Former USAID officials and retired military leaders discussed going “extra-constitutional” to transform America’s system around the midterms, recordings cited by a researcher show.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reported that investigative researcher Jennica Pounds, known online as DataRepublican, has released materials describing a network of former government, military, and intelligence figures organizing through nonprofits ahead of the 2026 midterms.
The groups named include Renew to Thrive and National Security Leaders For America, or NSL4A. Pounds’ posts and cited recordings frame talks about legitimacy crises, street “blocking,” and structural change that would not stop at defending the existing constitutional order.
Renew to Thrive and NSL4A did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
Pounds has posted threads under the banner “The Democracy Files,” saying she backed up hundreds of gigabytes of materials and shared them more widely. The Daily Caller account ties those drops to Zoom meetings, strategy texts, and calls involving ex-USAID personnel after the agency’s closure in July 2025.
Danielle Reiff, described as a former USAID democracy officer now representing Renew to Thrive, appears in a March 25, 2026 recording cited by Pounds. In that material she frames the coming vote as a legitimacy problem and pushes system-level change.
Reiff said in the cited recording:
“I’m seeing a crisis of legitimacy with the November midterm election... what we really need to do is transform our system”
Another line from the same reported March discussion goes further. Reiff is quoted describing open talk about breaking the ordinary constitutional frame to get the transformation she wants.
“The conversation centers around what’s going to happen if we go extra-constitutional to create the kind of transformation that we’d all like to see,”
She is also quoted saying organizers already know their “red lines” and that “the entire blocking community” is in place on the streets. In related remarks she speaks of using a “breakdown moment” for a “refounding moment” and big structural reform.
NSL4A is described as a 501(c)(4) tied to more than 1,400 senior military and intelligence officials. Retired Rear Adm. Mike Smith founded the group. The Daily Caller report says Smith runs an “Insurrection Act Working Group” alongside Reiff.
NSL4A’s site has publicized a toolkit aimed at “managing military intervention” during the election. The article does not reproduce the full toolkit text, but the title alone puts military force on the table as a midterm contingency subject.
Reiff claimed in an Aug. 6 conversation account, as relayed through Pounds, that Smith stressed street power plus a plan for the day after.
“the research all shows you that the blocking community can, like, rid us of a dictator, and the renewal will not happen if there’s not a positive vision and a plan for what to do on the day after,”
That language treats domestic political opponents as a “dictator” problem and treats organized street blocking as a tool to remove them. It is not ordinary electioneering.
Marcia Mundt, another former USAID employee, appears in a 2025 meeting tied to the 22nd Century Initiative that Reiff also attended. In a recording Pounds shared, Mundt describes taking frameworks once reserved for foreign “illegitimate government” analysis and applying them at home now that she no longer holds the job.
“We were never allowed to analyze the United States in this way before because there is this big dividing line between foreign assistance work and domestic work, so I never got to use it for a U.S. context, but now that I no longer have a job, I can use it for whatever I want,”
That dividing line existed for a reason. Foreign democracy-promotion toolkits were never supposed to become a domestic playbook against the elected U.S. government.
An unnamed former employee is quoted making the point even more bluntly, casting the United States as an “authoritarian” case and treating the shutdown of USAID as a strategic gift to trained operatives now loose in the population.
“Take it from those of us who worked in authoritarian countries: We’ve become one... they were so quick to disband [The U.S. Agency for International Development], the group that supposedly instigates color revolutions,” one former employee reportedly declared. “But they’ve done a very foolish thing. You just released a bunch of well-trained individuals into your population. If you kept our offices going and had us play solitaire in the office, it might have been safer to keep your regime.”
Color-revolution tradecraft, regime language, and “safer to keep your regime” are the vocabulary of people who see American voters and American institutions as targets, not principals.
A July 9 call hosted by Reiff brought in overseas voices with USAID-linked pedigrees. Rast’o Kǔzel, executive director of Slovakia’s Memo 98, urged “prebunking and inoculation” against narratives before they dominate the information space. Raša Nedeljkov of Serbia’s CRTA stressed presence “at every polling station.”
Memo 98 is described as established by the USAID-backed National Democratic Institute. CRTA is described as USAID-backed in material the Daily Caller cites. The same professional class that once worked election and media environments abroad is now on domestic strategy calls about U.S. midterms.
Materials tied to the Renew / Renewing Democracy effort use a four-part formula: “block, bridge, belong, and build.” Blocking, as described, covers safeguarding the 2026 and 2028 votes, defending speech and assembly, exposing corruption in both parties, and refusing to normalize intimidation.
The same strategy text does not stop at guardrails. It states flatly that defending what exists is insufficient.
“Guarding the old system is not enough,” the strategy reads.
Others in the reported network shared the CIA’s old “Simple Sabotage Field Manual” with government officials they saw as potential allies. The Daily Caller piece links that manual’s public text but does not quote passages from it. The gesture still signals a mindset: disruption literature passed around as useful reading for domestic politics.
Pounds’ October 2026 threads frame the project as an “illegitimacy playbook”, including discussion of when and how to declare the federal government illegitimate, and question whether a cohort of roughly 200 ex-USAID officials could advance ambitions to revise constitutional arrangements. Those figures and characterizations come from her posts as presented in the report; the groups named have not answered the paper’s questions on the record.
Democratic Constitutional Forum Zoom sessions are described as platforms where speakers pushed creating a new American Constitution. Ties are also reported to protest-linked efforts such as the 22nd Century Initiative and No Kings. The through-line is not a single rally. It is a professionalized network talking legitimacy collapse, street blocking, military-intervention contingencies, and “refounding” in the same breath as midterm election work.
The Daily Caller article relies heavily on Pounds’ releases and does not present independent full-chain authentication of every recording in the article body. Full toolkit language is not quoted. Exact years for every partial date, and any list of state governments supposedly advised, are not spelled out. No charges or formal findings appear in the reporting.
None of that erases the words already on tape and in strategy text: extra-constitutional transformation, rid-us-of-a-dictator research, illegitimate-government analysis aimed at the United States, and a military-intervention toolkit posted for midterm season.
Americans elect Congress and presidents under one Constitution. Operatives who spent careers exporting “democracy” work do not get a quiet veto when voters choose differently, and they do not get to workshop the day after a “breakdown” as if constitutional order were optional.
