Star Trek: Discovery transported the USS Discovery and its crew forward in time to the 32nd century - and a tie-in novel has finally revealed the full reason the Federation had fallen by that time. Faced with the potential extinction of all life in the universe if the secrets they possessed were obtained by the rogue AI Control, the crew of the USS Discovery chose to go to drastic lengths. Michael Burnham used the Red Angel prototype to travel into the distant future, towing the Discovery behind her. When she emerged, initially isolated and alone, she found the future was a lot bleaker than she'd expected.
Burnham emerged into a quasi-dystopian future where the Federation had collapsed after a mysterious event known as "The Burn." Galactic civilization had always been dependent on a mineral called dilithium, which regulates the matter-antimatter reactions in a ship's warp core, but one fateful day almost all dilithium in the galaxy was rendered spontaneously inert. Active reactors exploded, ships in flight were crippled and interstellar travel became impossible. The rug was pulled out from under the Federation and it collapsed. Burnham was shaken to learn the Federation's fate, struggling to understand why nobody worked to restore it after the Burn. The reason for the Federation's collapse was revealed in Una McCormack's novel Wonderlands. This tells the story of Burnham's first year in Star Trek's 32nd century before she was finally joined by the USS Discovery and the rest of the crew, and it sees her review historical records that help her understand what happened.
According to Wonderlands, the fall of the Federation really began during the Temporal Wars, well over 150 years before the Burn. The Federation didn't respond well to this conflict, with the interests of the four founding races - humans, Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites - dominating. Many worlds that had suffered profoundly during the Temporal Wars were essentially abandoned, with some rendered uninhabitable and their peoples forced to evacuate in the hopes of finding a new home. The lofty ideals of solidarity espoused by the Federation increasingly felt like a false promise rather than a reality.
The years before the Burn in Discovery saw dilithium becoming increasingly scarce, and the Federation did indeed attempt to find alternatives; but they never seemed to consider this research a priority, simply because the ties binding member worlds together were already loosening. When the Burn finally happened, it was the dramatic culmination of a process that had been going on for literal centuries, the final death-knell of a galactic power that had already been crumbling. Few people had enough emotional attachment to the Federation to make a concerted effort to bring it back.
And then, of course, Michael Burnham and the crew of the USS Discovery intervened. The very definition of True Believers, their faith held firm in the principles the Federation was supposed to stand for. By the end of Star Trek: Discovery season 3, the collapse of the Federation was being reversed with the promise of the Federation's return as a galactic power once again.
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