Abolish the Senate. Abolish ICE. Abolish Prisons.
Their Co-Chair Didn’t Deny It — She Said “True.”
This Is DSA’s Official Platform, Not a Gaffe.
On July 26, 2026, Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream put Democratic Socialists of America national co-chair Megan Romer through a rapid-fire true-or-false round. Abolish the Senate? “True.” Replace the presidency and Supreme Court? “Yep.” Abolish ICE? “Absolutely.” Abolish borders and grant amnesty to everyone here illegally? “As a long-term plan, yep.” Romer didn’t hedge, because she didn’t have to — every answer traces to text DSA had already published.
That platform, “Workers Deserve More!,” is not a fringe pamphlet or one member’s opinion. It was drafted by an elected DSA committee, approved by the organization’s National Political Committee under a mandate from the 2025 National Convention, and published at program.dsausa.org — the current, official platform read by more than 120,000 dues-paying members, the largest socialist organization in American history.
This is a document, not a gaffe. So this piece separates, plank by plank, what DSA has actually written down from what its individual members — including its most famous elected one — happen to believe personally.
- “True.” Megan Romer, DSA national co-chair, answering Fox News Sunday's Shannon Bream on whether DSA's platform calls for abolishing the U.S. Senate — Fox News Sunday, July 26, 2026
- 120,000+ DSA's self-reported national membership across roughly 220 chapters as of July 2026 — the largest socialist organization in U.S. history — DSA / Washington Examiner
- 1 sentence the entirety of DSA's national platform's language on AI, framed as a grievance rather than a regulatory proposal — program.dsausa.org
DSA’s national program, “Workers Deserve More!,” isn’t new rhetoric — it’s a document. A committee of elected DSA members drafted it between April and June 2026, operating under a mandate delegates set at the 2025 National Convention in Chicago. The National Political Committee approved the final text, and DSA’s own outlet, Democratic Left, announced it on July 17, 2026. The organization’s official account framed the relaunch directly: “the revamped Workers Deserve More program lays out a vision of a comprehensively democratic society.” The full text lives at program.dsausa.org — DSA’s own site, for an organization that now counts more than 120,000 dues-paying members across roughly 220 chapters, the largest socialist organization in American history.
New in DemLeft: The revamped Workers Deserve More program lays out a vision of a comprehensively democratic society. The Right's response speaks volumes.
Nine days later, that document became national news. On July 26, Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream ran DSA national co-chair Megan Romer through six of the platform’s more sweeping planks in a rapid-fire format. Romer didn’t deflect.
BREAM: Abolish the Senate?
ROMER: True.
BREAM: OK, replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them?
ROMER: Yep.
BREAM: Abolish ICE?
ROMER: Absolutely.
BREAM: Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the US illegally?
ROMER: As a long-term plan, yep.
Every answer traces to text DSA itself had published weeks earlier. Romer wasn’t freelancing or caught off guard on live television — she was reading her own organization’s platform back to a national audience. The clip went viral on X within hours, drawing reactions from across the political spectrum, including from inside the Democratic Party itself (more on that below).
Two of the six planks Romer confirmed aren’t new for 2026 — DSA has held them for years, and “Workers Deserve More!” simply restates them in the current platform. On policing and incarceration, the text commits DSA to “demilitarize police departments, disempower police unions, and redirect funding to public services as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor.” DSA’s national Abolition Working Group states the near-term mechanism plainly: “Defund the police by rejecting any expansion to police budgets or scope of enforcement while cutting budgets annually towards zero.”
On immigration, the platform’s section header reads, simply, “ABOLISH ICE.” The operative text: “Legalize migration, grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, provide a path to citizenship for all permanent residents, and end visa caps and quotas.” DSA maintains a standing national “Abolish ICE Commission” built around exactly this goal — it isn’t a single line in one document, it’s an ongoing institutional priority the organization has organized around for years.
Read back to Romer on Fox, both planks got the same unhedged answer: “Absolutely” to abolishing ICE; on borders and amnesty for everyone currently in the country illegally, “As a long-term plan, yep.” Bream wasn’t putting words in DSA’s mouth. She was reading its own platform back to it.
The plank that made the interview a national story is the one Romer answered first: the Senate itself. DSA’s platform states it flatly — “Abolish the Senate” — alongside a companion line rewriting the other two branches: “Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” The same document calls to “Abolish the Electoral College” and “Expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked choice voting in all elections” — in effect, a single legislative chamber holding the authority all three branches currently share.
Pressed on why, Romer didn’t retreat to abstraction. She compared the chamber to a defunct aristocratic institution:
“The Senate is an anachronistic institution, it comes from the British House of Lords.”
Megan Romer · DSA national co-chair · Fox News Sunday · July 26, 2026
Romer wasn’t describing a personal preference or a floor resolution some caucus lost a vote on. Every line she confirmed on camera is sitting, right now, in the platform DSA’s own National Political Committee approved and published under authority the 2025 Convention delegates granted it. There is no daylight between what she said on live television and what the organization has written down.
The platform’s economic core is public ownership, stated at multiple scales. On energy and transit: “Implement massive investment in sustainable, publicly owned energy and transit infrastructure.” On health care, tied to DSA’s long-running Medicare for All campaign: “Guarantee universal healthcare at no cost to individuals.” On housing: “Build new, publicly-owned social housing, strictly regulate investment properties, establish universal rent control.” And at its broadest: “Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control.” Romer confirmed the same idea to Bream in plainer language, affirming DSA supports “government or public ownership of most large corporations.” Notably absent is any standalone plank nationalizing banks specifically — that language sits inside the broader “largest corporations” line, not as its own separate demand.
What the platform does not contain is any real position on artificial intelligence. Its entire treatment of AI is one sentence, framed as a grievance rather than a regulatory proposal: “We’re promised magical technology with AI, but in reality, the bosses lay us off and track our every move.” That’s the whole plank — no position on AI safety, deployment, labor-displacement remedies, or federal oversight. The 2025 National Convention in Chicago did pass two AI-adjacent floor resolutions, but neither is a societal AI policy: “No AI Images!” bars AI-generated art from DSA’s own internal materials, and “For Political and Technological Independence: A Path to Exit from Capitalist and Democratic Party Tech” is about DSA weaning its own operations off outside tech vendors. On the single technology reshaping the American economy fastest, DSA’s national platform has, in substance, nothing to say.
DSA’s platform is a national document, but its most visible faces are individuals — and conflating the two is where coverage most often goes wrong. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D/DSA-NY) is a confirmed, dues-paying DSA member by his own public statements; his specific record in office is covered separately in our companion piece on the pied-à-terre database and 9/11 petition controversy. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is likewise a confirmed member — DSA states she has belonged since 2018, and she delivered the keynote address at DSA’s 2025 National Convention in Chicago that August.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is the more complicated case, and the complication is instructive. She self-identifies as DSA-affiliated, but DSA’s National Political Committee formally withdrew its national conditional endorsement of her in July 2024, after a dispute over her position on Israel and Gaza. NYC-DSA, the local chapter, kept its own endorsement in place — meaning membership and national endorsement are two different things that have since diverged for the same person.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is the case coverage most often gets wrong. DSA has issued solidarity statements backing Omar — the kind it extends to a range of non-member allies — but no DSA statement identifies her as a member the way the organization repeatedly does with Tlaib. Treating “the Squad” as interchangeably DSA, as much coverage does, doesn’t hold up for Omar specifically, based on the record DSA itself has published.
Beyond Congress, DSA members hold office at multiple levels: Claire Valdez (D-NY), a sitting New York Assembly member, won the June 2026 Democratic primary for NY-7; Jacobin and City & State both describe her as DSA’s first “cadre candidate” for Congress. Janeese Lewis George (D), a DC Council member, is running for DC Mayor as a DSA member. The organization’s national co-chairs, Megan Romer and Ashik Siddique, run the 120,000-member operation day to day; NYC-DSA alone grew from 5,910 members in October 2024, the month Mamdani launched his mayoral campaign, to 13,145 by December 2025, according to City & State New York.
The reaction wasn’t confined to the outlets you’d expect. On CNN, Democratic strategist Sabrina Singh — a former deputy Pentagon press secretary who worked on Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign — watched the Fox clip and didn’t equivocate: “I think that’s a huge problem. I don’t agree with any of those statements. I don’t think a majority of Democrats agree with those statements.” Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) made the same point on X, more bluntly.
This isn't a big tent—it's anarchy. Why can't Dems call out the DSA?
Singh and Fetterman aren’t conservative commentators looking for an opening — they’re a Democratic strategist and a sitting Democratic senator, reacting to their own party’s growing socialist wing reading its own platform out loud on national television. That reaction is itself part of the story: DSA’s platform is official, and the pushback to it isn’t coming from only one side of the aisle.
Police and prison abolition, ICE and border abolition, a Senate reduced to zero, a presidency and Supreme Court made subordinate to Congress, public ownership of the largest corporations — every plank here comes from a written-down, National Political Committee-approved, currently published national platform, not a hot-mic moment or a single member’s aside. What is a single member’s aside is anyone’s personal opinion about it, including a sitting mayor’s — and this piece has tried to keep those two categories apart throughout. On the one governance-reshaping technology asked about least, AI, the platform has one sentence and no policy. On everything else asked of it live on the air, DSA’s own co-chair didn’t dodge.
