Steady State Against MAGA: Who Will Win?
In early February 2025, the leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence received an anonymous letter from a group calling itself Steady State [1]. The letter claimed that the community included about 200 former CIA employees and other members of the intelligence community. The authors of the letter called the personnel purge at Langley, carried out by the Donald Trump administration in line with his MAGA policy [2], a dangerous trend and demanded that Congress intervene and stop the White House in order to preserve the independence and apolitical nature of the CIA. They criticized the intentions of the new Director of the Agency, John Ratcliffe, to retain only loyal employees.
This reaction demonstrated the scale of the problem created by the new administration, which affects senior Langley veterans. They were offered early retirement with generous severance pay. At the same time, Steady State members believed that the departure of the old guard would not only undermine institutional memory and deprive the CIA of the operational and analytical experience accumulated over decades of work, but will also damage partnerships with foreign colleagues that had been established over many years. For example, the CIA has had a special partnership with the British intelligence service MI-6 since World War II. And during the Cold War, the two intelligence services conducted many joint operations [3].
On the same day, a copy of the letter was posted on social media by Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior official at the National Security Agency and the CIA who was close to the former Director of both Agencies, General Michael Hayden. However, at that time, the initiative did not receive widespread publicity in American society.
This circumstance, as well as the channels used by the organization, demonstrated how the approach of individuals who previously held leadership positions in national security had evolved. They are trying not to lose their influence while remaining less visible than in the past.
It should be pointed out that during Donald Trump’s first term, these figures often appeared in the media criticizing the administration, which allowed the president to portray them as political opponents. Most of them, including Larry Pfeiffer and Michael Hayden, were targeted by the White House executive order of January 20, 2025, revoking the access to classified information of 50 former intelligence officials [4].
In general, the Steady State group, whose members actually declared Donald Trump their enemy, emerged at the beginning of his first presidential term. And in March 2020, the community under this name came out in support of Joe Biden’s candidacy in the presidential election. At that time, more than 100 former intelligence officers and officials who worked in the field of national security signed an open letter stating that Donald Trump “posed an existential threat to the United States”. That was an extraordinary phenomenon — veterans of intelligence and public service openly opposed the incumbent president and supported his opponent in the upcoming election.
Steady State has its own website (https://thesteadystate.org/), which provides some insight into the group. After Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, it effectively ceased operations, but was revived four years later. The group has declared its mission to be “fighting the real danger to the United States”, referring to Donald Trump. Unlike him, Steady State believes that it is the Biden administration that has done a lot to restore the global authority and leadership of the United States (i.e., implemented the MAGA slogan), which was particularly evident in NATO’s decisive response to the RF’s aggression in Ukraine.
Steady State cites propaganda and support for its protégés in elections at various levels as its main methods of fighting the current administration. In addition, the organization has abandoned anonymity, as a list of members recently appeared on its website [5].
Steady State uses a ship’s wheel as its emblem, which serves as a reference to the role of the US Navy in shaping the American establishment and intelligence community [6], as well as to the stability that the group prioritizes.
The return of Steady State to the political horizon and the change in its strategy caused some discomfort in security circles in the US capital amid widespread fears of further repression by the new administration. With this in mind, the organization limited its propaganda and switched to impersonal appeals in order to maintain its political weight. However, its candidates failed in the 2024 elections to the US House of Representatives, raising the question of how this community of staunch opponents of Donald Trump will continue to fight the “real danger to the country”.
On the one hand, CIA retirees are determined, as their advanced age and loss of access to classified information have not affected their connections and positions in the so-called “Deep State” [7], nor the ambition of the “Steady State” mission.
On the other hand, Langley veterans were unable to prevent the appointment of the controversial candidate Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence and stop billionaire Elon Musk, who intended to “drain the Washington swamp”, that is, to oust Donald Trump’s political and ideological opponents from the federal government. Then “Steady State” redirected its attacks from the 47th US president to these two individuals.
At the same time, some experts point out that under the influence of repression, political movements have a characteristic tendency to radicalize and turn into extremist organizations, choosing the path of violence or even terror. The explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck pickup truck on January 1, 2025, near the Trump Las Vegas hotel was a very serious signal to the White House. Elon Musk himself suggested that that incident and the terrorist attack in New Orleans, committed earlier using a Ford pickup truck, may be related. In his opinion, the situation looked exactly like a terrorist attack [8].
Given that Steady State consists mainly of retirees who lived through the Cold War, they are capable of more decisive methods. Within the country, members of the organization may take radical steps, launching a kind of hybrid war against the federal government, which will create a crisis of confidence in the Donald Trump administration and its ability to ensure security in the United States. Abroad, veteran intelligence officers could use their long-standing ties with foreign colleagues or agents recruited decades ago to undermine the international initiatives of the new White House occupant.
In June 2025, Steady State launched another attack on Congress. This time, the organization appealed to the Senate Intelligence Committee to block the appointment of Joe Kent, who recently headed the office of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, as head of the National Counterterrorism Center. He is suspected of attempting to pressure the National Intelligence Council to change its conclusions regarding the links between the criminal organization Tren de Aragua [9] and the Venezuelan government. The Donald Trump administration used this unconfirmed information to formally justify the deportation of alleged members of the group to a prison in El Salvador. However, such an argument is unlikely to influence lawmakers’ sympathies for a candidate who, during his 20-year military career, served 11 times in combat zones and, before his discharge, served in a paramilitary unit of the CIA.
Nevertheless, Steady State has no intention of backing down and is considering publicly supporting its own candidates in the upcoming midterm elections to Congress (the entire House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate are up for re-election), which are scheduled for November 2026.
Volodymyr Palyvoda,
expert in international relations
Notes:
[1] Steady State (also translated as Stable State).
[2] Acronym for Make America Great Again — a campaign slogan used in American politics and popularized by Donald Trump in his 2016 and 2024 presidential campaigns. It was first used in 1980 by Ronald Reagan as an election slogan. According to some commentators, it represents American exceptionalism and promotes an idealistic or romanticized American past that excludes certain groups of society.
[3] From 1949 to 1951, the MI6 liaison mission in Washington was headed by Kim Philby, who, as it later turned out, had been working for Soviet intelligence since 1933.
[4] Many of these intelligence officers had long since retired and lost their access to classified information, so Donald Trump’s move can be described as an act of political revenge.
[5] According to the Intelligence Online website, the Steady State group currently has over 280 members, but only about 100 people have agreed to publicly acknowledge their affiliation with the organization.
[6] The first Director of Central Intelligence since 1946 was Rear Admiral Sidney Sauers. From 1947 to 1950, Central Intelligence and the newly formed CIA were headed by Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter.
[7] The deep state or state within a state is a type of governance consisting of potentially secret and unauthorized networks of power that operate independently from the political leadership of the state, pursuing their own goals and objectives. During his first term, Donald Trump considered all his political opponents as part of the Deep State”. After returning to the White House, the president resumed his attacks on them, and his environment considers the Steady State group to be an offshoot of the Deep State.
[8] The FBI identified the deceased pickup driver as Matthew Levelsberger, a US Army Special Operations Forces soldier who may have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues resulting from his military service. Investigators found two letters on his phone detailing the motives for the explosion. In the first letter, he called on his fellow servicemen, veterans, and all Americans to wake up and see the weak government that serves only to enrich itself. In the second letter, he called his actions not a terrorist attack, but a “wake-up call for the United States”.
[9] An international organized crime group from Venezuela, the largest in its country and one of the largest in Latin America. It is believed to have over 5,000 members. Since its inception, the gang has expanded its activities throughout Venezuela, the USA, and seven Latin American countries, facilitated by the mass immigration of Venezuelans (over 20 % of the population) from their homeland.
