The Permanent Government: How Soros Money Kept Obama's National Security State Alive Between Administrations

The Permanent Government A Soros-funded organization that nobody has heard of placed nearly half the Biden national security apparatus. It never dissolved. It is hiring now.

Data Republican exposes another mind-blowing story, and this one goes to the heart of how Democratic administrations are actually built.

The researchers have mapped the full architecture of National Security Action, a Soros-funded organization that assembled, maintained, and placed the entire Obama national security bench into the Biden administration. Forty-six people. Every senior post. An $8.2 million funding trail. And a claimed dissolution that the IRS filings expose as fiction. What follows is that story, told in full.

Ten days after Donald Trump was inaugurated for his first term, a former Pentagon official and Open Society Foundations board member named Rosa Brooks published an article in Foreign Policy magazine outlining four methods for removing the new president from office. Impeachment. The 25th Amendment. Cabinet revolt. 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."

She put it in print anyway.

Within the same year, a new organization was quietly incorporated in Washington. National Security Action launched publicly in February 2018 with Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security advisor, and Jake Sullivan, the man who would become Biden's, as co-chairs. Rosa Brooks sat on its advisory council. So did Tony Blinken. Avril Haines. William Burns. Susan Rice. Samantha Power. Alejandro Mayorkas. Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Wendy Sherman. Colin Kahl. Kathleen Hicks.

Forty-six of the seventy people on its roster 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. Mayorkas ran DHS. Thomas-Greenfield became UN Ambassador.

The primary funder was the Open Society Policy Center, a Soros family 501(c)(4). Confirmed grants to National Security Action total $8.2 million, 67 percent of all documented grant revenue the organization has ever received.

National Security Action does not appear once across 1,600 transcripts from Brookings, Carnegie, CSIS, the Council on Foreign Relations, and dozens of other think tanks. Its own communications staff refused to confirm the organization's funding source to a reporter from Puck News. Its website lists no staff by name, no board members, no advisory council, and no financial disclosures.

This is how you build a government that nobody elected and nobody can see.

The Pipeline

The mechanism required three interlocking parts.

The first was personnel. NSA assembled the roster during the Trump years, keeping sixty national security professionals organized, funded, and ready. The advisory council was not an honorary list. It was a staffing database.

The second was placement. From January 20, 2021 to January 31, 2022, every senior federal appointment passed through one office: the White House Presidential Personnel Office, directed by Cathy Russell. Cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries, assistant secretaries, NSC directors, ambassadors. Russell oversaw all of it. Russell is married to Tom Donilon, Obama's former national security advisor, BlackRock Investment Institute chairman, and NSA advisory council member. Between ten and fourteen people on NSA's advisory council received senior national security appointments requiring Russell's office's coordination during her tenure. No public record of formal recusal exists.

The third part was the transition. 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.

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 2023. During that period, the entity he directed sent millions to NSA, $1.4 million to Win Without War, and nearly $2 million to Foreign Policy for America.

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 that placed its members in government. The woman who oversaw every senior national security appointment in the federal government was married to an advisory council member of the organization whose members she was appointing.

None of this appears in the public record of Washington's foreign policy conversation. NSA's co-founders appear in over seventy think tank transcripts combined. The organization does not.

The "Dissolution"

When Biden took office, NSA announced it was dissolving. Its people were in government. The outside structure was no longer needed.

The IRS filings tell a different story.

In 2021, the dissolution year, NSA received $1.5 million from the Open Society Action Fund. In 2022, revenue dropped to zero, but NSA spent $660,686 burning through the reserve. In 2023, Open Society sent another $900,000. Caroline Tess, now listed as permanent Executive Director, was paid $267,000 for a full-time forty-hour workweek. NSA spent $1.8 million that year, nearly double its revenue, with twenty-three information returns filed against only three W-2 employees, suggesting up to twenty contractor engagements. Events spending in 2023 totaled $742,000, double the events budget for 2024, the year NSA was publicly operational again.

The word NSA insiders use is hibernation. Total received from the primary funder during the dormant years of 2021 through 2023: $2.4 million.

The relaunch press release came February 5, 2024. Tess issued a statement: "Our goal was to put ourselves out of business, and to a great extent we did." Her full-time salary for all of 2023 confirms the operation was running from January at minimum, thirteen months before the public announcement.

The Echo Chamber

In May 2016, the New York Times Magazine published a profile of Ben Rhodes. He admitted constructing a media operation 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 chairs National Security Action, contributes to NBC News and MSNBC, co-hosts a podcast on Crooked Media, founded by Obama White House communications staff, and advises Foreign Policy for America. At no point in his cable appearances is he identified as Chair of National Security Action. He is identified as former Deputy National Security Advisor. His government credential. Not his current role.

At a May 2025 public event, Rhodes spent sixty-two minutes discussing foreign policy, Democratic politics, and the lessons of the Biden years. He did not mention National Security Action once. 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.

The Words They Use To Confuse You

A field guide to what they’re actually saying when they’re saying it.

The Unredacted | Truth Without PermissionGene Goodwin

2028

In May 2026, National Security Action 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.

NSA is now hiring an Associate Director for Polling and Outreach at $100,000 to $110,000, explicitly tasked with building relationships with candidates and campaigns at congressional, state, and local levels.

Harvard Kennedy School has absorbed Sullivan, Burns, Power, Sherman, Rice, Hicks, and five other NSA alumni. Columbia SIPA has Adeyemo and Finer. WestExec Advisors, co-founded by NSA members Blinken and Michele Flournoy, has taken additional alumni as principals.

Rhodes said it openly in May 2026: "The next Democratic administration should look quite different from the Biden administration."

The people planning it are the same people who ran the last one. The funder is the same family. The office is the same hedge fund suite.

The woman who wrote about a military coup ten days after inauguration went on to advise the organization assembling the replacement government, govern the board of the foundation paying for it, and co-found the project that war-gamed what to do if institutions refused to certify an election. Three seats. Same years. Same funder behind all of it.

They are meeting. They are funded. They are hiring.

The organization that placed forty-six people in the Biden administration has never once appeared on the record in 1,600 think tank transcripts. Its own staff won't confirm who funds it.

That is not an oversight. That is the design.

Research and documentation by Data Republican.