A federal judge has ruled that the President of the United States cannot give his own appointees access to Treasury Department information systems, even though Trump has publicly maintained that during his first term he was denied access to information he needed to do his job effectively by insiders working to neutralize him. The ruling was so broad that another judge had to clarify that the Secretary of the Treasury can access the Treasury Department's data. How can the head of the executive branch be barred from accessing executive branch information through people he trusts? If the President believes the bureaucracy is malfunctioning, how can he reform it without first understanding how it works, if the bureaucracy persistently denies him or his advisors the information they need to evaluate it?

This is certainly not how the government of the United States of America was originally constituted in 1787, nor does it correspond to any of the Constitution document's formally written and ratified amendments. Rather, it demonstrates that since the drafting of the written Constitution, the government has in some other way been reconstituted to create a fourth substantive branch of government, alongside the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.

The transformation originates with Congress's power to shape how executive authority is exercised. When Congress creates new executive powers - like environmental regulation through the EPA - it specifies not just what can be done, but how. Through the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), Congress built an entire system of rules governing how the executive branch must operate. When agencies act outside these rules, states can sue to stop them if they can demonstrate that the violation threatens the sort of harm that gives them standing to sue. And if they can further demonstrate that the harm is imminent and irreparable, they can seek an injunction ordering the agency in question to halt the contested action until it is assessed in a full trial, which a judge can grant if they additionally think the plaintiff is very likely to win, and that stopping the agency's action would not itself cause undue harm to the agency or the public.

On this theory, expanding access to sensitive Treasury systems outside the established framework is possibly unconstitutional or illegal because it's an end run around that regulatory framework. The potential for harm in handing sensitive user data to something outside the framework of security clearances established through prescribed bureaucratic procedure gives states standing to sue for an injunction.

The "irreparable harm" argument seems like special pleading. Surely a President's need to understand his own branch of government outweighs procedural requirements about information access? The government regularly takes irreversible actions - including lethal force - without courts rushing to block them. Moreover, the status quo system that assigned security clearances to Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Joshua Schulte, and failed to prevent the Office of Personnel Management breach in which 21.5 million federal employees' sensitive background investigation records were exposed, makes a mockery of complaints about circumventing reliable safeguards. The system's normal operation already produces catastrophic breaches. The bureaucracy claims strict security protocols are needed to prevent breaches, yet these same protocols block the oversight needed to evaluate whether they're working or actually creating more vulnerability. A system that cannot be examined cannot be fixed - and the continued operation of an unfixable system that regularly produces catastrophic breaches is itself an ongoing source of irreparable harm.

The judge in this case relied on the APA-mandated judgment of the very bureaucracies being audited, when finding that the audit would cause imminent and irreparable harm on balance. By requiring agencies to follow specific processes when they evaluate risks or set standards, Congress - via the Administrative Procedures Act - effectively told courts to treat the output of those processes as truth. While this interpretation was not explicit in the Administrative Procedures Act itself, courts have chosen to interpret it this way. What begins as legally mandatory procedure becomes mandatory legal reality.

This alchemy transforms bureaucratic processes such as security clearances from instrumental mechanisms into self-evident guarantees of safety. The clearance becomes a ritual, assumed to confer security simply by existing. Other frameworks have compact terms to refer to this phenomenon. Occultists call it "ritual magic," Lacan a "master signifier," Baudrillard a third-degree simulacrum, and ancient Israelites "idolatry." So when faced with challenges to executive action outside the APA framework, judges have to choose between four responses:

• Accept the bureaucracy's implied technical judgments as ground truth for the purpose of the ruling.
• Find specific evidence that the bureaucracy violated its own rules.
• Overturn the long precedential history of judicial deference to the bureaucratic procedures prescribed by the APA.
• Rule the APA itself unconstitutional.