Just because a disaster disrupts the federal government doesn’t mean the White House won’t try to stay in charge. Since the 1950s, the White House has drafted and maintained Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs)—a list of secret plans meant to be implemented in the wake of an apocalyptic disaster. Thanks to a new document dump and some clever information requests, we’re finally learning a little bit about how Washington would seek to stay in power should the worst occur.
As first reported by the New York Times, the PEADs documents come courtesy of the Brennan Center for Justice, which obtained the bulk of the documents through Freedom of Information Act requests. The documents cover a period from the Eisenhower presidency all the way to Trump.
The Brennan Center for Justice records are spotty. According to the Times, the think tank was able to shake loose 500 pages but 6,000 more were withheld as classified. The PEADs are still highly secret and understanding them means cross referencing decades of government paperwork to pick out references.
