Josh Marshall
BREAKING: DOGE Strong-Armed USIP Security Contractors to Switch Sides
Each time we hear more about the unfolding situation with the takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace, the story gets darker and involves greater abuses of power. My colleague Kate Riga is, as I write, covering a hearing about the incident that happened yesterday. When I last wrote about the story yesterday, I focused on the fact that the DC Metropolitan Police Department had sided with DOGE and the purported new directors of the Institute and expelled the incumbent staff. That remains the case. But based on new filings which Kate told me about during the podcast we recorded a short time ago, I learned that there is an entirely new dimension of the story which is at least as important as the MPD issue and likely more so. I’ve now had a chance to do a brief review of the court filings from the USIP. I’m going to give you a very brief overview now and then probably either Kate or I or perhaps both of us will have more information later in the day.
So here’s the gist.
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What Can We Do? 
I got an email from TPM Reader DH this morning asking what people in their everyday lives, people who aren’t close to the levers of political power, can do to, for lack of better words, help to save their country. I took a moment to write down a few thoughts and I decided to share it with you not because there’s any particular wisdom in it or because the prose is very polished but just because I’ve gotten the same question a number of times recently.
Read MoreThat’s a good question. I’m not sure I always have in mind who I’m talking to. But I think it may be more “ordinary” people than you might think. What I learned from the last ten years is that one of the most potent things ordinary people do is become part of fairly normie organizing in their communities. In Trump’s first term Indivisible groups down at the town and county level were a big big deal. Not always visible. Not big performative demonstrations. But ground level organizing focused around electoral politics in people’s communities. I think at moments like this that can feel somehow inadequate to the moment. But it’s not. It’s some of the most important stuff. There’s contributing to political activity, whether or it’s campaigns or groups. There’s showing up at things like townhalls. Again those are big deals. And many things we’ll sort of know when we see them.
Since I published the piece below, I’ve been picking up some of the back and forth on the efforts of the DC Metro police to get its story together in response to questions from various members of the DC city council. They’ve now released their official statement.
It’s actually worse than what I suspected.
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DC Metro Police Roust Staff of Indy Agency At DOGE’s Request
In the background over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to find out about the purported activities of the U.S. Marshals Service working at the behest of DOGE. When DOGE operatives took over the Foundation for African Development a couple of weeks ago, they reportedly made forced entry with the assistance of the U.S. Marshals. That’s not really what the Marshals do. They are housed within the Justice Department. But their job is to protect the federal judiciary and execute its orders. Special statutes exist that also allow them to enforce certain laws. But there was no court order here. So it didn’t really make sense.
When I poked around, it seemed like people just assumed they were Marshals. Or perhaps they identified themselves as such. But the more questions I asked, the less clear it was who they really were, notwithstanding the press reports that simply stated it as a fact. I put in a press request with the Marshals Service press office to confirm that these were in fact U.S. Marshalls. But I never heard back. Then yesterday there was a similar standoff at the U.S. Institute for Peace which ended with the Marshals again helping DOGE make forcible entry into the disputed premises. Or that’s what the initial reports in the Times said.
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The Brave New World of Oligarch Lordships—Apparently They’re AWESOME!
A couple weeks ago, the clarion of digital wrongdoing in the second Trump administration, Wired, published an article entitled ‘Startup Nation’ Groups Say They’re Meeting Trump Officials to Push for Deregulated ‘Freedom Cities’. I wrote about these guys, or one subset of them, in early January. Dryden Brown is chief of a startup called Praxis, which is in the “business” of founding new sovereign “start up societies.” On paper, he claims to have raised half a billion dollars for his company. But, actually, those are commitments contingent on his founding a new sovereign state. So that’s kind of like a lot of richies committing money to your new unicorn farm contingent on your finding two unicorns. In any case, Dryden had been focused on finding a chunk of land to found a new “network state” in the Mediterranean after getting bounced out of Africa. But once Donald Trump started making noises that Greenland might be on the market, he flew to Greenland to meet with officials and see if he could buy it.
In any case, that’s our boy Dryden. This new piece in Wired is about Trey Goff, the “chief of staff” of a thing called “Prospera,” which is a sorta, kinda “network state” recently established in Honduras, which the current government of Honduras is already trying to abolish. Prospera and a few other “network states” in the making are based on laws for “Special Economic Zones” which exist in some countries. The conceptual structure stems from certain duty-free areas that exist in certain countries, free ports of various kinds which have long existed and have often, but not always, been tied up with the history of European colonialism and, of course, the Special Administrative Regions of China, Hong Kong and Macau. U.S. urban policy has a sort of pale version of this in “enterprise zones” where businesses starting up in a certain area get certain tax benefits or expedited regulatory review. If you read about “Prospera,” a decent amount of at least the surface appeal is having these kind of boutique nerdvilles where tech micro-bros can high five each other because, like, if you want to buy a croissant at the coffee shop you have to pay in bitcoin. Stuff like that. The “government,” very much by design, follows the structure of venture investing, with different classes of stock and thus voting power. All that fun stuff.
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Sovereignty Where Ya Can Find It: More Notes on Saving the American Republic
The primary drivers in the creation of the federal Constitution — James Madison and Alexander Hamilton — saw the several states more as problems to be solved or perhaps obstacles to be worked around than critical features of the new American national government they hoped to create. But that’s not how things worked out. The United States does in fact have a federal system, which chief justice of the Supreme Court Salmon P. Chase, just after the Civil War in 1869, described as an “indestructible Union composed of indestructible States.” That is a critical, central fact for anyone thinking about how to defy, delay and undo Donald Trump’s lawless effort to remake the American Republic into an autocracy.
In unitary states, lines of authority go from president or prime minister down to local officials. That’s not true in our federal system. The federal law is superior to state law. But governors don’t work for presidents. Nor do any other officials in state governments, whether they’re governors to state attorneys general or county commissioners or mayors. (The very important exception to this rule are the state National Guards, which in certain circumstances can be federalized and put at the command of the president — a key and potentially ominous detail we’ll return to.) What this means is that there are great stores of legitimate political power and authority in the United States which exist independent of the federal government and the power of the president. Inferior to that power, yes. But independent of it still. And that’s critical.
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Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act: Notes on Preserving the American Republic
A short time ago, former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade posted this passage from a Chronicle of Higher Education interview with Lee Bollinger, First Amendment scholar, former law school dean and former president of the University of Michigan and of Columbia. I note the thumbnail biography because Bollinger, apart from subject qualities, has ascended to the the peaks of two of the foundational nodes of power in American civil society: the legal profession and the university system.
Read MoreI said like a week ago that I’m pretty confident the GOP is going to get wrecked in the 2026 midterms. You have to imagine a lot of very improbable things happening to imagine anything else. I’m hearing from many readers questioning whether Democrats will show up after this performance. I think they will, though I think there’s a good chance a number of senators will draw primary challengers, and it would be a good thing if they lose so long as they’re in solidly blue states. But we greatly overestimate the impact of enthusiasm and disappointment measured in these terms. Midterm backlashes come from responses far more organic in the population at large. And they’re often as much against their own party’s leadership as against the incumbent party. I see this not only as a misfire and failure to at least take a chance on preserving some of the machinery of the embattled republic. It was also a missed political opportunity. And here I mean politics not simply through the prism of the 2026 election.
Read MoreThis speaks for itself. From NBC News …
WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance acknowledged Friday that Elon Musk has made “mistakes” while executing mass firings of federal employees and emphasized that he believes there are “a lot of good people who work in the government.”
“Elon himself has said that sometimes you do something, you make a mistake, and then you undo the mistake. I’m accepting of mistakes,” Vance said in an interview with NBC News.
“I also think you have to quickly correct those mistakes. But I’m also very aware of the fact that there are a lot of good people who work in the government — a lot of people who are doing a very good job. And we want to try to preserve as much of what works in government as possible, while eliminating what doesn’t work.”
Looking Squarely at a Shutdown
It’s hard to write clearly when you’re being flooded with new information. But here goes. I’ve heard people arguing the “‘yes’ on cloture” argument, essentially saying, “don’t assume you can shut DOGE down, undo the damage. It’s not a silver bullet.” I can only speak for myself, but if anyone is thinking, based on the arguments I’ve made, that blocking cloture is a silver bullet and if Democrats just do this we can shut this whole thing down, I haven’t been clear. I will further say that while the things I’ve written over the last week or so make it pretty clear where I stand on this, I have several times had a hard think with myself: are you sure you’re right about this? I’m not sure I’d say this is a close call. But it’s a hard call, for me at least. Both options hold out possibilities of calamity and destruction I’ve never seriously contemplated before. That is simply where we are. I wish we weren’t here. But we are here.
As I’ve written, my ask would be, right out of the gate, “we’ll give you the keys, we’ll give you your bill, if we write down the DOGE plan for each department and agency. And we just do an up or down vote. If you can pass it through Congress, that’s all we ask.” (I’ve explained previously why I think this is a good idea.)
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