EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm

It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief". Once somebody set out to damage or destroy it, away it went. Pretty much without a whimper.

As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.

All societies are consensus realities wholly dependent upon participation.

The system was fine but no one has yet constructed a system that can withstand weaponized mass stupidity. Even the ones created to combat corruption fail to account for this danger.

So.

Germany has learned this lesson the hard way, with a 'defensive' constitution post-1945. You don't have 100% free speech in Germany, and it is possible to make parties illegal. It's not without its issues (currently, the far-right AfD might be banned using these laws but the whole system has been dragging its feet) but it is a lesson the US should have learned after the first Trump term.

Democracies by default assumed that all players in the system are supportive of the system itself, kind of like all early Internet protocols assumed that there are no malicious users.

They didn't "learn this lesson", they had a constitution imposed on them and were basically occupied for 50 years by multiple foreign powers; even up until 2020 as I recall there were about as many active US army personnel in Germany as German ones. There isn't a hugely compelling story that the constitution is the big factor in the German journey.

It isn't possible to build a paper system that consistently resists an incompetent elite and the people deciding to re-roll the dice on a new system because the current one isn't working. Corruption creeps in and people stop following the official rules.