The Guardrails Come Down

The trouble with guardrails is that they only get tested at the edge. On the calm stretch of road, they look like clutter — a tax on efficient governance, bureaucratic barnacles slowing everything down. And every calm stretch eventually produces someone who decides to start unbolting them, on the grounds that they're in the way and nothing bad is happening. Nothing bad is happening, of course, precisely because the guardrails are there. This is the recursion. The current administration's project — the one RealClearPolitics is now describing as tearing down the Watergate reforms — is not a rupture in American history. It is the unbolting phase of a loop that has run before, and it is legible only because the construction it reverses was so legible.

Strip the names off and watch the structure. This is not a story about one man's appetites. It is a story about what happens to a scar over fifty years, once everyone who felt the wound has retired or died.

i · what watergate built

The post-Watergate reforms share a single design principle: constrain the executive by naming, one by one, the specific things Nixon did and making each of them illegal, reviewable, or exposed to daylight. Read as a set, they are a point-by-point indictment written in the grammar of statute.

The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 was the centerpiece. It created three organs at once: mandatory public financial disclosure for senior officials and their families; the Office of Government Ethics to police conflicts of interest; and — its sharpest tooth — the independent counsel provision, which forced the Attorney General to hand off investigations of high officials to a prosecutor the administration could not simply fire. The whole apparatus was a direct answer to the Saturday Night Massacre, the night Nixon ordered the special prosecutor investigating him removed and watched two of his own officials resign rather than do it.

The Inspector General Act of 1978, signed by Jimmy Carter that October, seeded independent watchdogs across the federal agencies — officials with authority to review internal documents, investigate fraud, and report to Congress every six months, explicitly insulated from supervision by anyone but the agency head. The idea was to plant a set of eyes inside each department that answered partly to the legislature, not solely to the president.

Around those two pillars, Congress laid a whole floor. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was written because Nixon had refused to spend money Congress appropriated, treating the budget as a suggestion; the law made impoundment reviewable and, in most cases, illegal. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 answered his warrantless wiretaps by requiring a court order to spy on Americans. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 declared that a president's papers belong to the public, not the man — a law that exists because Nixon tried to keep, and destroy, his tapes. The War Powers Resolution of 1973, the National Emergencies Act of 1976, and the 1974 amendments to the Freedom of Information Act (passed over Gerald Ford's veto) rounded out the perimeter, each one a fence around a power that had just been abused in public.

That is the architecture. Every beam in it has a Nixon-shaped dent that explains why it's there.

ii · the long unwinding

Here is the part the outrage coverage always skips: the guardrails were loose long before anyone arrived to remove them wholesale. The recursion is bipartisan, and it works like a ratchet — each administration that holds the wheel discovers that oversight is only ever inconvenient to the party in power, and quietly files down whatever tooth is currently biting.

The independent counsel provision — the sharpest tooth of all — was the first to go, and both parties killed it together. After Kenneth Starr's investigation metastasized from a land deal into an impeachment, Democrats and Republicans alike decided the tool was too powerful and too unaccountable, and let Title VI expire on June 30, 1999. What replaced it was a set of internal Justice Department regulations under which the "special counsel" is appointed by, reports to, and can be removed by the Attorney General — that is, by the administration under investigation. The structure that had been built specifically so the executive couldn't fire its own investigator was replaced by one in which it can. Nobody stormed a building. They just let a sunset clause do the work.

The rest eroded on schedule. Signing statements, escalating from Reagan through the second Bush, let presidents announce in advance which parts of a law they intended to ignore. The post-9/11 surveillance programs blew straight through FISA, and when the warrantless wiretapping surfaced, Congress responded not by enforcing the 1978 law but by retroactively legalizing the breach in the 2008 FISA Amendments. The Federal Election Commission was designed with an even partisan split, which means it deadlocks by design and enforcement withers on purpose. The Impoundment Control Act got tested repeatedly, most visibly in the 2019 freeze of Ukraine military aid — a preview, it turns out, of the argument now being made openly.

None of this required a villain. It required only a long enough stretch of calm that oversight stopped feeling like protection and started feeling like an obstacle. Fifty years is more than long enough. The institutional memory of why these laws exist has thinned to a chapter heading in a textbook nobody assigns.

iii · the demolition phase

Which brings us to the wholesale removal, and its most useful feature: it is almost perfectly legible, because almost every move maps to a specific 1970s beam.

The inspectors general went first. In the opening days of 2025, roughly seventeen agency watchdogs were dismissed at once — without the 30-day advance notice to Congress and case-specific justification that the Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022 had added precisely to stop this. The 1978 statute's core promise, that the watchdogs answer partly to the legislature, was tested by the simple method of removing them and daring anyone to enforce the notice requirement. That is the Inspector General Act, un-bolted.

Impoundment is next, and this one is Nixon's exact claim exhumed and dressed for court: the argument, advanced openly from inside the budget office, that the president may decline to spend funds Congress has appropriated, and that the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is therefore unconstitutional. The specific power that produced a reform in 1974 is being reasserted, word for word, as if the reform were the aberration and the abuse were the constitutional baseline.

The pardon power is the reform that never came — and its use as a bulk political instrument, most visibly in the mass clemency for January 6 defendants, is instructive precisely because there was nothing to tear down. Congress never constrained the pardon after Watergate, because the power is constitutional and effectively unreformable, and Ford's pardon of Nixon set the template for using it to close a chapter by decree. The one door they couldn't lock in 1978 is the one standing widest open now.

And beneath all of it runs the civil-service project — the Schedule F effort to reclassify career officials as at-will employees strippable at the president's pleasure, dissolving the professional buffer between political command and administrative action. This one maps too, and to a beam inside the same window: the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, signed by Carter that October alongside the Ethics and Inspector General Acts, which built the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Senior Executive Service precisely to insulate career officials from being fired for their politics. Schedule F reverses it at the root. The whole point of a nonpartisan civil service is that someone in the room can say no. Remove the protection and you remove the no.

Most of these are named beams being pulled from the 1978 frame; the pardon is the exception that proves the method — the beam that was never built, exploited in the gap where one should have been. Either way the demolition is easy to read for the same reason the construction was: both were done in public, on the record, by people who understood exactly which power they were touching.

Before granting the loop its comforts, grant the objection its due. There is a real difference between a sunset clause quietly expiring in 1999 and seventeen inspectors general fired in a single week; between an appropriations freeze fought case by case in 2019 and the Impoundment Control Act called unconstitutional outright, on principle, from inside the budget office; between signing statements that nibble at a law and a reclassification that voids a whole class of civil-service protection at once. Speed and simultaneity can curdle into a difference of kind. The honest version of the loop thesis doesn't deny that — it absorbs it. This is still the unbolting phase of the old cycle, but run at a tempo the earlier turns never reached, by operators who learned from the slowness of those earlier erosions that the guardrails come off faster if you pull them all at once and dare the enforcement to show up.

The reforms of the 1970s were written in the grammar of "never again," and that grammar only persuades people who remember the again. We are two full generations past the wound now, governed by people for whom Watergate is history rather than memory. So the guardrails are coming down — and here is where the easy grim consolation wants to close the essay: they will be rebuilt, the way accountability structures always are, at greater cost and in a worse hurry, once the next crash proves again why they existed. The scar tissue regenerates. It simply requires a fresh wound first.

But that is the one load-bearing claim in this piece that goes untested, and it deserves the same suspicion as everything else. The 1970s rebuild was not automatic; it ran on specific enabling conditions. A Congress willing to move against a president of its own coalition. A shared factual record — the tapes — that no faction could finally deny. Officials like Richardson and Ruckelshaus who resigned rather than execute an illegal order, and made the abuse legible by refusing it. Now reread the demolition with those conditions in mind. Schedule F is aimed exactly at the people whose function is to say no. The shared record is itself dissolving, faction by faction. The immune response that regrew the guardrails last time depends on organs this round is built to remove. Earlier turns of the loop attacked the antibodies; this one may be attacking the body's ability to make them.

So watch the loop try to complete — but don't assume it can. Scar tissue regenerates only if the machinery that heals wounds outlives the wound. Whether it does is the real question, and no one running the demolition has any incentive to let us find the answer cheaply. The variable still in play was never just how expensive the reminder turns out to be. It's whether there's anyone left in the room still able to receive it.