The Deep State’s Private NGO Army of Classified Contractors

In early 2025, the American electorate did something remarkable. In electing Donald J. Trump to a second term, they issued a clear directive: restore transparency, dismantle bureaucratic excess, and return control of the government to its rightful stewards, the citizens. Among the early moves of the Trump administration was the creation of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, helmed by Elon Musk. The mission was clear, and symbolically appropriate: drain the swamp using code. In principle, DOGE aimed to open up federal spending to scrutiny via decentralized verification, akin to a public blockchain. Yet in practice, such a project may already be dead on arrival. Why? Because a shadow network of former intelligence officials, private contractors, and off-ledger operations appears to be working diligently, and perhaps deliberately, to prevent precisely that kind of accountability.

The idea that unelected actors retain de facto control over policy execution is not new. But what demands new attention is how that power is now structured. It no longer resides solely in clandestine meetings within government buildings, nor exclusively in classified directives. Increasingly, it resides in private boardrooms, in contractor billing systems, and in networks of former officials operating with the privileges of the state but the obscurity of the market. It is this configuration that makes the situation so vexing. Unlike traditional government, private firms are not subject to FOIA, not bound by budget hearings, and not responsive to elections. They are, in a word, unaccountable. And yet they execute government functions.

Consider the case of Freedom Consulting Group, now rebranded as Freedom Technology Solutions Group. This Maryland-based contractor employs individuals with Top Secret clearances, performs technical work for intelligence agencies, and, perhaps most troublingly, boasts two of the most elite figures in American intelligence history on its board: former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Sue Gordon and former Director of both the CIA and NSA Michael Hayden. Both were appointed to FCG's board in 2021. They represent not just expertise, but institutional continuity, the connective tissue between government and a private world that increasingly executes its most opaque functions.

Suppose a citizen attempts to trace federal money as it flows into this firm. They will find a USAID contract related to geospatial mapping. This is unclassified and visible. But that is about all they will find. FCG, despite publicly announcing a $352 million Department of Defense contract, has no visible footprint for that award in

USAspending.gov

, the primary portal of federal financial transparency. There is no detailed entry, no line item, no trace. This raises a reasonable question. Where does the money go? More importantly, why is it hidden?

The government has long maintained that some programs must remain classified for national security reasons. This rationale, at its best, is defensible. There are genuine threats, and operational secrecy can be essential. But when opacity becomes the rule rather than the exception, it invites a different reading. If $352 million in taxpayer funds can vanish behind a security classification, and if the recipients of those funds include former public officials now acting through private proxies, then the structure begins to resemble not public service, but aristocracy. It becomes a court of influence cloaked in necessity.

The contracting structure of post-9/11 intelligence spending has exacerbated this problem. At least 70 percent of the intelligence budget is now spent on contractors. Millions of security-cleared individuals work for firms rather than for the state itself. These firms are free from many of the transparency obligations that bind federal agencies. They may issue press releases, but they are not obligated to provide access to internal deliberations, budgetary constraints, or oversight proceedings. The situation amounts to a jurisdictional sleight of hand. The function remains public, but the form has become private. And when DOGE attempts to shine light on these transactions, it is not merely ignored, it is structurally excluded.

What would a decentralized oracle for government efficiency actually do? At minimum, it would collect spending data from every federal agency and publish it in a tamper-resistant public ledger. At maximum, it would allow real-time audits, searchable accountability layers, and a system of distributed trust that bypasses the bottlenecks of central bureaucracies. But such a system can only function if the data is made available. And herein lies the paradox. The very institutions DOGE aims to reform have the ability to choke off the data flow at the source.

Some may ask, perhaps incredulously: is this really coordinated? Are we not merely witnessing bureaucratic inertia? The answer lies in patterns. When former intelligence officials like Hayden sign public letters dismissing valid stories as foreign disinformation without evidence, when they sit on boards of contracting firms that receive large but hidden sums of government money, and when they do so while opposing reformist initiatives like DOGE, the coincidence grows thin. This is not an accusation of conspiracy. It is an observation of systemic alignment. The incentives are clear. The tools are available. And the network is real.

If Congress cannot see the contracts, and if the public cannot audit the expenditures, then where precisely is the accountability? It is a bitter irony that the very architecture that claims to protect national security has become a sieve through which democratic control evaporates. Classification, once a protective mechanism, now operates as a shield for unaccountable power. The intelligence community’s private avatars have used this shield to great effect. They wield the security exemption not to protect Americans from foreign threats, but to protect themselves from domestic oversight.

Consider further the institutional behavior. DOGE, a duly constituted federal entity tasked with enhancing transparency, has encountered systemic resistance. Its analysts have discovered contracts that vanish from public view, personnel rosters that are untraceable, and billing procedures that elude audit. Musk’s attempts to institute algorithmic verification protocols have been met with warnings about national security, none of which come with clear substantiation. These are not coincidences. They are forms of procedural veto, exercised not by elected representatives, but by the permanent bureaucracy and its corporate auxiliaries.

There is also a conceptual asymmetry at play. Reforms such as DOGE must pass legislative approval, withstand media scrutiny, and operate in the light. Their opponents need only whisper about security concerns or invoke the specter of chaos to halt progress. The burden of proof is not shared equally. Transparency requires justification. Secrecy, we are told, does not.

The defense often mounted by these actors is predictably self-serving. They claim to be patriots protecting vital interests. But patriotism without accountability becomes merely a slogan. And interest, once untethered from public justification, becomes indistinguishable from private gain. The revolving door between intelligence leadership and private firms like FTSG illustrates this danger. It is not just a career trajectory. It is an epistemic feedback loop. The same individuals who define threats, shape budgets, and award contracts, later reappear as the recipients of those very contracts.

This pattern is not theoretical. Keith Alexander’s transition from NSA director to founder of IronNet, a firm that employed a current NSA official while charging clients seven-figure monthly fees, is well documented. William Black’s role in channeling a billion-dollar project to his former firm SAIC, with no results to show, is equally illustrative. These are not outliers. They are case studies in the normalization of insider contracting. And their common thread is always the same: opacity.

DOGE’s failure—or more precisely, its marginalization—cannot be understood merely as a technical difficulty. It must be seen as a philosophical problem about authority. Who decides what the public may know? Who controls the knowledge infrastructure of government? These are not questions of efficiency. They are questions of sovereignty. And right now, that sovereignty is bifurcated. The visible government answers to voters. The hidden government answers to itself.

This bifurcation may not survive the long term. Either the public will reassert its authority, through legislation, exposure, and institutional reform, or the contractor state will become permanent. The latter is not merely a governance issue. It is a metaphysical one. A republic that cannot see itself cannot govern itself. To reclaim vision is to reclaim power.

DOGE was a step toward such reclamation. Its challenge now is not just technical implementation, but overcoming a structure of resistance that is deeply embedded, institutionally justified, and economically incentivized to remain hidden. The swamp has evolved. It no longer wears a badge or sits in a cubicle. It wears a blazer, signs NDAs, and answers to no one but the classified ledger.

To fight it, we need more than reform. We need clarity, persistence, and above all, visibility. Without these, the will of the people remains subordinate to the will of the unseen. And no republic can survive such a condition indefinitely.

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