Hannah Rosen

I'm Anne Applebaum.

Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals?

Well, maybe they are afraid.

And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win.

We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual.

reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next.

The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.

This is Ryan.

And he's explaining to me how the work that he and his colleagues do helps a person like me, who has no sense of direction, get around.

Or I should probably say he and his former colleagues.

The Earth is not a perfect sphere.

It turns out that it's constantly shifting, in subtle ways.

Hippenstiel's work was keeping up with all this complexity so that the maps would remain precise.

It's a field called geodesy.

Hippenstiel did this work for the federal government.

Before I talked to Hippenstiel, I was not aware that my getting around depended on the work of the National Geodetic Survey.

So do other way more critical things, like precision farming, disaster relief, ships knowing how deep or shallow the shoreline is in real time.

Even, Hippenstiel says, weapons firing accurately.

The work that he and his colleagues did was invisible, but critical.

It kept the ground under my feet stable.