The Big Secret Hidden in the "Designated Survivor"

Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era. I hope if you’re coming to this online, you’ll consider subscribing right here. It’s easy—and free:

I originally named this newsletter because of my long-running work and interest in all the government’s strange plans for what would happen during and after a catastrophic event like a nuclear attack — it was a name I meant to be more of an abstract idea and theme rather than a commentary on our exact current political situation — so I thought you all deserved some updates on the nation’s “Doomsday Scenarios.”

Part of what has always fascinated me about this world of Doomsday infrastructure is how it operates all around as Americans daily without anyone really paying attention or, for the most part, realizing what it is. These Doomsday facilities and vehicles are, for some workers, just their ordinary day job — the NORAD bunker inside Cheyenne Mountain has a Subway sandwich franchise at the center of the mountain to feed the military personnel who work there every day.

I’ve got four (mostly) fun examples of that to share with you today.

It’s been a big and busy month for the nation’s Doomsday workers. First of all, the Pentagon is proposing to give the workers of the Raven Rock doomsday bunkers in Pennsylvania a raise! As anyone who has read my eponymously named book, Raven Rock — known officially as Site R, the Alternate National Military Command Center, or the Raven Rock Mountain Complex — is the giant bunker that would serve as the backup Pentagon in the event of an attack on Washington. On 9/11, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was rushed to the facility, which was built in the early part of the Cold War, and the facility has been renovated and expanded in the years since and remains a cornerstone of the nation’s “contingency operations.”

Raven Rock has long been considered an official part of what’s known as the “Pentagon reservation,” but the 720-acre facility sits right on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border and sprawls across both portions of Washington County, Maryland, and Adams County, Pennsylvania. As such, the Office of Personnel Management is fixing up some paperwork to redesignate the part of the 720-acre facility that exists in Adams County, Pennsylvania, as part of the “Washington-Baltimore-Arlington wage area” to ensure that everyone at Raven Rock is paid at the higher rates for the Washington, D.C. region. As the OPM proposed rule explains, “This change would align wage area coverage for installations within the Pentagon Reservation and prevent pay disparities among FWS employees working at the RRMC.”

Second, there was another interesting little tidbit about Raven Rock this month: A Maryland man, who runs a YouTube channel, was charged with illegally flying a drone over the complex. According to federal officials, the man used a drone to record aerial views of Raven Rock, as well as some related communications sites and, in doing so, violated “National Defense Airspace” and now faces as much as a year in prison.

One of the other interesting tidbits in the case files is that the joint NCIS and FBI investigation also evidently relied on CBP’s “Center for Air and Marine Drone Exploitation,” a little-known newly established lab referred in government parlance as CAMDEx. The criminal case filing for the Raven Rock YouTuber is one of the first public mentions of CAMDEx, which has also been involved in equally strange cases like a California drug dealer delivering fentanyl by drone.

(My favorite Raven Rock fun fact, which wouldn’t be visible from the air: The bunker has a badminton court!)

Third, flight tests are continuing too this month for the new forthcoming E-4C, the new presidential “Doomsday Plane,” a $13 billion fleet of five planes that will replace the Carter era E-4B planes long based at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. One of the E-4Cs was doing loops off New York and the East Coast earlier this month, and the fleet is expected to enter service officially mid-year.

Fourth, it’s the annual time for the nation’s favorite Doomsday Scenario parlor game: The State of the Union Designated Survivor!

One of news organization’s favorite news nuggets in covering the State of the Union each year is the announcement of the “Designated Survivor,” the Cabinet secretary who has been chosen to skip the event and who would assumed the “acting” presidency in the event of a catastrophic attack on the Capitol.

Last night, the Cabinet “survivor” was the VA secretary, Doug Collins, who also served the role during President Trump’s address to congress last year. But the more interesting announcement was that California Democrat Rep. Mike Thompson made a big deal that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had chosen him as the party’s “Designated Survivor.”

Most news outlets dutifully and playfully reported news like Mike Thompson’s announcement without ever asking the obvious question: Why, exactly, does the Democratic minority in the House need a “Designated Survivor”?

The idea of a “congressional designated survivor” really only began after 9/11, and the mere existence of a “minority party designated survivor” actually tells us something super interesting about the most secret and least-known government continuity plans.

There are really four separate sets of government Doomsday plans. The three that get the most attention and are best known are “Continuity of Operations,” (COOP) which deal with department and agencies would keep functioning in a catastrophe; “Continuity of Government” (COG), which deal with the survival and succession of government leadership; and “Continuity of the Presidency” (COP), which deal with the survival and succession of the presidency. There’s a fourth set of plans — in some ways the most important — that are not publicly known at all and are hidden even from inquiring members of Congress, known as “Enduring Constitutional Government” (ECG).

ECG is sometimes called the “most classified” or “most secret” plan in the entire US government, and while that’s not a real classification level, if I could pick a single classified file in the entire US government to read, I wouldn’t waste my time on any of the UFO files, the Kennedy assassination files, or anything like that — I’d go straight to the ECG plans.

ECG has to do with how the three branches of government would operate after a devastating attack on Washington; the plans have been described in official documents obliquely as “a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, coordinated by the President, to preserve the capability to execute constitutional responsibilities in a catastrophic emergency.”

We don’t know what ECG means in practice — indeed most of the leadership of the US government doesn’t even know what ECG means in practice — but from years of careful parsing of documents and reading between the lines of vague hints and references I’ve come to think of it as a series of plans about how the US would preserve the spirit of the Constitution in circumstances where it can’t preserve the letter of the Constitution.

It’s clear that ECG doesn’t look like our peacetime government at all — but we have no idea what it does look it exactly.

And that’s where Mike Thompson’s announcement gives us a tiniest of important hints.

Ordinarily, it wouldn’t be useful at all for a single member of Congress to survive — who cares if there’s only one surviving member of the Democratic minority of the House of Representatives?

Evidently, though, the ECG plans must care.

Congress itself has long been a particular puzzle for continuity planning — it hasn’t done a good job creating its own Doomsday plans, as I’ve written about — and it would take months or even perhaps a year or more to reconstitute itself after a widespread catastrophe, depending on when precisely the catastrophe occurred relative to the electoral calendar.

There has to be a plan for the in-between — and that plan clearly involves someone like Mike Thompson stepping into some currently unimagined and unknown super-role.

The best informed theory about what ECG looks like in practice — built upon assembling clues and reading tea leaves like the Thompson announcement, which to be clear has happened too in past years and so isn’t something classified that Thompson blew the lid off — is that ECG procedures must involve some functioning “rump” Congress, a super-empowered skeletal legislative branch — perhaps even as small as just the four party leaders from the two chambers — who would be able to operate with the full powers of Congress until the myriad of special elections and appointments took place that could restore Congress to its full normal size.

It’s not entirely clear to me why ECG has to be as highly classified and secret as it is — I’ve long argued and believed that in order for Doomsday plans to be seen as valid by the US population, we need to debate and discuss them openly in advance. We don’t really have any idea what ECG looks like for the judicial branch — although we have to assume there’s a similar plan. Some senior judge (or perhaps a couple of judges?), presumably from some out-of-DC appeals court circuit raise their hand and announce that they’re now the entirety of the Supreme Court? Maybe?

Would the American people really accept a situation where after a catastrophe, Mike Thompson and some similarly unknown GOP representative together announced that they held all the powers of the US House between them? Maybe. But boy there’s a greater likelihood of that happening if anyone had an idea what those plans and powers were in advance — and where there had been a robust public debate about those powers, checks, and balances in advance.

The State of the Union obviously has already passed safely, so we don’t need to spend much time contemplating the nation where Mike Thompson became the House minority leader and Doug Collins suddenly became our “acting” president (Cabinet secretaries never become the “permanent” president — they merely become “acting”!), but I do wish and hope at some point that the country is able to have a thoughtful conversation about what “democracy” under “Enduring Constitutional Government” actually looks like.

GMG

PS: Have a fun story, tidbit, or nugget from the world of the government’s Doomsday plans? Or maybe you have some old Mount Weather or Raven Rock memorabilia you want to contribute to my collection? I’m vermontgmg.14 on Signal.

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