On Tape: Ex-USAID 'Democracy' Crew Weighs Going 'Extra-Constitutional' and Letting Governors Run America

For decades, USAID's democracy office had a job most Americans never heard about. It went into countries its experts decided were sliding toward authoritarianism and helped the other side get organized, from election monitors to street movements. Now recordings surfaced by the researcher DataRepublican show veterans of that work talking about running the same playbook on the United States, with the midterms less than two weeks away.

Her "Democracy Files" thread on 𝕏 collects the drops, which she says come from an archive of calls and documents that now tops 312 gigabytes. We traced the people in the clips back to their own websites and papers. A lot of it checks out. Some of it doesn't yet, and we flag that below.

Who these people are

The center of it is the Democracy Renewal Group. It describes itself as "a community of former international democracy and peacebuilding assistance professionals, including from USAID," who are "now applying that expertise to the United States," in its own report. It formed in 2025, while USAID was being taken apart, "to prevent our community from scattering to the winds," co-founder Danielle Reiff wrote. The name even shares its initials with USAID's old democracy office, which was known inside the agency as DRG.

Reiff is a retired U.S. diplomat who spent 20 years "supporting democratic transitions" overseas, per her bio. With activist Paul Zeitz she also co-founded Renew to Thrive and the Renew American Democracy plan, or RAD, according to her own writing. That plan, published in June, runs from Jan. 1, 2026, to Jan. 20, 2029, the day the next president is sworn in, the group's report says.

It rests on four pillars: Block, Bridge, Belong and Build. "Block" is about making sure institutions "withstand attack." "Build" calls for "a people's proposal for structural reforms" and "a plan" for a new kind of federal government. One more goal is written right into it: "International support is organized and provided for renewing U.S. democracy." Reiff has called the larger project a "Fourth Founding," in an essay.

What they said on tape

On a March 25 call first reported by The Post Millennial, a participant who said he belonged to the Democratic Socialists of America told the group, "We have to be the ones who are creating an organization that is explicitly anti-constitutional." He then asked, "Is that fair to say, Danielle?" The reply: "Yeah, definitely."

Reiff went on: "The conversation broadly that we've started is what happens if we need to go extra constitutional to create the kind of transformation that we'd all like to see." She floated "maybe like a third Continental Congress" that would publish a list of red lines, "like if these red lines in our democracy are crossed we will move into an extra constitutional process." Another voice on the same clip, posted by DataRepublican, called a midterm "meltdown" a "real window of opportunity" and said the plan "needs to be on steroids."

On an Aug. 13 call, a speaker DataRepublican identifies as Reiff said that if "our federal government becomes illegitimate," then "we can take that breakdown moment and leverage it for a big structural reform, you know, re-founding moment." Zeitz described an "options memo" for governors, because once Washington is judged illegitimate, "the governors become the leading governing authority." The clip is here.

John Mongan, identified as a former State Department official, said the memo had reached the governors of Massachusetts, California and Illinois. Massachusetts "didn't want to touch it," he said, while California and Illinois "were interested in getting involved if someone else would take the lead on it." Governors, he said, would need plans for which federal jobs to take over, how to coordinate with each other and how to reach out to foreign governments, so they could "wall off these illegitimate individuals and keep on trying to run the country, or at least parts of the country." He added that "this is not a concept for a secession." No governor's office has confirmed any of this.

Who decides what's "illegitimate"?

Zeitz published his red lines in May, on his Substack. Some sound reasonable on paper. Others leave a lot of room. "A Congress not elected and seated freely and fairly in the 2026 midterms is illegitimate," he wrote, and using the Insurrection Act against protesters "crosses this line."

Listen to how Reiff explains it, in a clip from Part 5. If election results are disputed and there is "an attempt to not seat democratically elected officials in this next Congress," then "our Congress would become illegitimate and our federal government, by extension, would be illegitimate." Her answer is "provisional or transitional leadership," maybe a group of governors, or former Presidents Bush and Obama.

Here's the problem. The Constitution already says who settles a disputed House or Senate seat: that chamber, under Article I, Section 5. And their "election meltdown" doesn't require any cheating at all. Opening a January planning forum, the host explained it could mean "a perfectly clean election, and then half the country or 25% of the country doesn't trust the results," according to the recording. A private network doesn't get to decide when an elected government stops counting. Voters and courts do.

The muscle behind it

Zeitz said on the Aug. 13 call that the United Democracy Alliance, "a huge coalition of the blocking movement, the people that are doing all the lawsuits and the civil resistance and the non-cooperation," had red lines "now being refined in terms of indicators and metrics" and was building "a situation room" for the 2026 and 2028 elections. He said it was "being led under" National Security Leaders for America (NSL4A), which he described as 1,600 retired military, intelligence and diplomatic officials.

NSL4A is real, and it's led by retired Rear Adm. Michael E. Smith. In the January forum, a participant said Smith "was here today as well." To be fair, its public midterm toolkit, made with groups under the Horizons Project banner, tells local officials to treat any troop deployment as lawful "until determined otherwise by the courts" and to avoid confronting soldiers. That public guide is a lot tamer than the private talk.

DataRepublican's Part 6 is nine minutes of participants citing the "3.5% rule," from Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth's research finding that nonviolent movements that got 3.5% of a country's people actively involved at their peak didn't fail in the cases studied, per her own paper. In America, that's about 12 million people.

The foreign playbook comes home

In July, Renew to Thrive's calls "brought election defenders from Serbia, Slovakia, Guatemala, and Brazil to stand with American organizers," its own newsletter says. Serbia is where the model started: in 2000, U.S.-funded advisers helped guide the movement that brought down Slobodan Milosevic, The Washington Post reported at the time.

In clips from those sessions, a speaker who says she was a USAID democracy officer for 20 years put it plainly: "We used to be the ones, you know, with a lot of money and sharing our model." Now, she said, "we are really grateful for those of you who are stepping up to provide a similar level of guidance and support for us." One guest urged a presence "at every polling station," a lesson he said "I learned from you guys two decades ago." Another said that if a U.S. coalition and "outside actors" both declared an American election tainted, "that could contribute to greater legitimacy."

What's proven, and what isn't

The groups, their written plans and the quotes above are real. They come from the groups' own sites and newsletters and from the recordings as published. Separately, The Washington Post reported Oct. 20 that about 10 current and former national security officials have been quietly advising officials in 10 states on possible federal "interference" in the midterms. The Post didn't name them, and NPR said they fear retaliation. DataRepublican asked whether they're the same people in her files. That hasn't been shown.

Some of her bigger claims aren't proven yet either: that the United Democracy Alliance decides when groups like No Kings, Indivisible and 50501 hit the streets, that Chenoweth created it, or that "billions of dollars" flow through the network. The full archive hasn't been independently checked, and how it was obtained is disputed, Midpoint News noted. We found no public response from Reiff or Zeitz.

DataRepublican ends her primer with one question: "Who decides when your government is legitimate?" Under the Constitution, the answer has always been voters, Congress and the courts, not a private network with a situation room. Americans vote Nov. 3.