its technocratic allies.
Motivations are rooted not so much in populist “draining the swamp” rhetoric as they are in establishing a durable, privatized power structure insulated from traditional democratic constraints. Further, the timing around Freedom 250 and the aggressive pace of the rollout suggest an intent to lock in this architecture in place before meaningful opposition against it can coalesce.
This model truly echoes the worst elements of European technocracy: Selling the people centralized digital control as efficiency and convenience, while adding an unapologetic American flavor in the shape of family-business cronyism.
Trump’s refusal to establish a true blind trust³, combined with the placement of family members and loyalists in key nodes, undermines any overt claim of him retaining public-service purity.
Implications for Personal Liberty and the Republic
The stakes could not be more clear: This convergence lays the foundation for creating tiered citizenship, where compliance and connections yield frictionless access while dissent or disconnection invites friction, exclusion, and round-the-clock surveillance. Centralized biometric identity paired with tokenized systems and monetized governance points toward a future of conditional, behavior-based rights rather than inherent liberties.
The evidence, from domain records, executive orders, financial disclosures, and public reporting does not support benign interpretations. It points to a regime motivated by power retention and private accumulation, using the language of patriotism and efficiency to mask the erosion of institutional boundaries.
For the moment, citizens still retain tools of resistance: demanding full transparency on NDS contracts and data flows, preferring legacy in-person government services, supporting independent oversight, and remaining vigilant against further consolidation.
And yet, the American citizenry has become complacent about its personal freedoms. The coming years will test whether the republic can withstand this aggressive fusion of executive power, digital infrastructure, and family profit-seeking or whether the “second government” will quietly become the primary one to control everyone and everything.
Understanding these patterns is no longer optional. It has become an act of informed self-preservation.
What Can You Do About It?
To finish up, I have put together five concrete, practical ways in which American citizens can actively resist and push back against the developments I have outlined:
- Refuse Digital Centralization: Use Legacy Channels Aggressively
Always process passports, benefits, taxes, and official business in-person at physical government offices rather than through passports.gov, login.gov, or Trump Accounts portals.
Request paper records and avoid linking accounts. That means scheduling appointments early and documenting every interaction. However, this action alone starves the “second government” of your biometric and centralized data. - Flood the System with FOIA Requests and Public Records Demands
File targeted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests (and equivalent state requests) for NDS contracts, vendor agreements (especially with LexisNexis/RELX), data-sharing protocols, and financial flows related to World Liberty Financial or events like UFC Freedom 250.
Use tools like MuckRock.com for easy filing. Coordinated citizen FOIAs create transparency pressure and generate public records that journalists and watchdogs can use. - Apply Sustained Political Pressure on Congress and State Officials
Contact your Senators, Representatives, and state attorneys general weekly via phone calls and letters demanding:
- Full Privacy Act/FOIA compliance for all NDS-built systems.
Investigations into conflicts of interest (Trump family crypto profits, club memberships, stock holdings). - Legislation prohibiting White House registration of agency-critical .gov domains.
Join or form small advocacy groups focused on this issue. Elected officials will only respond to high volume pressure applied persistently.
- Support and Fund Targeted Legal Challenges
Contribute time or money to organizations already litigating these issues, for example Public Integrity Project lawsuits against the UFC event, EFF challenges on biometric surveillance, or Judicial Watch actions on executive overreach).
File amicus briefs if qualified, or support class-action efforts against remote proofing agents and data sharing. Legal pressure is one of the most effective brakes on executive action. - Build Parallel Alternatives and Local Resilience
Support and use decentralized tools: privacy-focused communications, like Signal or self-hosted options, local barter/community networks, precious metals/crypto held outside regime-linked control, and support state-level pushback. Did you know that many red and blue states are already passing data privacy or anti-digital ID laws?
Work to educate your networks through small private briefings or newsletters. Informed, affluent citizens coordinating locally can create significant cultural and economic counter-pressure against the technocratic takeover
These actions are fully legal, low-risk, and scale when done consistently.
The key is persistent, coordinated, non-violent civic friction: denying data, demanding transparency, and raising the political and legal cost of the second government’s rollout.
Footnotes:
- ndstudio.gov:Official homepage of the National Design Studio.
- americabydesign.gov: Main initiative site for the “America by Design” effort.
- passports.gov and passport.gov: Passport-related login/portal sites (registered to White House
- trumprx.gov: Federal prescription drug pricing / lower-cost meds platform.
- realfood.gov: MAHA / nutrition and food policy site.
- trumpaccounts.gov: Trump Accounts (children’s savings / investment program).
- techforce.gov: Tech talent recruitment / civic engineering initiative.
- safedc.gov: Public safety / law enforcement surge platform for Washington, D.C.
- trumpcard.gov: Gold Card / expedited green card / investment immigration program.
- genesis.energy.gov: Genesis Mission (federal AI / energy infrastructure initiative with major tech partners)
- vote.gov: previews / staging versions (e.g., vote-gov.previews.ndstudio.gov) Working previews of voter registration infrastructure built under NDS.
- retire.opm.gov: Digital federal retirements / OPM modernization.
2 A short dig reveals that LexisNexis is owned by RELX Group (formerly Reed Elsevier), a publicly traded multinational information and analytics company.
- RELX is listed on the London Stock Exchange (REL), Euronext Amsterdam (REN), and New York Stock Exchange (RELX).
- LexisNexis (including its Risk Solutions division, which handles much of the identity proofing work for login.gov) operates as a major subsidiary/division within RELX.
In turn, RELX PLC (the parent company of LexisNexis) is a publicly traded multinational corporation with no single individual, family, or private entity owning a controlling stake.
Ownership Structure (as of mid-2026):
- Institutional investors own the vast majority (approximately 74–80% of the shares.)
- Largest shareholder: BlackRock, Inc. (around 9.7–11%).
- Other major institutional holders include:
- Vanguard Group
- Capital Research and Management Company
- Invesco
- FMR LLC (Fidelity)
- Morgan Stanley
- and various other asset managers and pension funds.
RELX trades on the London Stock Exchange (REL), Euronext Amsterdam (REN), and as ADRs on the New York Stock Exchange (RELX). It is widely held by global institutions and passive index funds, with no concentrated private control.
3 “The refusal to establish a true blind trust” means that President Trump has declined to place his extensive business assets and investments into an independent, irrevocable trust managed by an unbiased third party with no family involvement or communication; a standard ethics safeguard used by previous presidents to prevent conflicts of interest, thereby allowing him and his family to retain direct knowledge of, influence over, and financial benefit from their private holdings while he exercises presidential power.
