A recent New York Post report — wrapped, as usual, in the glossy foil of "alien contact" — contains an unexpectedly serious political kernel. Behind the spectacle sits a quote attributed to then–Sen. Marco Rubio: that certain classified information about UFOs is kept secret even from sitting U.S. presidents. Strip away the extraterrestrial colour, and you're left with a genuine constitutional puzzle: how can any information related to national defence be withheld from the commander-in-chief? And if the president can be excluded, who exactly is running the show?
The obvious answer is that the modern American security state evolved into a labyrinth with its own logic, its own rules, and its own institutional self-interest. Agencies like the CIA, NSA, and various black-budget defence programs are legally empowered to classify material "above" standard access levels. In practice this means much of the government runs on a need-to-know culture where the person who is theoretically at the top is often treated as a temporary visitor — someone who will be gone in four or eight years, whereas the bureaucratic infrastructure remains for decades. Continuity beats democracy.
This is not just conspiracy talk; it has been acknowledged in polite Washington circles since the Church Committee of the 1970s exposed how intelligence agencies routinely bypassed both Congress and presidents. Reagan didn't know about certain covert operations until they failed. Obama openly admitted he learned more about the intelligence system "after taking office than I ever imagined existed." Trump complained the agencies were "running their own policy." Biden has been publicly corrected by the Pentagon for statements on Taiwan policy — a remarkable inversion of authority when the uniformed bureaucracy feels entitled to revise the elected head of state.
Rubio's comment therefore fits the pattern, even if the subject matter is UFOs instead of missiles: compartmentalisation is the shield behind which bureaucratic autonomy thrives. Information becomes the currency of power and withholding it becomes a way to shape policy without ever having to win an election.
The courts fare no better. While presidents theoretically outrank everyone, judges have repeatedly upheld the "state secrets privilege," meaning agencies can avoid scrutiny simply by claiming disclosure would harm national security. If a president attempts to declassify something, agencies can slow-walk, reinterpret, or quietly bury the order through procedural fog. In other words, the institutional machine has veto power over its own oversight.
If you define "Deep State" as a permanent class of security and intelligence officials who can outlast, out-manoeuvre, and occasionally out-vote a president, then it exists — not as a smoky backroom conspiracy, but as a structural reality baked into a government that has grown too large, too secretive, and too self-protective to be fully democratic.
The UFO story simply brings the issue into sharper relief. If sitting presidents can be denied access to certain files about unidentified aerial phenomena, then the real question is not whether aliens visited New Mexico in 1964. It's whether the American people still have any meaningful control over the institutions that act in their name.
Australia is not exempt from this dynamic. While it lacks the vast intelligence archipelago of the United States, its legal framework creates a similar structural imbalance between elected officials and permanent security institutions. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act, the Intelligence Services Act, and the sweeping secrecy provisions of the National Security Legislation Amendment (Espionage and Foreign Interference) Act 2018 allow intelligence agencies to classify information so deeply that even ministers can be briefed only "to the extent necessary." Courts, too, are constrained: the National Security Information (Criminal and Civil Proceedings) Act 2004 permits the attorney-general to intervene in trials to withhold evidence on security grounds. And because Australia lacks a constitutional bill of rights, there is no fundamental legal check equivalent to the U.S. First Amendment when secrecy collides with democratic oversight.
The result is not a Bond-style conspiracy, but a familiar structural reality: a permanent intelligence bureaucracy with the legal and procedural tools to outlast, out-wait, and out-manoeuvre the politicians who nominally direct it. Just as in the American UFO debate, the specific subject matter matters less than the principle it exposes. When information becomes the domain of career officials rather than the public's representatives, the question becomes unavoidable: if secrecy governs the state, who governs secrecy? The answer, in both Canberra and Washington, is increasingly unsettling. The Deep State is real.