How to Undermine Authoritarian Control: On Empowering Parallel Institutions

The United States’ ability to protect democratic institutions, social services, and research investments will depend on civil society demonstrating the necessity of those programs.

To understand this moment, we can look back at recent history, when civil society was tasked with the same mission. In 1968, the Russian physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov published a landmark piece in The New York Times sounding the alarm on threats to academic freedom in Soviet Russia, insisting that “scientific methodology and a democratic spirit” must infuse the way our political leaders make decisions and relate to each other.

In 2025, the Times published a widely discussed piece titled “Historians See Autocratic Playbook in Trump’s Attacks on Science” that discussed attacks on science as a documented strategy for repressing social influence and freedoms. Indeed, the concepts of scientific progress and democratic principles have been inextricably linked throughout history by their commitment to widely shared frameworks of reason.

Since the start of the current administration, a small handful of ultra-elites have coordinated a sweeping dismantling of federal agency services and investments with the express intent of irreversible damage. This decimation has been especially acute at federal science agencies. Profound staff cuts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (-24 percent), the Department of Energy (DOE) (-13 percent), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (-11 percent) are just some of the many agencies impacted.

The drastic—and in some cases unlawful—cuts to agency staff, programs, and services have compounding impacts across the country. Significant wait times plague the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) call center and some parts of the now hollowed out Department of Education have become unreachable. The National Weather Service, the Federal Aviation Administration, and DOE have already been forced to rehire fired workers or recruit new hires to ensure they have enough weather forecasters, air traffic controllers, and nuclear power safety officers to keep the public safe. The breadth of disarray and speed of destruction have been intentionally stultifying. Categorizing and organizing these institutions in the public eye will be essential to protecting them.

Time-Tested Strategies and Peaceful Resistance

As authoritarianism attempts to take root in America, there are several time-tested strategies from other countries and contexts on how to fight back most effectively when the ruling regime controls most branches of government. One strategy that has been especially effective across diverse geographic, cultural, and political contexts is building parallel institutions: filling the voids of government functions, services, and resources created by authoritarian regimes and their abandonment of obligations to the people. By showing government shortcomings instead of just talking about them, then organizing regular people to help fill those gaps, parallel institutions build alternative power and influence.

From Brazil to Ukraine and India to Sudan, parallel institutions have been effective at safely and peacefully undermining authoritarian control by taking care of people where the government won’t. In the late 1960s, the Black Panther Party, a Marxist-Leninist political organization, organized a free breakfast program at school churches. They recognized the shortcomings of food in public schools and filled the gap. Their peaceful resistance to reliance on government resources and programs rapidly spread to 23 cities and 20,000 children by the end of the first year in 1969. The Panthers recognized that people weren’t listening when they just talked about poor school performance among hungry students. By feeding students directly, they revealed the failures of the school system and educated people about the problem through helping to solve it.

In Kosovo in the 1990s, a voluntary tax system was created to fund parallel schools to counteract policies of deculturation. In Sudan, beginning in 2019, community groups organized Emergency Response Rooms to provide humanitarian aid where national programs and international aid organizations were unable or unwilling to keep people fed, sheltered, and safe. All of these programs identified a public need that the government couldn’t address and filled it as well as possible, all the while advocating for the return of effective, peaceful governance.

Keeping Science as a Public Good

The scientific community is exceptionally well-suited to employ this strategy and can work to rebuild critical elements of the federal science enterprise that have been dismantled by the Trump administration. While tools and resources such as the federal science advisory committee system, NOAA’s weather tracking, air quality monitoring, and other key scientific activities have been compromised, there are actions we can take.

For decades, the US Federal Advisory Committee system ensured that the best available science advice from the nation’s top experts reached agency officials who make critical decisions—from drug and medical device approvals, decisions on wildlife conservation, air quality regulatory actions, to emerging technology investments. Such scientific activities play a huge role in driving government officials to make evidence-based policy decisions, and to help hold them publicly accountable when they don’t.

Following a Trump executive order in late May 2025, 51 (27 percent) of almost 200 active science-focused Federal Advisory Committees have been shuttered, with more under review. This decision keeps science advice from reaching policymakers on real-world issues such as vaccine effectiveness, air pollution protections, food safety, and much more. By squashing the science, the government can avoid accountability for failing to make a science-based policy decision.

But civil society can build parallel institutions, and we’ve already seen many institutions and individuals in the scientific community step up. After the Trump administration sidelined the US Census Bureau Scientific Advisory Committee in the spring of 2025, its members chose to provide science advice to the Census Bureau anyway, as the Independent Census Science Advisory Committee, and they held their first public meeting this past September. The Vaccine Integrity Project is providing evidence-based vaccine recommendations after the Trump administration compromised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

This strategy has worked in the United States before. The first Trump administration disbanded an EPA scientific panel that advised on air pollution standards. In response, the disbanded panel convened independently, hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, to review the evidence and advise the agency on the science of the health effects of particulate matter. The independent panel deliberated publicly and submitted its recommendations as a public comment so that they became part of the administrative public record. The panel’s actions supported successful legal challenges to the EPA’s failure to set health-protective pollution standards.

Such efforts to build parallel institutions have many benefits in both the short and long term. First, they combat disinformation and maintain a metric for truth to ensure the best available science and information remains accessible to decision-makers and the public. Second, they help preserve critical services and scientific truth in the public record, which can prove useful in legal and historical proceedings. Third, they create community and institutional memory among leading experts to better rebuild key systems in the future. Lastly, they bring thousands of people focused on or impacted by science, research, and related fields deeper into the community by resisting the authoritarian turn.

In the short term, parallel institutions can be a critical tool for driving home a key message that can deliver change: There are many essential functions that we should expect and demand of our government. Importantly, the strategy of building parallel institutions is well-suited to persist in difficult political conditions. It relies heavily on volunteer workers and experts and helps people, which expands unity and is very difficult for corrupt leaders to criminalize.

Moreover, the parallel institution strategy offers the rare and irresistible opportunity to reimagine how government functions and services can better improve people’s lives. Because parallel institutions are operating outside of government rules and processes, they don’t need to repeat the inefficient and opaque processes that are often immovable within government contexts. Parallel institutions can offer more efficiency and more effectiveness to their government counterparts. We can ultimately fold them into a future government that can better serve society as a whole.

Civil Society’s Moment Is Now

Civil society has a chance to apply this strategy at scale, and nonprofit, philanthropic, and federal-worker communities can play a pivotal role. Because these efforts can be crowdsourced and many participants are willing to be a part of the effort as volunteers, it is extremely cost-effective to scale across the country, across government functions, and across technical fields. Philanthropy and organizations implementing this approach can focus on issues of greatest alignment with their areas of emphasis. Acting early is important to seize the opportunities to fill gaps as government services and activities are being dismantled. This is the moment to capitalize on the institutional knowledge and capacity from recently displaced federal workers and those adjacent.

Our nation is at a critical crossroads. We are in uncharted territory in terms of the pace, scale, and severity of destruction of federal science and service enterprises, alongside the social safety net that is our government’s responsibility to maintain. We must meet those threats with tested solutions that match the dangerous privatization and dismantling we are up against. Let’s build new institutions with what we have and be the visionaries that lead the way.