How the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) grew from a fringe club into a 100,000-member force. And why its own platform, its foreign ties, and a murder in Washington have made it a target of federal scrutiny
For most of its history, the Democratic Socialists of America was an afterthought—a few thousand aging leftists meeting in church basements. Today it claims roughly 100,000 members, governs America’s largest city through Mayor Zohran Mamdani, counts two members of Congress among its ranks, and is the subject of a congressional hearing into whether it functions as an instrument of hostile foreign governments.
It is also, by the explicit language of its own governing platform, an organization dedicated to dismantling the constitutional structure of the United States. That combination, mass membership, real governing power, and a stated revolutionary aim, is why a growing number of lawmakers, researchers, and former allies now describe DSA not as a quirky pressure group but as a genuine threat to the American system.
What they want
The clearest evidence of DSA’s intentions is the document its delegates adopted at their August 2025 national convention in Chicago. The platform calls for abolishing the United States Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” and replacing the President and the Supreme Court with bodies “subordinate to Congress.” Cliff Connolly, a member of the national leadership, defended the approach in blunt terms: “We’re never going to have democracy or socialism in the United States as long as the president and the Supreme Court exist in their current form.”
The same convention committed DSA to running a socialist candidate for president in 2028 and to “building the party”—converting the organization from an activist network into a governing one. Its program couples the demolition of constitutional checks with open borders, the abolition of police and immigration enforcement, and a militant anti-Zionism that has become the organization’s defining cause.
DSA, for its part, describes itself as committed to “democracy as not simply one of our
political values but our means of restructuring society,” and insists it seeks change through
democratic means.
Who leads them
DSA is governed by a 25-member National Political Committee that functions as its board of directors, with a seven-member steering committee at its core. Power within it runs through organized ideological “caucuses,” and the current leadership reflects a decisive shift toward the revolutionary left.
Its two co-chairs embody the spread. Ashik Siddique, of the comparatively moderate Groundwork caucus, works as a research analyst at the National Priorities Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington think tank. His counterpart, Megan Romer, belongs to Red Star—a caucus that openly identifies as Marxist-Leninist and runs internal study programs on Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara. Romer, based in upstate Moravia, New York, is the publisher of a small press, Arioso Press, and a freelance writer.
The rest of the leadership is a cross-section of professionals who hold day jobs while steering the country’s largest socialist organization:
- Jeremy Cohan, a former NYC-DSA co-chair, is a sociology professor at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
- Sidney Carlson White, an organizer on the Mamdani mayoral campaign, works as a curatorial assistant at the Jackie Robinson Museum in New York.
- Amy Wilhelm, of the orthodox-Marxist Marxist Unity Group, is an enterprise network engineer in Seattle.
- Cliff Connolly, who spearheaded the organization’s new “security commission,” is an emergency medical technician and substitute teacher in Orlando.
- Cerena Ermitanio is a registered nurse and AFSCME union member in Houston.
- Sarah Milner, who co-chairs DSA’s national communications committee, is a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier and union member in Portland, Oregon.
- Eleanor Babaev, a veteran New York electoral canvasser, is an event coordinator at Roosevelt House, Hunter College’s public-policy institute.
- Frances Gill is a psychiatry resident; David Jenkins, of the Libertarian Socialist Caucus, founded a transcription company, Transcribblers; Andrew Thompson, of the Springs of Revolution slate, is a former Colorado state employee and union shop steward in Denver.
Others include Ahmed Husain, an engineer in the Denver and New York chapters; Luisa Martínez, a formerly undocumented immigrant and longtime Portland organizer; Katie Sims, an Ithaca electoral organizer who ran for that city’s mayor in 2022; and Christian Araos, a Long Island member who has written for DSA’s magazine about Cuba and traveled there on an organization delegation.
Who’s already in power
DSA’s reach now extends well beyond its membership rolls and into government itself. The organization claims more than 250 members in elected office nationally, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, and several of Mayor Mamdani’s senior aides come directly from its ranks. Among them Cea Weaver, who heads the Mayor’s Office of Tenant Protection, and Tascha van Auken, who runs the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement.
What unsettles critics most is the mechanism DSA uses to keep its officials in line. Under what the organization calls the “Socialists in Office” program, DSA-elected legislators meet regularly with chapter leadership to “cohere on key votes” which is a “co-governance model,” in the words of a New York co-chair. The nonpartisan outlet City & State reported that, in practice, these officials “share the power they have as legislators with the DSA…despite their own personal beliefs.” In other words, the organization expects the officials voters elect to answer to the caucus.
The money and the federal scrutiny
DSA presents its finances as a virtue: it accepts no corporate PAC money and runs on member dues. The organization itself is a 501(c)(4); its sister “DSA Fund” is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) that has accepted tax-deductible contributions routed through donor-advised funds, including Schwab Charitable and Fidelity Charitable which is the same charitable infrastructure used by the wealthy donors DSA routinely condemns.
In January, the Network Contagion Research Institute released a report urging investigators to examine whether DSA’s foreign engagements—trips to Venezuela, Cuba, and China that included access to senior officials—may violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act. A House committee held a hearing on the findings the following month. The institute stressed that it was not alleging criminal conduct, only that the pattern “warrants further scrutiny.” No charges have been filed.
The organization’s legal footprint has drawn questions of its own. A federal lawsuit in New York over a deceased professor’s retirement funds has challenged whether DSA’s own 1982 founding merger was legally valid, and in Washington State, a DSA chapter admitted to violating campaign-finance law by failing to register and report as a political committee.
The line that alarmed even allies
The episode that crystallized concerns about DSA came in May 2025, after Elias Rodriguez murdered two young Israeli embassy staffers, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, outside a Washington museum. A DSA caucus, the Liberation Caucus, publicly praised the killer and demanded his release. Representative Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat, called the posture “grotesque.”
National DSA condemned the killings: “We condemn the murder of Israeli embassy workers. Any statement otherwise is not the stance of DSA.” But the controversy did not end there. Months later, when DSA’s national board voted on whether to remove a member who had called Rodriguez a “political prisoner” from a newly created security commission, the leadership voted 15 to 10 to keep him on it.
The stakes
DSA’s defenders argue that its platform is aspirational, that “co-governance” is ordinary coalition politics, and that the organization condemned the embassy murders unequivocally. Its critics counter that an organization should be judged by its stated goals, its foreign alignments, and the votes it takes when challenged. And by all three measures, the Democratic Socialists of America have made their intentions clear.
What is no longer in dispute is the organization’s trajectory. A group once confined to the margins now holds City Hall in the nation’s largest city, fields the biggest socialist legislative slate in American history, and sits at the center of a federal inquiry. Whether American institutions treat that as a curiosity or a warning may prove to be one of the more consequential questions of the decade.
Note: employment and biographical details are drawn from the members’ own candidacy disclosures, caucus materials, and public reporting; verify current employers before publication.