Inside the Soros-Funded Nonprofit That Hand-Picked Biden’s National Security Team, Then Pretended to Dissolve
by DataRepublican, May 11,2026, datarepublican.substack.com
https://tinyurl.com/3mtwrf29
On January 30, 2017 — ten days into the Trump presidency — Rosa Brooks published an article in Foreign Policy titled “3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020.” She outlined four scenarios for removing the new president from office: impeachment, the 25th Amendment, cabinet revolt, and a military coup. Of the last option, Brooks wrote that it was “a possibility that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America.”
Brooks was a former Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, where she reported to Michele Flournoy from 2009 to 2011. Before that, she served as Special Counsel to the President at the Open Society Institute — the predecessor name for George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. After leaving government, she went to Georgetown Law, where she holds the Scott K. Ginsburg Chair in Law and Policy.
Within the same year of her article, a new organization was quietly incorporated. National Security Action was incorporated in 2017 and launched publicly on February 2018. Its co-chairs were Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, and Jake Sullivan, who would become Biden’s national security advisor. Rosa Brooks sat on its advisory council. So did approximately sixty other people — 88.6% of them Obama administration alumni.
The organization’s primary funder was the Open Society Policy Center, a Soros family 501(c)(4). Brooks also served on the board of the Open Society Foundations’ US Programs — the upstream grant-making entity within the same Soros network that was financing the organization whose advisory council she had joined.
This is the story of that organization.
The Roster
National Security Action launched with approximately seventy people — sixty advisory council members and ten staff. Its advisory council included Tony Blinken, Avril Haines, William Burns, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Denis McDonough, Alejandro Mayorkas, Wendy Sherman, Wally Adeyemo, Kurt Campbell, Colin Kahl, Kathleen Hicks, and Jon Finer. Tom Donilon — Obama’s former national security advisor — served on the advisory council.
Forty-six of seventy roster members — 65.7% — received Biden administration appointments. Sullivan became National Security Advisor. Blinken became Secretary of State. Burns became CIA Director. Haines became Director of National Intelligence. Power ran USAID. Thomas-Greenfield became UN Ambassador. McDonough ran the VA. Mayorkas ran DHS.
Julia Ioffe reported for Puck News on May 7 that the organization has been “funded largely by Alex Soros since its inception.” She called them “the Biden bros.” But Biden contributed five or six actual loyalists to a sixty-person advisory council. The other fifty-four were Obama alumni, maintained between administrations by Soros money. These are the Soros boys. They have been since the beginning.
The Pipeline
For twelve months and eleven days, from January 20, 2021 to January 31, 2022, Cathy Russell oversaw every senior appointment in the federal government. As Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, she oversaw the selection of every cabinet secretary, deputy secretary, assistant secretary, NSC director, and ambassador.
Russell is married to Tom Donilon — the former Obama national security advisor who served on NSA’s advisory council. Between ten and fourteen members of that organization received senior national security appointments requiring her office’s coordination during her tenure. No public record of formal recusal exists.
Donilon simultaneously chaired the BlackRock Investment Institute while sitting on NSA’s advisory council. His brother, Michael Donilon, served as Senior Advisor to President Biden until January 2024. Tom Donilon did not take a formal Biden administration position. His wife ran the office that selected the others.
Caroline Tess ran NSA’s day-to-day operations as Executive Director. She also led the Biden-Harris transition team responsible for confirming national security cabinet secretaries. The person who ran the organization whose members were being placed also ran the process that placed them. She returned to NSA as Interim Executive Director in June 2021.
The Money
The money came through a single chain. George Soros’s personal wealth flows into the Fund for Policy Reform, a 501(c)(4) with approximately $841 million in assets. The Fund sends hundreds of millions annually to the Open Society Policy Center, also called the Open Society Action Fund. Alexander Soros sits on the boards of both entities. The Action Fund distributes to NSA: 3.25 million in 2019, $1.5 million in 2021, $900,000 in 2023, $1.5 million plus an additional $1 million in 2024. Total confirmed from Open Society to NSA: $8.2 million — 67% of all documented grant revenue.
Tom Perriello served simultaneously as Executive Director of the Open Society Policy Center and as a member of NSA’s advisory council, the organization his entity was funding. His tenure ran from November 2018 to July 14, 2023. During that period, the entity he directed issued millions to NSA, $1.4 million to Win Without War, and almost 2 million to Foreign Policy for America.
Ioffe found the same wall of opacity: “Nobody — not even the various comms people working for N.S.A. — would tell me who is on the organization’s board or confirm that the group’s funding comes from Soros.”
What They Did in Office
On August 26, 2021, a suicide bomber killed thirteen American servicemembers and 169 Afghan civilians at Abbey Gate during the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The House Foreign Affairs Committee’s investigation, led by Chairman McCaul, found that Sullivan systematically exercised powers over the withdrawal process, with the NSC serving as “the nerve center for critical decision making” — substituting its judgment for that of the State Department and Defense Department on decisions those agencies were designated to make. Colin Kahl, who served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy during this period, appeared on NSA’s advisory council roster.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched its attack on Israel. The NSA alumni who occupied every senior intelligence and national security position in the United States government that morning included Sullivan as National Security Advisor, Blinken as Secretary of State, Haines as Director of National Intelligence, and Burns as CIA Director.
At the April 2026 meeting at Soros Fund Management, Rhodes confronted Sullivan about the aftermath. Ioffe reported that Rhodes “suggested that Sullivan needed to reckon with the stain of that policy.” A former senior State Department official told Puck: “This is the Jake and Jon Show: Redux, and nobody I know is happy about it. The idea that the same foreign policy leadership that brought us the Afghanistan withdrawal and the cover-up of Biden’s decline should be in charge of staffing the next Democratic administration and determining its foreign policy is tone deaf at best.”
The “Dissolution”
When Biden took office in January 2021, NSA was supposed to dissolve. Its people were in government. The outside organization was no longer needed. The IRS filings show what actually happened.
In 2021, the “dissolution” year, NSA received $1.5 million from the Open Society Action Fund. Tess was listed as “Interim Executive Director” — the first appearance of the “Interim” designation in the filing record. In 2022, revenue dropped to zero, but NSA spent $660,686 burning the 2021 reserve. In 2023, Open Society sent another $900,000. Tess, now permanent Executive Director, was paid $267,000 for a full-time forty-hour work week. NSA spent $1.8 million — nearly double its revenue — with twenty-three information returns filed against only three W-2 employees, suggesting up to twenty contractor engagements.
The 2023 990 XML reveals where the money went. Events spending: $742,244 — double the 2024 events budget of $372,482. The primary activity during “dissolution” was convening. The word NSA insiders use is “hibernation.” Puck confirmed the framing: NSA “largely went into hibernation” after Sullivan and Finer entered government.
Total received by NSA from its primary funder during the “dormant” period of 2021–2023: $2.4 million.
The Reactivation
In June 2023, Alexander Soros formally took over the Open Society Foundations from his father. He told the Wall Street Journal he was “more political” than his father. He sat on the boards of both upstream entities in NSA’s funding chain — the Fund for Policy Reform and the Open Society Policy Center.
On July 14, 2023, Tom Perriello exited the Open Society Policy Center — three weeks after Alex’s takeover.
Between May and November 2023, four NSA-adjacent personnel left the Biden administration. Susan Rice departed the White House in May. Colin Kahl left the Pentagon in July. Wendy Sherman left the State Department in July. Tom Nides left his ambassadorship that summer. All four exits predated October 7.
They left as Biden’s polls were collapsing. In March 2023, Monmouth polling found 44% of Democrats wanted Biden to step aside. By August, an AP-NORC poll found roughly three-quarters of the public — including 69% of Democrats — said Biden was too old to be effective for a second term.
The “relaunch” on February 5, 2024 was a press release for a decision already made. Caroline Tess issued a statement: “Our goal was to put ourselves out of business — and to a great extent we did. Yet today, the dire threat of a second Trump Administration necessitates that we once again mobilize.” But Tess’s full-time $267,000 salary for all of 2023 confirms the operation was running from January at minimum — thirteen months before the public announcement.
The Harris Pivot
In 2020, George Soros poured roughly $50 million into Democratic efforts — a record at the time. For Biden’s reelection, the family’s direct support was conspicuously modest: on June 30, 2023, George and Alex Soros each gave the legal maximum of $6,600 to the campaign, then $250,000 to the Biden Victory Fund. I could not find any other direct checks. The larger machinery — $60 million routed through Democracy PAC in January 2024 — backed the party’s infrastructure, not the president personally.
On July 21, 2024, Biden dropped out. Within hours, Alex Soros posted endorsing Kamala Harris. Democracy PAC sent $10 million to Future Forward, the primary pro-Harris super PAC. The pivot was instant.
Harris had no independent national security bench — no Ben Rhodes, no Jake Sullivan. Of the NSA members who left the Biden administration before its end, seven joined the Harris campaign. Phil Gordon, NSA advisory council member, became Harris’s National Security Advisor — a role he had held since her vice presidency. Colin Kahl participated in debate preparation. Tom Nides advised the campaign.
The Two Security Actions
At 1 Thomas Circle NW, Suite 700, Washington DC — the offices of the Center for International Policy — there existed a 501(c)(4) called “New Security Action,” filing IRS returns under that name since 2009. Its stated mission: “building public support for progressive national security policies.”
In February 2018, Rhodes and Sullivan incorporated “National Security Action.” One word different. Same funder. Same policy space. Same building.
In 2020, the original “New Security Action” formally rebranded. The IRS filing reads: “WIN WITHOUT WAR F/K/A NEW SECURITY ACTION.” Win Without War’s IRS-registered name remains “New Security Action” to this day. A 2023 MoveOn.org grant lists the recipient as “Win Without War dba New Security Action.”
Win Without War was founded in 2002 as a project of the Center for International Policy. Stephen Miles was CIP’s Program Director in 2017–2018, then became Win Without War’s Executive Director and later President — the organizational bridge between the parent and the spinoff.
Open Society funded both organizations. $8+ million to National Security Action. $1.4+ million to Win Without War. Open Society gave Win Without War’s parent, CIP, $3+ million.
In October 2025, Win Without War — the organization still legally named “New Security Action” — launched the “Not What You Signed Up For” billboard campaign at military bases, directing servicemembers to question their orders, in partnership with the National Lawyers Guild’s Military Law Task Force. One month later, on November 18, six Democratic lawmakers released a video telling active-duty troops: “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders.” One of those six lawmakers was Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire. She is married to Jake Sullivan.
The Echo Chamber
In May 2016, the New York Times Magazine published a profile of Ben Rhodes. He admitted creating an “echo chamber” to sell the Iran nuclear deal: “We created an echo chamber. They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
Rhodes now simultaneously holds five positions: Co-Chair of NSA. Contributor to NBC News and MSNBC. Co-Host of Pod Save the World on Crooked Media, founded by Obama White House communications staff. Advisor to Foreign Policy for America. Board member of the Ploughshares Fund, which gave NSA $75,000 in 2020 and received $300,000 from Open Society Action Fund in 2024.
At no point in his cable news appearances is Rhodes routinely identified as “Chair of National Security Action.” He is identified as “former Deputy National Security Advisor” — his government credential, not his current advocacy role.
A search for “National Security Action” across 1,600 transcripts from Brookings, Carnegie, CSIS, the Council on Foreign Relations, Heritage, and dozens of other think tanks returns zero results. Center for American Progress appears twenty-eight times. CNAS appears six times. NSA — the organization that placed forty-six people in the Biden administration — appears zero times. Its co-founders appear in over seventy transcripts combined. The organization does not exist in the public record of Washington’s foreign policy conversation.
Rosa Brooks and the Three-Stage Pipeline
Brooks’s January 2017 article did not exist in isolation. It described a capability she would spend the next three years helping to build.
In late 2017, she joined the advisory council of the organization assembling the personnel — NSA. She simultaneously sat on the board of the entity funding it — OSF US Programs, which sent $4.9 million to NSA. Then in late 2019, she co-founded the Transition Integrity Project with Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute — the operation that war-gamed scenarios in which the military and federal institutions would refuse to recognize election results. TIP ran under the organizational umbrella of Protect Democracy, Ian Bassin’s organization. Its war games ran in the summer of 2020 with approximately 100 participants. Only about ten names are public. The other ninety have never been disclosed.
Three seats. Same years. Same funder behind all of it.
The woman who publicly floated a military coup ten days into the Trump presidency went on to advise the organization assembling the national security state’s next workforce, govern the board of the foundation paying for it, and co-found the project that rehearsed what that workforce would do if it didn’t like an election outcome.
In His Own Words
In May 2025, Rhodes spoke at a McCourtney Institute for Democracy event.
At 14:27: “I don’t think Joe Biden would have won the last election absent a pandemic. Even with that, he like barely eaked out a victory. It wasn’t like a correction.”
At 10:14: “We as the defenders of democracy became defenders of a system that had lost a constituency.”
At 19:33, criticizing the foreign policy approach his organization was built to staff: “Where I’ve been critical of the Democratic party, including the Biden administration, is there was kind of this desire to run it back, you know, like play the old hits, you know, like talk about NATO a lot, you know, um that’s not where anybody is.”
At 10:57, describing a class he taught at USC: “Each week we did a different autocrat. And it was meant to go through how the playbooks are similar but slightly different flavors. And we did Orban, Putin, Trump. We also did Modi and Netanyahu and Erdogan and Bolsonaro… and we did the Chinese. So we did eight autocrats.”
In that entire speech — sixty-two minutes of direct remarks — Rhodes never once mentions National Security Action.
In May 2026, he told Axios: “The two most interesting projects to think about are the pipeline of people who might work on campaigns and populate a Democratic administration, and then the ideas that can form a progressive or Democratic foreign policy going forward.”
That is the product description, from the manufacturer.
2028
Harvard Kennedy School and the Belfer Center now house Sullivan as the inaugural Kissinger Professor, Nicholas Burns as the Goodman Professor, Power, Sherman, Rice, Hicks, Sherwood-Randall, and Ned Price as IOP interim co-director — nine confirmed NSA alumni at one institution. Columbia SIPA has absorbed Wally Adeyemo and Jon Finer. WestExec Advisors — co-founded by NSA members Blinken and Michele Flournoy in 2017 — has taken Adeyemo as a principal and Julie Smith as senior advisor.
In May 2026, NSA announced Maher Bitar as its new Executive Director. Bitar came directly from serving as Chief Counsel and National Security Adviser to Senator Adam Schiff. Before that, he served on the Biden NSC as Senior Director for Intelligence Programs and then Deputy Assistant to the President.
An Associate Director for Polling and Outreach, salary $100,000 to $110,000, is being hired — explicitly tasked with “building relationships with and conducting outreach to candidates and campaigns at congressional, state, and local levels.”
NSA’s website still lists no staff by name, no board members, no advisory council, no annual report, no financial disclosures.
A Hill Democrat told Puck: “They’re all canceled and they don’t realize it.” A second: “Power is never relinquished, it has to be taken — and right now, the legacy folks are holding it.”
Same seventy people. Same funder. Same hedge fund office. A decade and counting.
One of them wrote about a military coup ten days after inauguration. Within a year she was advising the organization that assembled the replacement government. Within three years she was war-gaming how to make the institutions refuse to certify an election. She held a seat on the board writing the checks the entire time.
The woman who oversaw every senior national security appointment in the Biden administration was married to an advisory council member of the organization whose members she was appointing. The man who ran the Soros checkbook sat on the advisory council of the organization his entity was funding. The woman who ran the organization also ran the transition process that placed its members in government. The co-founder who built an echo chamber to sell the Iran Deal chairs the organization, appears on cable news under his government credential, and has never once mentioned it on camera or in sixty-two minutes of public remarks.
The organization that placed forty-plus people in the Biden administration appears in zero of 1,600 think tank transcripts. Its own communications staff refused to confirm its funding source to a reporter. It received $2.4 million from that funder during the years it claimed to be dissolved. It spent $742,000 on events during its “dormant” year — double what it spent on events the year it was publicly operational. And its co-founder, on tape, admits the entire project only succeeded because of a pandemic.
They are meeting at the same hedge fund office. They are funded by the same family. They are already hiring for the next cycle.
Rhodes said it himself: “The next Democratic administration should look quite different from the Biden administration.” But the people planning it are the same people who ran the last one.