The Democratic National Committee put its physical headquarters up for collateral last year in order to obtain a $15 million line of credit to help invest in off-year elections, according to D.C. deed records not previously reported.
The building, located in Southeast Washington and partially owned by the DNC, has been used as collateral in the past, including in other election cycles. That the DNC had to do so again ahead of the 2026 elections to obtain its biggest-ever off-year loan raised concerns among some members that it was further evidence of its intensifying financial strain.
The DNC did not explicitly declare the building as its collateral in its monthly or loan-related filings to the Federal Election Commission.
“Ken gaslighting us about the DNC’s finances and not being transparent about the financial situation makes us doubt if he can oversee the DNC during the most important primary of our lifetime,” said a DNC member, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly.
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The DNC is working toward two main goals: to help the party win back control of Congress in November, as well as gubernatorial and local elections across the country. And it’s also preparing for the 2028 presidential primary, which is expected to be wide open and have no clear front-runner.
Those objectives have been complicated by the DNC’s current lack of money. Federal disclosures from June showed it only had about $16 million in its account and $18 million in debt. That’s a sobering amount of money compared to the Republican National Committee, which declared that it had $128 million in cash with no outstanding debts.
“This is not new,” said a DNC official in a statement about the party using the building as collateral. “The loan documents were publicly released in November, and the DNC’s building was also used as collateral in our prior lines of credit in 2019, 2018, 2014, and many other years.”
Another Democrat close to the DNC said Ken Martin, the beleaguered Democratic Party chair, has struggled to convince donors to maximize their contributions, which has contributed to the small cash-on-hand total.
Martin is under particularly close scrutiny. He was the subject of an internal human resources inquiry after throwing a phone in the direction of a young aide in early July, according to five sources who have direct knowledge of the situation or were briefed on the matter. The New York Times first reported the phone-throwing incident.
It’s the latest internal flare-up for the chair, who is tasked with reversing the party’s fortunes but faces growing skepticism amid paltry fundraising numbers and a botched release of the 2024 election autopsy that almost cost him his position as chair. For some of those sources, the incident with the cellphone reflected a tense mood inside the DNC that has only deepened.
The incident occurred after call time, a block in his schedule where Martin would call political allies or donors. While the details of what set Martin off are unclear, multiple people who were briefed on the matter said he got angry and threw his phone in the direction of his aide, though it did not hit the staffer. The incident left a small group of aides who were present shaken and resulted in a human resources inquiry, two of the five sources said.
It is unclear who placed the HR inquiry.
“It’s just fucking unnacceptable. This is spiraling behavior,” said one DNC source briefed on the incident.
Another source who heard about it said it was “not surprising,” given Martin’s recent demeanor.
Another source who was familiar with the incident said the phone was thrown at the aide’s desk and not at the aide, which they argued made the incident less severe.
All of the sources who spoke to NOTUS requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Martin, who was elected as DNC chair in February of 2025, apologized to the aide the following business day in a meeting with HR, a DNC source said, and the committee has tried to move past this incident. NOTUS is declining to name the aide involved.
The aide did not respond to a request for comment from NOTUS.
Martin in the meantime has been on the defensive about the DNC publicly. Last week, he defended the committee’s current financial status as a new strategy in an op-ed on Substack. Responding to criticism of the party’s low cash-on-hand totals, Martin wrote that the DNC has made the “conscious decision” to invest the cash it raises into “electoral assets: more people, earlier organizing, better technology, and stronger state parties.”
“That answer may be unsatisfying to people who believe the purpose of a political party is to accumulate the largest possible bank balance until the final days before an election,” Martin said. “But a party is not a savings account. Its purpose is to build power.”
Martin also wrote that the DNC has “done exceptionally better with high-net worth donors,” citing an increase of donations from major donors relative to comparable years.
The DNC is also grappling with fallout from the changes it wants to make ahead of 2028. On Friday, its rules committee approved a new 2028 Democratic presidential calendar — but not before serious sparring among states that wanted to be in the early window. The voting schedule, which has South Carolina voting first, followed by Nevada and New Hampshire, still needs to go before the full DNC for a vote in its August meeting, but already at least two states have made their displeasure at the order public.
The pressure of the job, three Democrats close to the DNC told NOTUS, appears to be having an effect on Martin. One of the three sources pointed to the controversy Martin faced over the incomplete 2024 election autopsy in May as the inflection point.
NOTUS reported a brewing crisis over Martin’s leadership after the autopsy. It was released with errors and ultimately failed to reach an explanation for what went wrong. It also failed to include an executive summary, even though one was mentioned in the report. The blowback grew contentious — sources NOTUS spoke to at the time said that Martin refusing to share the larger problem of the autopsy with a broader group of officials at the DNC contributed to the outsized reaction. There was even talk of a no confidence vote, though it never came to pass.
“He’s been super paranoid,” said one of the DNC sources of Martin’s recent behavior. “He’s super embattled.”
That source pointed to the fact that DNC officers were asked to sign nondisclosure agreements in advance of a meeting concerning its financial circumstances as an example. The nondisclosure agreements were first reported by Axios and confirmed by NOTUS.
“He’s not in a great place at all,” said one of the sources close to Martin. “I’m very concerned.”
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