“Having the best spies, the best collection systems, and the best analysts will not help an intelligence service if it leaks like a sieve,” the former CIA speechwriter Charles E. Lathrop remarked in The Literary Spy, a book of quotations about espionage that he compiled. Lathrop, who wrote under a pseudonym, was making a point about counterintelligence—the flushing out of enemy spies and leakers who might compromise a spy agency’s precious secrets. Counterintelligence, Lathrop observed, “is the kidneys of national security: necessary, but unheralded until something goes wrong.”

These days, something looks to have gone very wrong—with the kidneys and maybe with the brain, too.  

To protect secrets, people who will be handling classified information or assuming positions of trust within intelligence agencies are vetted, often by law-enforcement agents, who interview friends and co-workers, review travel histories, and analyze financial information to determine whether someone might make an attractive recruit for a foreign intelligence service. Perhaps he’s in debt and would be willing to sell sensitive information. Or maybe she harbors some allegiance to a hostile country or cause and might be willing to spy for it. Looking for these red flags is counterintelligence 101, an imperfect, laborious, and invasive process that American presidents of both major parties have nevertheless accepted as the cost of doing intelligence business.

[David Deming: DOGE is failing on its own terms]

But the legion of Elon Musk acolytes who have set up shop inside federal agencies in the past few weeks do not appear to have been subjected to anything approaching rigorous scrutiny. President Donald Trump has also nominated to key national-security positions people whose personal and financial histories contain at least caution flags. This deviation from past practice has created a new kind of counterintelligence predicament, officials and experts have told me. Rather than staying on high alert for hidden threats, the counterintelligence monitors have to worry about the people in charge.

The public knows very little about how, or if, staff at the new Department of Government Efficiency that Musk runs were vetted before they obtained access to the Treasury Department’s central payment system or the files of millions of government employees at the Office of Personnel Management. These two databases could help U.S. adversaries uncover the identities of intelligence officers and potentially their sources, people with knowledge about how the systems are set up told me.

Precisely what the DOGE teams are doing with this information, whom they’ve shared it with, and whether they have adequately protected it from falling into the wrong hands remains unknown. But the risks posed by this direct access to the government’s central nervous system are entirely foreseeable.

“The fact that people are getting access to classified and personally identifiable information who are not being vetted by our national-security system means it is more likely that there are going to be damaging leaks,” Tim Naftali, a counterintelligence expert and presidential historian at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, told me.

Why would President Trump, who is the ultimate arbiter of who gets to see classified information, take such risks? One answer is rooted in his historic distrust of the FBI, whose agents traditionally conduct background investigations of senior administration officials as they assume their posts. Trump views the bureau as a hotbed of disloyal conspirators. During the presidential transition, he reportedly resisted efforts to allow FBI background checks, and how thoroughly members of his administration were vetted, if at all, is still not clear.

Animus and mistrust likely guide the president’s decisions here. He has publicly seethed at the agents who searched his Florida home, as part of an investigation that led to felony charges for mishandling national-security information after he left office. The agents who worked on that case are assigned to a counterintelligence squad at the FBI’s Washington field office, and the White House is trying to fire them. These agents routinely investigate threats to U.S. national security, and removing them would at least temporarily stall their efforts.

“In his dark passion for retribution, Trump is making his own government, which is our government, more vulnerable to adversarial penetration,” Naftali said.

Security risks now pervade the federal government, thanks largely to a cadre of youngsters, some barely out of high school, whom Musk has deployed inside federal agencies, ostensibly to identify wasteful government spending. In addition to the Treasury Department and the Office of Personnel Management, DOGE agents have reportedly accessed information networks at the State Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Commerce Department, the Education Department, and the Energy Department, among others. Musk has further plans to send teams to other major organizations, including the Pentagon.

[Read: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

As his teams fan out, the kidneys of counterintelligence are backing up.

At Treasury, a security team warned that DOGE employees’ access to a central government payment network presents an “unprecedented insider threat risk,” The Washington Post reported last week. The government defines an insider threat as “someone with regular or continuous access” to a computer system who could exploit the information for criminal purposes, leak it to unauthorized parties, or sell it to a foreign government. Edward Snowden, the government contractor who disclosed classified information about NSA surveillance to journalists and who now lives in Russia, is the classic modern example.  

Two intelligence officials told me that the Treasury system, which processes more than $5 trillion in payments each year, contains sensitive national-security information. It could be used to uncover the identities of U.S. intelligence officers—who are after all paid from the Treasury—as well as people or organizations who are paid to spy on behalf of the United States.

These names are not explicitly identified as intelligence assets in the Treasury network, but an adversary with the time and know-how could use the Treasury data, possibly in concert with other information, to discover classified identities, the officials indicated. According to the Post, a senior career official at the department raised such concerns in a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The official recommended some unknown mitigating steps that Bessent reportedly approved.

At the Office of Personnel Management, DOGE employees gained access to information, including addresses and salary history, about Treasury and State Department employees working in “sensitive security positions,” the Post also reported. Personnel data are another puzzle piece that could allow an adversary to identify who works for the intelligence community, and potentially in what country they’re stationed.

“Little pieces of information matter a lot when they’re put together with other little pieces of information,” Joel Brenner, who was in charge of U.S. counterintelligence policy under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told me. This is standard intelligence tradecraft. “That’s how we do it. That’s how every intelligence service does it,” Brenner said.

The Office of Personnel Management is not known for its counterintelligence prowess. A decade ago, Chinese hackers breached the agency’s computer networks and stole the records of millions of U.S. government employees, in one of the great espionage coups of recent history. As I reported at the time, officials had earlier resisted a plan to merge a system known as Scattered Castles, which contained the records of intelligence-agency personnel and others who held security clearances, with OPM’s system, fearing exposure in just this scenario.

Their concerns proved prescient, and today, Scattered Castles remains segregated from OPM’s systems—fortunately, given recent reports that Musk’s team has connected its own server to OPM’s systems, which could open a gateway for foreign hackers to again burrow in.

Yet intelligence-personnel records may still be at risk. Last week the CIA sent OPM a list of names of new CIA officers via an unclassified email, people familiar with the matter told me. The CIA sent only the officers’ first names and the first initial of their last names. But even those fragments of information could be useful to foreign spies.

Over the weekend, a former senior CIA official showed me the steps by which a foreign adversary who knew only his first name and last initial could have managed to identify him from the single line of the congressional record where his full name was published more than 20 years ago, when he became a member of the Foreign Service. The former official was undercover at the time as a State Department employee. If a foreign government had known even part of his name from a list of confirmed CIA officers, his cover would have been blown. The cover of a generation of young intelligence officers now appears to depend on whether Musk’s DOGE kids are, with no obvious experience in such matters, properly handling and protecting the information that the CIA sent them.  

How trustworthy are Musk’s employees? Early reports suggest that if they had been subject to traditional background checks, which they apparently were not, some of them would have had trouble passing. One standout in this regard, Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old DOGE member who has used the online handle “Big Balls,” was fired from an internship after he was accused of sharing proprietary information with a competitor, Bloomberg reported. After he was dismissed, the former intern bragged on an online chat platform that he “had access to every machine” and could have deleted crucial data from the company’s servers. “I never exploited it because it’s just not me,” Coristine reportedly wrote. This is the textbook definition—indeed, the U.S. government’s definition—of an insider threat.

The cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs has written that Coristine was affiliated with a community of chat channels “that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network.” Coristine, who was first identified not in a government announcement but by investigative reporters at Wired, founded a company that “controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” the publication reported. Coristine has recently been named a senior adviser at the State Department, according to the Post.

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

Government computer-security experts are worried that DOGE members could corrupt vital technology systems. “Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors,” my colleagues wrote in The Atlantic last week. An insider need not even behave maliciously to cause havoc. DOGE agents, who are overwhelmingly young with little professional experience or familiarity with older government systems, “may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo.”

The counterintelligence risks don’t extend only to unchecked young people with the keys to the government’s kingdoms of data. Some of Trump’s Cabinet nominees—including those for two national-security positions—raise classic red flags.

According to his financial disclosure forms, Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to run the FBI, was paid $25,000 last year by a film company owned by a dual U.S.-Russian citizen that has made programs promoting “deep state” conspiracy theories pushed by the Kremlin, the Post reported. Receiving money from a foreign government is a basic risk factor because it raises questions about whether a government employee’s favor or influence can be bought.

The resulting six-part documentary appeared on Tucker Carlson’s online network, itself a reliable conduit for Kremlin propaganda. In the film, Patel made his now infamous pledge to shut down the FBI’s headquarters in Washington and “open it up as a museum to the ‘deep state.’” The FBI is one of the Russian intelligence services’ main targets for espionage.

On his disclosure forms, which were made public only after he testified in his Senate confirmation hearing, Patel describes the payment as an “honorarium.” That term traditionally implies a nominal or even negligible sum of money, which this was not. He also listed consulting work for clients that include the Qatari embassy and said that he would keep his stock in the Cayman Islands–based parent company of the clothing brand Shein, which was founded in China.

According to his financial disclosure forms, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to run the Health and Human Services Department, is saddled with up to $1.2 million in credit-card debt. Owing money is another risk factor because it might induce people to accept funds in exchange for sensitive information. Investigators examine bank records, credit-card statements, and other financial documents to determine how much debt a security-clearance applicant carries and its proportion to his level of income.

Allegiance or even sympathy to a hostile power is yet another warning sign. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, has drawn widespread criticism for her statements supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as her 2017 meeting with Syria’s then-president, Bashar al-Assad. More alarming, the Post found evidence that Gabbard tried to obfuscate details about the nature of her encounters with the Syrian dictator from congressional investigators and may have lied to her staff. Having a history of shady meetings with any foreign national, much less the head of a country, is a great way not to be approved for a security clearance. (Just ask Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose own opaque interactions with foreign officials temporarily stopped him from obtaining a clearance in the first Trump administration.)

During her confirmation hearing, Gabbard resisted entreaties from her fellow Republicans and Democrats—with whom she used to caucus when she was a member of Congress—to condemn Edward Snowden’s leaks and label him a “traitor.” Gabbard, who has long praised Snowden as a courageous whistleblower and called on Trump to pardon him, would say only that he “broke the law,” an obstinate position that left the distinct impression she approves of what Snowden did. Nevertheless, today the Senate voted largely along party lines to confirm Gabbard’s nomination as the nation’s top intelligence official.

Traditionally, counterintelligence officials have judged people whose ideology mirrors that of an adversarial state, or who have financial conflicts of interest, to be at higher risk of becoming spies or leaking secrets. “At the moment, that’s the population from which President Trump is selecting his most powerful and influential members of his administration,” Naftali told me.

[Read: It’s time to worry about DOGE’s AI plans]

Trump’s assault on the country’s national-security agencies stems from a distrust that millions of Americans share, Jeffrey Rogg, an intelligence historian at the University of South Florida, told me. Trump has repeatedly said—accurately—that the intelligence community often falls short of its basic obligation of keeping the United States from being taken by surprise by the country’s adversaries. And the agencies have failed several times to root out their own insider threats. Those counterintelligence debacles shake public confidence and bolster Trump’s critique that the intelligence agencies are dysfunctional and even corrupt.

At the same time, many career intelligence officers don’t trust the president or the people he has chosen to lead. They believe that Trump has misled the public about what the intelligence agencies are really there to do. And these, too, are accurate complaints, shared by many Americans.

Intelligence agencies depend on trust, both in their own employees and from the public. That confidence is disintegrating. As Rogg told me, “This is where we’re going to be our own worst enemies.”

The BBC's Defence correspondent breaks down a drastic shift in Washington's position on the war in Ukraine.

As the Trump administration widened its campaign against the civil service, my mind kept turning to an old source, Max Stier, who has earnestly devoted his life to making government work better. Like his great passion, the bureaucracy, he’s relatively anonymous. In 2001, he founded an outfit called the Partnership for Public Service, a name that suggests an almost lyrical devotion to the gritty stuff of government. His organization is a font of ideas for making bureaucracy more effective. Over the years, it has trained thousands of government employees and helped agencies devise modernization plans.

Hoping to understand the damage that President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have managed to inflict, I called Stier this past weekend. What was he telling the civil servants who were calling him in a state of panic? Because he is levelheaded and committed to a nonpartisan agenda, I trusted him to deliver a measured assessment. That he seemed so profoundly alarmed was itself terrifying. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Franklin Foer: I’m sure your phone is constantly buzzing. What are you hearing?

Max Stier: I’ve fielded calls from Forest Service workers in Idaho and health-care workers in Georgia. It’s important that people know that the bulk of civil servants are not in D.C. Eighty percent of the feds are outside of D.C. They’re in every community in our country—and they used to be in a lot of communities globally too. Some people have been chased away. Some people have been directly fired, largely illegally, or put on administrative leave or sidelined. But there is no part of the workforce that is immune from this profound distraction and fear.

[Read: It’s time to worry about DOGE’s AI plans]

Foer: Okay, survey the totality of the wreckage for me.

Stier: There is just a series of hammer blows that have been wielded against the civil service. The so-called deferred-resignation offer is their attempt to create a stampede out the door, to make it easier for them to get rid of the apolitical expert civil service. And then, on the other end, they’re creating a system that enables them to politicize the hiring and the management of the workforce. Certainly there are parts of our government—and most obvious ones, like USAID and the Department of Justice and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—that are taking it on the chin even harder. Some of the most frightening things are happening at the FBI.

Right now, we’re seeing the destruction of infrastructure, but also a culture that focuses on the public good and the commitment to the rule of law. What we are going to see next is the use of government authority that is possible because that culture has been eradicated—the use of government authority for improper purposes. And so when you think about what’s happening, for example, with prosecutors who were fired because they investigated or prosecuted January 6 rioters or the president himself, these events foretell the use of government authority to pursue a personal agenda and to go after perceived enemies.

One other point: Sometimes even the media describes this as an effort to cut costs. This is not an effort to cut costs. This is going to cost the American taxpayer and the American public in huge ways.

Foer: Wait, explain that to me.

Stier: If you really wanted to reshape the federal workforce, you would start with an actual investigation of all the talent that you have—and then all the talent that you need. You would develop a plan. But what they’ve done is a random exercise. They are going after people without any sense about whether they’re the best performers or the poor performers. It’s probably a little worse than that: The people who may be the most talented have a larger propensity to leave, because they’ll have more options.

And the administration is creating liabilities. It will now owe money to people who are put on the sideline for no reason, and it will have to fill gaps that are created that they don’t even understand, which will mean eventually going out to hire contractors. There will be lawsuits—and lawsuits that are meritorious. Guess who pays for that? The American taxpayer is going to be funding the defense in those cases and will pay the payoff. If your intent were to shrink the workplace in a cost-effective way, this is a crazy way to do it.

Foer: But that’s the Silicon Valley way—moving fast and breaking stuff.

Stier: That may or may not be a smart strategy in Silicon Valley. It is not in the government, because there are real consequences. People get hurt in a different way when public capability is broken. One of the challenges in our government is that when it tries to modernize technology, it has to build up a new system alongside the legacy system. That’s how it manages to keep functioning.

Our government is about creating good outcomes; it’s not about throughput. So the objective is wrong here. The public sector has accountability, transparency, reliability issues that are simply not the same as in the private sector.

Foer: All the focus has been on DOGE, understandably. But what does the focus on Musk leave out?

Stier: Most democracies count their political appointees in the tens, not the thousands. We have a government where there are 4,000 political appointees that a president makes. That’s a vestige of the spoils system that actually creates a lot of grief. Only 1,300 of them require Senate confirmation. The remaining appointees are a bit invisible. The public isn’t seeing that they are the ones doing a lot of the damage right now.

[Read: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

Foer: Trump’s are qualitatively different from the appointees who show up in every administration?

Stier: It is qualitatively different. In modern times, there’s never [before] been a collection of political appointees where personal loyalty to the president has been the paramount value that has been used to select them. They swear an oath of office, when they take these jobs, to defend the Constitution. So they should be following the policy direction of the president within those constraints, but that is not how they were selected and not how they have begun to operate so far.

Foer: What do you make of DOGE’s efforts to gain access to government databases?

Stier: I cannot tell you how many conversations I have had with the community of chief information-security officers. They’ve never seen anything like this, and it terrorizes every bone in their body. These are not just people who are trying to protect the status quo. These are people who would have been good allies for reform.

Foer: What are some of the scariest risks that you’ve heard described that these actual practitioners see as plausible?

Stier: Chinese control over vital assets of our government and our country, because DOGE has opened the door for that to happen. Selective attacks on enemies lists. Breakage of systems that have consequences for vulnerable Americans. And it’s not like, Oh, here’s a mistake. They are engaging in the same practice everywhere—and they are not asking for advice or help from people who know what those risks are.

Foer: What would a responsible government-reform agenda look like now?

Stier: Ask Americans what they think about our federal government, and they think about bickering politicians in Washington. They don’t actually think about civil service. And that’s part of the challenge here. The opportunity is hopefully they will begin to understand who those folks are and appreciate what they have, even if we can do better.

But a place to begin is tapping into the very best technologists in Silicon Valley to modernize government systems. We need to have a reorientation toward the customer. In the private sector, we’ve seen improved customer service that is created by the digital universe we live in. Our government needs to be much more customer-focused.

And at the end of the day, we need to see the reform of leadership. We have too many political appointees. The folks chosen for these jobs are chosen and rewarded for a policy announcement, not actual policy execution. We have short-term leaders aligned to long-term organizations. Take the Veterans Health Administration, which is a hospital system run by a political appointee. Much of the time, there’s no one in that job. And when they’re there, they’re there for two years. And you can’t run an operationally complex system with short-term leaders.

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

Interestingly, every career civil servant has a performance plan that they have to commit to. We need to hold political leaders responsible for real performance.

Foer: When civil servants ask you for advice about staying or going, what do you tell them?

Stier: The first thing I say is, this is a personal choice. No judgment from me.

A third of the civil service are veterans. Coming out of the military, they want to continue to serve. That is the dominant ethos in our government. So I say: Remember the sense of purpose that you carried into government. The longer you can stick it out, the longer you will continue to be able to help the American people. Systemically, we need the civil service committed to stay as much as possible—to ensure that the rule of law and the Constitution are actually followed.

Our government is the only tool for collective action that we have as a society. We live in a phenomenally dangerous world that has gotten scarier. Harms have metastasized. Our government needs to actually get better at meeting the set of risks that we face. Civil servants are the best tool we have for actually making our government better.

The rise of the American software industry in the 20th century was made possible by a partnership between emerging technology companies and the U.S. government. Silicon Valley’s earliest innovations were driven not by technical minds chasing trivial consumer products but by scientists and engineers who aspired to address challenges of industrial and national significance using the most powerful technology of the age. Their pursuit of breakthroughs was intended not to satisfy the passing needs of the moment but rather to drive forward a much grander project, channeling the collective purpose and ambition of a nation.

This early dependence of Silicon Valley on the nation-­state and indeed the U.S. military has, for the most part, been forgotten, written out of the region’s history as an inconvenient and dissonant fact—­one that clashes with the Valley’s conception of itself as indebted only to its capacity to innovate. The United States since its founding has always been a technological republic, one whose place in the world has been made possible and advanced by its capacity for innovation.

But there is also another essential element of American success. It was a culture, one that cohered around a shared objective, that won the last world war. And it will be a culture that wins, or prevents, the next one.

This essay has been excerpted from Karp and Zamiska’s new book, The Technological Republic.

At present, however, the principal shared features of American society are not civic or political but rather cohere around entertainment, sports, celebrity, and fashion. This is not the result of some unbridgeable political division. The interpersonal tether that makes possible a form of imagined intimacy among strangers within groups of a significant size was severed and banished from the public sphere. The old means of manufacturing a nation—the civic rituals of an educational system, mandatory service in national defense, religion, a common language, and a free and thriving press—have all but been dismantled or withered from neglect and abuse. This distaste for collective experience and endeavor made America, and American culture, vulnerable.

The establishment left has failed its cause and thoroughly eroded its potential. The frenetic pursuit of a shallow egalitarianism in the end hollowed out its broader and more compelling political project. What we need is more cultural specificity ­in education, technology, and politics—­not less. The vacant neutrality of the current moment risks allowing our instinct for discernment to atrophy. Only the resurrection of a shared culture, not its abandonment, will make possible our continued survival and cohesion. And only by combining the pursuit of innovation with the shared objectives of the nation can we both advance our welfare and safeguard the legitimacy of the democratic project itself.

Silicon Valley once stood at the center of American military production and national security. Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, whose semiconductor division was founded in Mountain View, California, and made possible the first primitive personal computers, built reconnaissance equipment for spy satellites used by the CIA beginning in the late 1950s. For a time after World War II, all of the U.S. Navy’s ballistic missiles were produced in Santa Clara County, California. Companies such as Lockheed Missiles and Space, Westinghouse, Ford Aerospace, and United Technologies had thousands of employees working in Silicon Valley on weapons production through the 1980s and into the 1990s.

This union of science and the state in the middle part of the 20th century began in earnest during World War II. In November 1944, as Soviet forces closed in on Germany from the east, President Franklin D. Roo­se­velt was in Washington, D.C., already contemplating an American victory and the end of the conflict that had remade the world. Roo­sevelt sent a letter to Vannevar Bush, a pastor’s son who had become the head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, where he helped lead the Manhattan Project.

In the letter, Roo­se­velt described “the unique experiment” that the United States had undertaken during the war to leverage science in service of military ends. Roo­sevelt anticipated the next era—­and partnership between national government and private industry—­with precision. He wrote that there was “no reason why the lessons to be found in this experiment”—­that is, directing the resources of an emerging scientific establishment to help wage the most significant and violent war that the world had ever known—­“cannot be profitably employed in times of peace.”

Roosevelt’s ambition was clear. He intended to see the machinery of the state—its power and prestige, as well as the financial resources of the newly victorious nation and emerging hegemon—spur the scientific community forward in service of, among other things, the advancement of public health and national welfare. The challenge was to ensure that the engineers and researchers who had directed their attention to the industry of war—and particularly the physicists, who, as Bush noted, had “been thrown most violently off stride”—­could shift their efforts back to civilian advances in an era of relative peace.

The entanglement of the state and scientific research both before and after the war was itself built on an even longer history of connection between innovation and politics. Many of the earliest leaders of the American republic were inventors, including Thomas Jefferson, who designed sundials and studied writing machines, and Benjamin Franklin, who experimented with and constructed objects as varied as lightning rods and eyeglasses.

Unlike the legions of lawyers who have come to dominate American politics in the modern era, many early American leaders, even if not practitioners of science themselves, were nonetheless remarkably fluent in matters of engineering and technology. John Adams, the second president of the United States, was, by one historian’s account, focused on steering the early republic away from “unprofitable science, identifiable in its focus on objects of vain curiosity,” and toward more practical forms of inquiry, including “applying science to the promotion of agriculture.”

Many of the innovators of the 18th and 19th centuries were polymaths whose interests diverged wildly from the contemporary expectation that depth, as opposed to breadth, is the most effective means of contributing to a field. The frontiers and edges of science were still in that earliest stage of expansion that made possible and encouraged an interdisciplinary approach, one that would be almost certain to stall an academic career today. That cross-­pollination, as well as the absence of a rigid adherence to the boundaries between disciplines, was vital to a willingness to experiment, and to the confidence of political leaders to opine on engineering and technical questions that implicated matters of government.

The rise of J. Robert Oppenheimer and dozens of his colleagues in the late 1930s further situated scientists and engineers at the heart of American life and the defense of the democratic experiment. Joseph Licklider, a psychologist whose work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology anticipated the rise of early forms of AI, was hired in 1962 by the organization that would become the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—­an institution whose innovations would include the precursors to the modern internet as well as the global positioning system. His research for his now classic paper “Man-­Computer Symbiosis,” which was published in March 1960 and sketched a vision of the interplay between computing intelligence and our own, was supported by the U.S. Air Force.

There was a closeness, and significant degree of trust, in the relationships between political leaders and the scientists on whom they relied for guidance and direction. Shortly after the launch by the Soviet Union of the satellite Sputnik in October 1957, Hans Bethe, the German-­born theoretical physicist and adviser to President Dwight Eisenhower, was called to the White House. Within an hour, there was agreement on a path forward to reinvigorate the American space program. “You see that this is done,” Eisenhower told an aide. The pace of change and action in that era was swift. NASA was founded the following year.

By the end of World War II, the blending of science and public life—­of technical innovation and affairs of state—­was essentially complete and unremarkable. Many of these engineers and innovators would labor in obscurity. Others, however, were celebrities in a way that might be difficult to imagine today. In 1942, as war spread across Europe and the Pacific, an article in Collier’s introduced Vannevar Bush, who was at the time a little-­known engineer and government bureaucrat, to the magazine’s readership of nearly 3 million, describing Bush as “the man who may win the war.” (Three years later, Bush published “As We May Think” in The Atlantic, praising scientists for working together in a “common cause,” and anticipating many aspects of the information age that lay ahead.) Albert Einstein was not only one of the 20th century’s greatest scientific minds but also one of its most prominent celebrities—a popular figure whose image and breakthrough discoveries, which so thoroughly defied our intuitive understanding of the nature of space and time, routinely made front-­page news. And it was often the science itself that was the focus of coverage.

[From the February 1949 issue: J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ‘The Open Mind’]

This was the American century, and engineers were at the heart of the era’s ascendant mythology. The pursuit of public interest through science and engineering was considered a natural extension of the national project, which entailed both protecting U.S. interests and moving society—indeed, civilization—up the hill. And while the scientific community required funding and extensive support from the government, the modern state was equally reliant on the advances that those investments in science and engineering produced. The technical outperformance of the United States in the 20th century—­that is, the country’s ability to reliably deliver economic and scientific advances for the public, whether medical breakthroughs or military capabilities—­was essential to its credibility.

As the philosopher Jürgen Habermas has suggested, a failure by leaders to deliver on implied or explicit promises to the public has the potential to provoke a crisis of legitimacy for a government. When emerging technologies that give rise to wealth do not advance the broader public interest, trouble often follows. Put differently, the decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. In this way, the willingness of the engineering and scientific communities to come to the aid of the nation has been vital not only to the legitimacy of the private sector but to the durability of political institutions across the West.

The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley has strayed significantly from this tradition of collaboration with the U.S. government, focusing instead on the consumer market, including the online advertising and social-media platforms that have come to dominate—­and limit—our sense of the potential of technology. A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose—their rallying cry that they intend “to change the world” has grown lifeless from overuse—­but many of them raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-­sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer.

A skepticism of government work and national ambition took hold in the Valley. The grand, collectivist experiments of the middle of the 20th century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual. The market rewarded shallow engagement with the potential of technology, as start-up after start-up catered to the whims of late-capitalist culture without any interest in constructing the technical infrastructure that would address our most significant challenges as a nation. The age of social-media platforms and food-delivery apps had arrived. Medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to wait.

[Read: The divide between Silicon Valley and Washington is a national-security threat]

For decades, the U.S. government was viewed in Silicon Valley as an impediment to innovation and a magnet for controversy—more an obstacle to progress than its logical partner. The technology giants of the current era long avoided government work. The level of internal dysfunction within many state and federal agencies created seemingly insurmountable barriers to entry for outsiders, including the insurgent start-ups of the new economy. In time, the tech industry lost interest in politics and broader collaborations. It viewed the American national project, if it could even be called that, with a mix of skepticism and indifference. As a result, many of the Valley’s best minds, and their flocks of engineering disciples, turned to the consumer for sustenance.

The interests and political instincts of the American elite diverged from those of the rest of the country following the end of World War II. The economic struggles of the country and geopolitical threats of the 20th century today feel distant to most software engineers. The most capable generation of coders has never experienced a war or genuine social upheaval. Why court controversy with your friends or risk their disapproval by working for the U.S. military when you can retreat into the perceived safety of building another app?

As Silicon Valley turned inward and ­toward the consumer, the U.S. government and the governments of many of its allies scaled back involvement and innovation across numerous domains, including space travel, military software, and medical research. The state’s retreat left a widening innovation gap. Many cheered this divergence: Skeptics of the private sector argued that it could not be trusted to operate in public domains while those in the Valley remained wary of government control and the misuse or abuse of their inventions. For the United States and its allies in Europe and around the world to remain as dominant in this century as they were in the previous one, however, they will require a union of the state and the software industry—­not their separation and disentanglement.

[Read: The crumbling foundation of America’s military]

Indeed, the legitimacy of the American government and democratic regimes around the world will require an increase in economic and technical output that can be achieved only through the more efficient adoption of technology and software. The public will forgive many failures and sins of the political class. But the electorate will not overlook a systemic inability to harness technology for the purpose of effectively delivering the goods and services that are essential to our lives.

In late 1906, Francis Galton, a British anthropologist, traveled to Plymouth, En­gland, in the country’s southwest, where he attended a livestock fair. His interest was not in purchasing the poultry or cattle that were available for sale at the market but in studying the ability of large groups of individuals to correctly make estimates. Nearly 800 visitors at the market had written down estimates of the weight of a particular ox that was for sale. Each person had to pay six pennies for a chance to submit their guess and win a prize, which deterred, in Galton’s words, “practical joking” that might muddy the results of the experiment. The median estimate of the 787 guesses that Galton received was 1,207 pounds, which turned out to be within 0.8 percent of the correct answer of 1,198 pounds. It was a striking result that would prompt more than a century of research and debate about the wisdom of crowds and their ability to more accurately make estimates, and predictions, than a chosen few. For Galton, the experiment pointed to “the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment.”

But why must we always defer to the wisdom of the crowd when it comes to allocating scarce capital in a market economy? We seem to have unintentionally deprived ourselves of the opportunity to engage in a critical discussion about the businesses and endeavors that ought to exist, not merely the ventures that could. The wisdom of the crowd at the height of the rise of Zynga and Groupon in 2011 made its verdict clear: These were winners that merited further investment. Tens of billions of dollars were wagered on their continued ascent. But there was no forum or platform or meaningful opportunity for anyone to question whether our society’s scarce resources ought to be diverted to the construction of online games or a more effective aggregator of coupons and discounts. The market had spoken, so it must be so.

Americans have, as Michael Sandel of Harvard has argued, been so eager “to banish notions of the good life from public discourse,” to require that “citizens leave their moral and spiritual convictions behind when they enter the public square,” that the resulting void has been filled in large part by the logic of the market—­what Sandel has described as “market triumphalism.” And the leaders of Silicon Valley have for the most part been content to submit to this wisdom of the market, allowing its logic and values to supplant their own. It is our own temerity and unwillingness to risk the scorn of the crowd that have deprived us of the opportunity to discuss in any meaningful way what the world we inhabit should be and what companies should exist. The prevailing agnosticism of the modern era, the reluctance to advance a substantive view about cultural value, or lack thereof, for fear of alienating anyone, has paved the way for the market to fill the gap.

The drift of the technological world to the concerns of the consumer both reflected and helped reinforce a certain technological escapism—­the instinct by Silicon Valley to steer away from the most important problems we face as a society and toward what are essentially the minor and trivial yet solvable inconveniences of everyday consumer life: such as online shopping and food delivery. An entire swath of arenas, including national defense, violent crime, education reform, and medical research, appeared too intractable, too thorny, and too politically fraught to address in any real way. (This was the challenge we have aimed to address at Palantir—to build technology that serves our mos significant and vital needs, including those of U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, instead of merely catering to the consumer.)

Most were content to set the hard problems aside. Consumer apps and trinkets did not talk back, hold press conferences, or fund pressure groups. The tragedy is that serving the consumer rather than the public has often been far easier and more lucrative for Silicon Valley, and certainly less risky.

The path forward will involve a reconciliation of a commitment to the free market, and its atomization and isolation of individual wants and needs, with the insatiable human desire for some form of collective experience and endeavor. Silicon Valley offered a version of this combination. The Sunnyvales, Palo Altos, and Mountain Views of the world were company towns and city-­states, walled off from society and offering something that the national project could no longer provide. Technology companies formed internally coherent communities whose corporate campuses attempted to provide for all of the wants and needs of daily life. They were at their core collectivist endeavors, populated by intensely individualistic and freethinking minds, and built around a set of ideals that many young people craved: freedom to build, ownership of their success, and a commitment above all to results.

Other nations, including many of our geopolitical adversaries, understand the power of affirming shared cultural traditions, mythologies, and values in organizing the efforts of a people. They are far less shy than we are about acknowledging the human need for communal experience. The cultivation of an overly muscular and unthoughtful nationalism has risks. But the rejection of any form of life in common does as well. The reconstruction of a technological republic, in the United States and elsewhere, will require a re-embrace of collective experience, of shared purpose and identity, of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together. The technologies we are building, including the novel forms of AI that may challenge our present monopoly on creative control in this world, are themselves the product of a culture whose maintenance and development we now, more than ever, cannot afford to abandon. It might have been just and necessary to dismantle the old order. We should now build something together in its place.

This essay has been excerpted from Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska’s new book, The Technological Republic.

The Atlantic will expand its flagship event, The Atlantic Festival, to New York City for the first time this fall, and host a one-day festival event in Washington, D.C., this spring. The Atlantic Festival will take place from Thursday, September 18, to Saturday, September 20, and be anchored at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in downtown Manhattan, with other venues to be announced. Additionally, the event in D.C., On the Future, will be held Tuesday, April 29, at Planet Word. The speaker lineups are to be announced.

The expansion to New York City follows 16 years of The Atlantic Festival being held in Washington, D.C., and the growth of the event in scale, ambition, and attendance. The festival is the preeminent live exploration of The Atlantic’s journalism, bringing together more than 100 speakers to take part in events that examine the state of business and tech; culture and the arts; politics and democracy; and climate and health––all moderated by Atlantic journalists. The event will also host theatrical and musical performances, book talks with authors and essayists, exclusive film screenings, and podcast tapings.

Interviewees at the festival in recent years have included U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Jamie Dimon, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Spike Lee, Kerry Washington, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nancy Pelosi, former Senator Mitt Romney, and dozens of sitting Cabinet secretaries, governors, and members of Congress. The festival has screened a number of films and series, including The Vietnam War, Boys State, and Lee, and featured live performances by Anna Deavere Smith, Yo-Yo Ma, Michael R. Jackson, and Chris Thile.

Candace Montgomery, executive vice president of AtlanticLive, says of the move: “We are thrilled to bring The Atlantic Festival to the cultural capital of the world. New York City is home to many Atlantic readers and subscribers and provides the festival with a global stage––giving us the opportunity to bring together fascinating speakers and build upon what has made the festival so successful.”

Last year was the third consecutive year that The Atlantic was awarded the top honor of General Excellence by the National Magazine Awards; this year, the magazine is adding two more print issues, returning to monthly publication for the first time in more than two decades. The Atlantic is also hiring a number of writers and editors to grow its coverage of politics, defense, national security, and technology, in addition to health, science, and other areas.

The 2025 Atlantic Festival is underwritten by Allstate, Destination DC, Genentech, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation at the Supporting Level.

Please reach out with any questions or requests: press@theatlantic.com.

On the Future: An Atlantic Festival Event
April 29, 2025
D.C.’s Planet Word, and virtually

The Atlantic Festival
September 18–20, 2025
Perelman Performing Arts Center, and virtually