Summary:

Former officers of the US Agency for International Development, the body that ran American overseas democracy programmes until it was shut down in 2025, have been recorded discussing how to respond to a disputed midterm election. An analyst's fourteen-part series on X, posted between 19 October and 3 November, sets out what the speakers describe as a plan to declare the federal government illegitimate.

The plan follows the colour revolution method, which helped drive out governments in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine by pairing a disputed election with mass nonviolent pressure. The recordings cover conditions agreed in advance that would justify declaring the government illegitimate; a monitoring centre for election day; a memo advising governors on taking over functions of government; and outreach to federal workers.

The compiler, Jennica Pounds, finds no hidden network behind the groups, only shared funders, people and strategy documents. Natalie Winters, a White House correspondent for Steve Bannon's War Room programme who publishes on Substack, reports that other groups have published plans using similar techniques, including a proposed parallel vote count. The recordings have not been independently verified, and no public response has been located from the named individuals or organisations.

Detailed Report

1. How a Colour Revolution Unfolds: Pair a Disputed Election With Mass Nonviolent Pressure

A colour revolution is a mass movement, built around a disputed election, that removes a government through nonviolent pressure. The name comes from the symbols crowds adopted: roses in Georgia in 2003 and orange in Ukraine in 2004. The model took shape in the campaign that ended Slobodan Milošević's rule in Serbia in 2000.

The method rests on the work of the late American political scientist Gene Sharp, who argued that no ruler governs by force alone. A government depends on the police, the army, the civil service, the courts, the media, business and religious bodies. When enough of them stop cooperating, it cannot function. Sharp catalogued 198 methods of nonviolent action, from strikes and boycotts to sit-ins.

Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard political scientist, found that nonviolent campaigns have succeeded more often than violent ones. Campaigns mobilising about 3.5 per cent of a population have almost always succeeded. She describes this as a pattern rather than a law, and names Bahrain in 2011–14 as an exception.

Practitioners have reduced the approach to six steps. The first is to unite the opposition behind a single candidate or list, as the student movement Otpor did in Serbia. The second is to brand the movement with a symbol and slogan that others can copy. The third is to train activists in nonviolent technique. The fourth is to build independent media, election monitors and legal help, including parallel vote tabulation, in which monitors tally a sample of polling stations to check the official count. The fifth is to dispute the count and encourage foreign governments to back the challenge. The sixth is to split the ruler's supporters, aiming crowds, strikes and court challenges at the courts, the civil service, the police and state media until enough of them refuse orders.

The same sequence, Pounds argues, is now being run on an American election.

2. Ex-USAID Staff Plan Built Around Four Modes and Five Red Lines

The plan's roots lie in USAID's democracy office. Its Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Governance, known as DRG, sent staff to help opposition movements abroad with election monitoring, independent media and civil-society building. After the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) shut USAID down, its democracy staff formed the Democracy Renewal Group. The name shares the initials of the old office.

The group's plan is Renew American Democracy, known as RAD. The plan is organised around what it calls Block, Bridge & Belong, and Build. Its four modes run in parallel rather than in sequence. Block means resisting immediate harms and defending elections and institutions against what the plan frames as abuse of power. Bridge means easing tension across political and other divides so that wider coalitions become possible. Belong means building the local culture and institutions, from school boards to congregations, that keep people in the work. Build means co-creating longer-term reforms. RAD's materials describe a "People's Proposal" drafted through citizens' assemblies. Pounds reads Build as redesigning American government itself, with a crisis as the opening. In recordings of the groups' calls, speakers describe that opening: "leverage it for a big structural reform, you know, refounding moment."

The recordings contain a set of five red lines, conditions that would mean the federal government "crosses the threshold into illegitimacy." In Pounds's characterisation of the recorded discussion, the government would be illegitimate if it investigated election fraud; delayed seating a new member of Congress over alleged cheating; saw Republicans win too many elections; acted against "activist judges"; or moved against peaceful protesters. These items come from her reading of the private calls, not from a published RAD strategy document. Danielle Reiff, a leader of the group, explains why they are fixed early: "everybody's already pre-organized."

Pounds's reading of a 9 September funding proposal says the coalition is focused on election day and just after. In her account, what is missing is "the day after tomorrow," if and when the federal government is deemed illegitimate. That phrase comes from the recordings and her reading, and the published RAD documents do not confirm it.

3. Groups Plan Ahead for Certification Through 3 January

The most direct talk of breaking with the constitutional order comes from a 25 March Democratic Constitution Forum, according to Midpoint News. The speaker, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, says they have teamed up with the Democracy Renewal Group's leaders. They foresee a crisis of legitimacy around the November election and call the midterms an opening if a meltdown occurs.

Midpoint News identifies a second speaker as Reiff, who describes the sequence that could follow. A convening, something like a third Continental Congress, would declare red lines. A national dialogue would come next, and eventually a constitutional convention. The speaker warns that moving too early could be dangerous.

A 15 January exercise listed three emergency scenarios for 2026: militarisation, an election meltdown and an acute constitutional crisis, such as newly elected members of Congress not being seated. A later clip sets out the same three, with the Insurrection Act first. The Act is the law that lets a president deploy troops against civil unrest. In the clip, Reiff asks what leadership could fill the gap if Congress is not seated, and says the aim is to find "provisional or transitional leadership of the country." Pounds does not say when or where it was recorded.

Pounds sets the end date at 3 January, when the new House is sworn in. States certify results in November and December. On the recordings, a forum speaker from Freedom Trainers, a training network, says a crowd of about 1.5 million would be needed to shut down Washington if certification stalls. The recording has not been independently verified. A strategy discussed on the calls, the Fulcrum Caucus, would elect a bloc of independents to deny either party a majority and use their votes as leverage.

Pounds places the decision to mobilise on the streets with the strategy table of the Election Safeguards Response Network, a coalition directed by Norm Eisen, a former White House ethics counsel to President Barack Obama. The network's stated job is to detect, deter and rapidly coordinate responses. The network is public, and People's Action names Eisen as its executive director. What is unpublished, Pounds says, is who sits at the table. Winters reports memos marked not for public or press circulation that describe partners "maintaining open lines of communication with election officials."

4. Governors, Federal Workers and Foreign Recognition: The Plan's Three Fronts

Governors are the plan's most concrete audience. An options memo argues that governors would become the leading governing authority under the constitution if the federal government were deemed illegitimate. On the recording, a speaker says the memo has reached Governors Safeguarding Democracy and several individual officials. The speaker also says Massachusetts declined to engage with it, while California and Illinois expressed interest if another state took the lead. These are the speaker's claims. No public confirmation from the governors' offices has been located. A speaker presents the proposal as states governing within the constitution.

Eric Manton, of the Democracy Renewal Group, is named as the author of a chat message from a 6 August call. In it, he wrote that the group was starting to consult federal workers on blocking actions inside agencies during emergencies, and asked that this not go on the form. No workers are named. Pounds infers a link to the Federal Workers Alliance for Democracy, a public coalition of current and former federal employees. That link is her inference, not a documented connection. The plan's wording on the workforce moves from seeding non-compliance by federal employees in a November 2025 draft to legal defence for officials who refuse to comply in the published strategy.

On a 9 July call, speakers from other countries advised the American groups. A coalition leader described Brazil's 2022 election, with activists at every polling station, legal hotlines, a situation room and quick recognition of results by embassies. One speaker said that if a broad American coalition and outside actors made the same claim about an election, "that could contribute to greater legitimacy."

A separate September proposal names Paul Zeitz and Eric Manton as managers of a $40,000 "International Solidarity" line for private outreach to heads of state and the European Union, so that they are ready to recognise a "legitimate renewal process." The line is unfunded, and there is no sign the outreach took place.

5. Parallel Counting and Legislative Preparation: Two Plans Outside the Recordings

Winters reports that Dylan Cooke, organising director of Seed the Vote, said in an 18 May update that its legal partners were exploring "parallel vote counting infrastructure, separate from the government." The statement says only that the infrastructure is under consideration.

Cooke describes four stages: fight election rules the group considers suppressive, win by margins too large to dispute, prove the results through independent counting, and enforce them through protests and nationwide non-cooperation. He cites Serbia, Hungary and Venezuela as precedents. "Gathering evidence matters only if it creates mass mobilization and mass outrage."

A 23 October memo from Movement Voter Project, a group that lists Seed the Vote as a grantee, says movement leaders have rehearsed 18 threat scenarios. It promotes a Freedom Trainers manual that recommends seeking "international recognition" and holding daily rallies and strikes at the Capitol if Congress refuses to seat election winners.

A fourteen-page guide for state legislators, marked confidential, comes from Protect Democracy, a legal advocacy group co-founded by Ian Bassin and Justin Florence, former associate White House counsels to President Barack Obama. The State Innovation Exchange, a network of state legislators, published it. Most of the guide is standard election-protection preparation, and it discourages premature victory claims. It tells lawmakers to "make the escalation politically costly" when election materials are seized.

Training and money run through the method's history, and the record starts in Serbia. In 2000 the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government-funded non-profit that backs democracy programmes abroad, granted Otpor more than $282,000 for new branches and offices and a bus tour encouraging voter participation in the September presidential election. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported this in 2005, citing NED records.

The International Republican Institute (IRI), linked to the Republican Party, arranged a seminar at the Budapest Hilton in spring 2000. Roger Cohen reported in The New York Times Magazine that retired US Army Colonel Robert Helvey instructed more than 20 Otpor leaders there in techniques of nonviolent resistance. Michael Dobbs, writing in The Washington Post in December 2000, referred to the broad outlines of a "$41 million U.S. democracy-building campaign in Serbia."

Cohen also quoted Daniel Calingaert of IRI saying that Otpor received some of the $1.8 million the institute spent in Serbia throughout 2000. Calingaert later became executive vice president of Freedom House.

Georgia followed in 2003. The Open Society Institute, the foundation network of the financier George Soros, funded travel and training that connected Georgian activists with Otpor members in Belgrade and brought Otpor trainers to Georgia, according to contemporary reporting on the Rose Revolution. Secondary accounts of that reporting describe the programme as training a large number of students, but the precise count is not confirmed from a primary source.

In Ukraine, the NED funded youth mobilisation programmes between 2001 and 2004, according to secondary accounts of its grant records. The Associated Press reported in December 2004 that the Bush administration had spent more than $65 million over the previous two years to aid political organisations in Ukraine, mostly through third-party NGOs, with no money sent directly to political parties.

The link to USAID's democracy bureau runs through CANVAS, the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, which Otpor's founders set up in Belgrade in 2003 to package and export the methods. In a press release of 16 October 2023, USAID announced $45 million over five years, the largest single award to date from its Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Governance. PartnersGlobal, a Washington non-profit, leads the consortium that received it, and the consortium includes CANVAS and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. The award funds Powered by the People, a programme supporting nonviolent social movements.

Hardy Merriman, whom Cooke credits for his framework, was a senior technical adviser to Powered by the People from 2023 to 2025, according to his own biography. He is also listed as a co-author of the CANVAS Core Curriculum, published in 2007.

The two sources also overlap in names and methods. National Security Leaders for America, a group of about 1,600 retired officers, intelligence officials and diplomats, Indivisible, a progressive advocacy network, and Freedom Trainers appear both in the recordings and in the documents Winters cites. The Democracy Fund and the Ford Foundation are among the funders of most of the groups' work. PolicyLink, a non-profit, uses the same "new founding" language in its plans to redesign federal agencies for the next administration.

The overlaps are of people, training, funders and scenario documents. Right-leaning groups ran similar scenario exercises. Pounds's theory concerns a narrower question, who decides when to mobilise, and she offers an image: "An orchestra can play without a conductor if everyone has the same sheet music."

In April, Reiff relayed a researcher's advice that a movement should reach a 25 per cent tipping point quietly, "without drawing the attention of the spoilers." In May, Laura Adams, who had worked on USAID democracy programmes abroad, said they were "pivoting the whole field to the US." At a June rehearsal for a press conference launching the strategy, Daniel Calingaert, a former Freedom House executive, took the role of the reporter and asked who was funding it. One participant said "Nobody," and Zeitz said there had been some funding. Calingaert's scripted reply was that most of the strategy is already under way in more than 1,400 groups and 200 networks.

Conclusion

Former USAID democracy officers and allied groups have discussed, in recordings and planning documents, how to respond to a disputed midterm by declaring the federal government illegitimate under conditions agreed in advance. The plans cover governors, federal workers and outreach for foreign recognition of results. Other groups have published plans for a parallel vote count and mass mobilisation. The recordings have not been independently verified, and no public response has been located from the named individuals or organisations. States certify results in November and December, and the new House is sworn in on 3 January.