# Federal Government Hub The structural spine of the United States federal government — the three branches established by the Constitution, the institutions that staff them, and the machinery through which federal power is exercised. This is the **whole-of-government map**: it ties together the legislative infrastructure already documented under [[Congress]], the judicial infrastructure under [[Judiciary]], and the vast executive-branch apparatus under [[Federal Agencies]]. The KB tracks the federal government the way it tracks everything else — not as civics instruction but as **infrastructure under stress**. The framers designed three branches in deliberate tension, following [[Montesquieu]]'s theory of [[Separation of Powers]], so that ambition would counter ambition and no single actor could capture the whole. The contemporary right's project — articulated in [[Project 2025]], operationalized through [[Schedule F]], [[DOGE]], and a maximalist reading of [[Unitary Executive Theory]] — is in substance a project to collapse that tension: to subordinate the [[Administrative State]] to a single will, neutralize Congress's [[Power of the Purse]] through impoundment, and remake the judiciary into a ratifier rather than a check. This map exists to make the machinery legible so the stress points are visible. ## The Three Branches ### Article I — Legislative The first branch, where law is made and the executive is checked. Already mapped in detail under [[Congress]] — chambers, committees, procedures, and the [[Power of the Purse]]. ### Article II — Executive The President, the [[Executive Office of the President Hub]], the 15 cabinet departments, and the sprawling independent and regulatory apparatus — the branch that has expanded most dramatically since the [[New Deal]] and is the primary target of the contemporary capture project. Mapped under [[Federal Agencies]]. ### Article III — Judicial The Supreme Court and the federal court system — the branch the [[Federalist Society]] pipeline has spent four decades reshaping. Mapped under [[Judiciary]]. ## Structural maps The branch-level ASCII maps, one page each: **[[Congressional Committees Tree]]** (legislative) · **[[Executive Branch Org Chart]]** (executive) · **[[Federal Judiciary Tree]]** (judicial) · **[[Intelligence Community Tree]]** (the cross-branch IC federation) · **[[Presidential Line of Succession]]** (executive continuity + the Twenty-Fifth Amendment). ## Cross-cutting machinery - **[[Separation of Powers]]** and **[[Checks and Balances]]** — the constitutional architecture the three-branch design rests on - **[[Power of the Purse]]** — Congress's appropriations control, the check most directly contested by executive impoundment - **[[How Federal Money Moves]]** — the operational pipeline behind the purse: appropriation → warrant → apportionment → obligation → outlay - **[[Administrative State]]** — the regulatory and bureaucratic apparatus the right seeks to dismantle - **[[Unitary Executive Theory]]** — the legal theory used to justify total presidential control of the executive branch - **[[Schedule F]]** — the mechanism to convert career civil servants into at-will political appointees - **[[Project 2025]]** — the agency-by-agency blueprint for executive-branch capture - **[[DOGE]]** — the vehicle for unilateral agency cuts, closures, and mass firings ## Branch and sibling MOCs - [[Congress]] — the legislative branch - [[Federal Agencies]] — the executive branch - [[Judiciary]] — the judicial branch - [[People]] — the canonical political-philosophy figures - [[Works]] — the canonical texts - [[Foundations Concepts]] — the political-philosophy concepts - [[Power Theory]] — the analytical frameworks for how power operates