We should stop treating the Presidency like a political job and start governing it like high-risk nuclear infrastructure.
March 26, 2026
Original Paper
Brittle Sovereignty: NIST-Style Safeguards for Presidential Power
SSRN · 6342700
The Takeaway
The paper argues our current 'checks and balances' rely too much on personal virtue. Instead, it proposes using engineering-style 'least-trust' frameworks—like mandatory multi-node sign-offs and structured risk logging for high-stakes decisions—to treat executive power as a system with specific failure modes to be managed.
From the abstract
This article reconceives the American presidency as high-hazard risk-bearing infrastructure and re-reads the familiar story of “imperial” executive growth through the lens of modern nodal, least-trust frameworks. Where eighteenth-century checks and balances roughly dispersed sovereign power across institutional “nodes,” they did so with coarse categories, vague emergency language, and heavy reliance on political virtue, rather than explicit risk classes, calibrated multi-node authorizations, and