Locked in a classified safe somewhere on the White House grounds is a stack of pre-written orders that most Americans have never heard of. They have never been leaked. They have never been declassified. And yet, if a president decides to use them, they could suspend the very rights that most of us have taken for granted our entire lives.
These are Presidential Emergency Action Documents, and they are among the most consequential, and least understood, tools in American government. The questions surrounding them are not comfortable ones: What exactly do they authorize? Who can stop a president from using them? And why has Congress, despite repeated warnings from senators on both sides of the aisle, struggled to do anything about it?
The short answer is that nobody outside a very small circle knows for certain what these documents say. That opacity, many argue, is precisely the problem.
What Are Presidential Emergency Action Documents and Why Are They Dangerous?
Presidential Emergency Action Documents, or PEADs, are draft classified executive orders, proclamations, and messages to Congress that are prepared for the president of the United States to exercise or expand powers in anticipation of a range of emergency hypothetical worst-case scenarios, so that they are ready to sign and put into effect the moment one of those scenarios comes to pass. Think of them as a presidential emergency playbook, preloaded and waiting.
Presidential emergency action documents originated during the Cold War as continuity-of-government measures in response to a possible nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, and could have allowed for the suspension of habeas corpus, warrantless seizures, and other actions that likely would have infringed upon the constitutional rights of American citizens. Habeas corpus, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the fundamental legal right to challenge your detention in court, it’s one of the oldest civil liberties protections in the Anglo-American legal tradition, and a cornerstone of due process.
The original rationale made a certain grim sense. If Soviet missiles were incoming, you needed a response framework ready before the dust settled. But over the decades, PEADs have since been expanded for use in other emergency situations where the normal operation of government is impaired, well beyond nuclear war. What began as Cold War contingency planning has evolved into something considerably broader, and the fact that the documents themselves remain sealed makes it nearly impossible to know exactly how far they now reach. Executive orders have long been used to bypass legislative debate in moments of crisis, a pattern that helps explain why pre-signed emergency directives like PEADs exist in the first place.
Locked away in a classified safe on the White House grounds is a stack of papers crafted over decades with the hope that no one would ever use them. It lists the extraordinary powers a president may be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack or other massive catastrophe. Among the select few who have been granted access to the nation’s most closely held secrets, the pages are known as the Presidential Emergency Action Documents. Some simply call it the “Doomsday Book.”
What the Documents Are Known to Authorize
Here is where things get specific. While the full contents of PEADs remain classified, fragments of what they contain have emerged through declassified references in other government documents and Freedom of Information Act requests.
Armed with the latest tranche of presidential records, we now know that at least some of the most disturbing aspects of early Cold War emergency action documents persisted as of 2008. Although the library withheld almost all substantive information about the PEADs under review, researchers have been able to reconstruct the broad contours of several of them. At least one of the documents under review was designed to implement the emergency authorities contained in Section 706 of the Communications Act, a statute that allows the president to shut down or take control of wire communications infrastructure during a declared emergency.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, official reports from the 1960s indicate that various PEADs authorized the president to suspend habeas corpus, detain “dangerous persons” within the United States, censor news media, and prevent international travel. These aren’t hypothetical concerns extrapolated from vague legal theories. They are things that actual government documents say the president had prepared authorization to do.
The Bush-era records are particularly instructive. The Brennan Center obtained more than 500 pages of documents from the George W. Bush Presidential Library through a FOIA request, with an additional 6,000 pages withheld as still classified. Those released records confirm that one PEAD was still being revised, specifically in response to the Supreme Court’s landmark Boumediene v. Bush ruling, which affirmed detainees’ rights to challenge their imprisonment. The fact that the government was revising the document rather than retiring it speaks for itself.
TIME Magazine (2024) reported that the full “Doomsday Book” of PEADs includes ready-made orders to suspend habeas corpus, place parts of the country under military control, impose martial law, block Americans from traveling overseas, and restrict telecommunications, all according to national security officials and FOIA documents.
The Senators Who Sounded the Alarm
The concern about PEADs and constitutional threats to emergency powers is not the province of any one political party. Former Senator William Cohen, a Republican from Maine who later served as Secretary of Defense under President Clinton, and former Senator Gary Hart, a Democrat from Colorado, have both publicly warned that these secret emergency documents represent a genuine threat to constitutional government. As Senator Hart put it in remarks reported by CBS News, the documents amount, in his view, to “suspension of the Constitution, basically.”
A bipartisan group of senators, Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah, and Democrats Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, pressed for more details about what’s in the draft orders, when they can be used, and what legal theories justify them. Senator Paul requested the White House let him read the PEADs in a classified setting, but was denied. “That is alarming to us and we’d like to know more about them,” Paul told TIME. “The idea that we would have emergency orders written up to replace the constitutional republic in times of emergencies, that would alarm anybody.”
That a sitting U.S. senator with a security clearance was denied access to documents that affect constitutional rights is, to put it plainly, a remarkable state of affairs.
Why Congress Has No Oversight
One of the stranger aspects of PEADs is that they appear to fall outside even the limited oversight Congress has over other sensitive national security matters. It appears that they are not even subject to congressional oversight. Although the law requires the executive branch to report even the most sensitive covert military and intelligence operations to at least some members of Congress, there is no such disclosure requirement for PEADs, and no evidence that the documents have ever been shared with relevant congressional committees.
Through declassified documents, we know that there were 56 PEADs in effect as of 2017, up from 48 a couple of decades earlier. And the government keeps spending money to update them. The Office of U.S. Senator Edward J. Markey (2020) reported that the Department of Justice requested and received funds from Congress to update several dozen PEADs first developed in 1989, including requesting funds as recently as 2018, yet the funding requests contained no explanation of what these documents encompass or what standards govern their revision. Congress, in other words, has been helping to pay for documents it has never been allowed to read.
As of 2022, no PEAD has been declassified, which means Congress remains unable to serve as any kind of meaningful constitutional check on these emergency protocols. The documents exist in a legal space where the normal rules, including the rules about oversight, simply don’t apply.
The Push for Reform
There have been genuine legislative efforts to change this. Senator Markey’s REIGN Act, introduced in May 2020, would require congressional disclosure within 30 days. The logic is simple: if Congress is going to be a meaningful check on emergency power, it needs to actually know what that power looks like.
More recently, the ARTICLE ONE Act made significant committee progress. On September 18, 2024, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed the ARTICLE ONE Act out of committee by unanimous voice vote. In the Senate, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee passed the bill out of committee by a vote of 13 to 1. The ARTICLE ONE Act, which reforms the National Emergencies Act, also includes a provision that the president disclose PEADs to congressional oversight committees.
But as legal analysts at JURIST noted in March 2025, the only reason these well-studied and broadly supported bills are not law is because Congress never had the opportunity to vote on them, they were first put on the calendar for a vote on December 19, 2024, the final day of the prior Congress. They expired without a vote. The reform effort remains alive, but it hasn’t yet crossed the finish line.
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What This Means for You
The existence of Presidential Emergency Action Documents is not, by itself, a scandal. Governments plan for catastrophic scenarios. That’s responsible governance. The problem is not the planning. The problem is the secrecy, the lack of oversight, and the absence of any meaningful legal check on how these documents might be used.
What the senators, Cohen, Hart, Paul, Lee, Blumenthal, Murphy, Markey, have all been pointing toward, from different political directions, is the same basic concern: when a president can unilaterally declare a national emergency and reach into a classified drawer to pull out pre-written orders suspending habeas corpus, controlling communications, restricting travel, and potentially placing parts of the country under military control, the constitutional balance of power has a serious structural gap. The documents that could be used to strip rights away from ordinary Americans have never been read by the people’s elected representatives.
You can’t advocate for better policy on something you don’t know exists. Now you know it exists. The legislative push for disclosure is real, bipartisan, and overdue. Whether it succeeds depends largely on whether enough people understand what’s at stake, and whether they expect their representatives to actually read the playbook before someone decides to use it.
A.I. Disclaimer: This article was created with AI assistance and edited by a human for accuracy and clarity.