Former FBI senior executive Lauren Anderson ’79 and former CIA officer Steven Cash came to Muhlenberg bearing a warning: “What we’re seeing now in this administration is deeply, deeply concerning,” Cash said to the crowd of students, faculty, staff, and community members gathered in Miller Forum on Tuesday evening. “I think … that I may have voted in the last free and fair election that I will ever vote in [in 2024].”
Cash is executive director of The Steady State, a collection of more than 450 former national security and intelligence officials, including Anderson, “who remain committed to their oaths to ‘defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’” Their panel discussion, moderated by Professor and Chair of Political Science Mohsin Hashim, was the first event of the 2026 Midterm Election Series.
Anderson and Cash kicked off the event with remarks. Anderson, a psychology major at Muhlenberg and a former trustee, recalled her time working in the FBI office in Morocco, a country that had long been run by an authoritarian monarch. The new monarch, his son, was more open, allowing dissent and press freedom that hadn’t been previously seen.
However, “freedom that exists by permission isn’t the same as freedom protected by institutions,” Anderson said. “One of the differences between an authoritarian system and a healthy democracy isn’t whether everybody agrees. It’s whether people have the space to disagree … to challenge authority and to feel safe doing it.”
One of the differences between an authoritarian system and a healthy democracy isn’t whether everybody agrees. It’s whether people have the space to disagree ... to challenge authority and to feel safe doing it.
Cash spoke about how the national and homeland security communities are in the business of Indications and Warning, or I&W — picking up on signs that a threat may be forthcoming and getting that information to decision-makers in time to head it off. He described the current situation in the United States as the Moroccan story in reverse.
“This isn’t democratic backsliding,” he said. “Our assessment is that we are facing, now, an existential threat.”
In the panel discussion with Hashim, both Anderson and Cash shared how actions taken by the current administration reflect actions they’ve seen would-be authoritarian governments take in other countries. For example, one of the first actions the current administration took was to remove the inspectors general meant to enforce guardrails within federal agencies. It has also systematically pushed longtime civil servants out of the national and homeland security services.
“The first thing a dictator does is purge [security services workers],” Cash said. “You need people like me and Lauren who may have those dangerous skills but are loyal to ‘the man.’ … You get rid of people like us, people who would say, ‘no, that’s wrong.’”
Audience members, in the room and over Zoom, lined up to ask questions, pushing the event well over its scheduled 90 minutes.
The next Midterm Election Series event, a talk entitled “The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them,” takes place on October 19. Learn more here.
