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If you’ll remember, back in March we ran a number of stories on the DOGE takeover of the U.S. Institute for Peace. The USIP is a unique entity, publicly funded but not part of the government. Certainly not part of the executive branch. That contention was the centerpiece of the legal case that unfolded. DOGE tried to take it over on orders of the President. It was rebuffed. It eventually threatened the Institute’s private security contractor into switching sides, threatened criminal investigations out of Ed Martin’s corrupt rule of the DC U.S. Attorney’s office, and, on March 17th, succeeded in taking control of the Institute by force. This involved the still-not-fully-explained involvement of the DC police force, the MPD. So DOGE won.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Eventually, the expelled leadership of the USIP won in court. And it wasn’t one of these small-bore incremental wins we’ve seen so many of over the course of the Spring. They completely won — though their victory is still on appeal. But they fully won in the sense that a judge ruled the entire takeover was unlawful and undid all of it. They retook control of the Institute and the building it owns and what’s left of its budget. And they’re now in the process of trying, at various levels, to clean up the mess DOGE created, literal and figurative, and get the Institute back on its feet.
Yesterday, I talked to George Foote, longtime lawyer for the Institute and, as luck would have it, a longtime TPM Reader as well. He walked me through some of what has happened since all the fireworks earlier this spring.
One thing you may have heard on social media yesterday is that DOGE kind of trashed the place. Colin O’Brien, the Institute’s head of security, was out on the outdoor terrace trying to clean up when he thought he’d check in the trash can. (The terrace is apparently a pretty sweet place to have lunch and has an amazing view.) There he found a bunch of beer bottles and a prodigious amount of pot. So surprise, surprise: the DOGE boys know how to party. (That got reported in a few places.) Besides that, DOGE took over, had a big celebration on the night of the forced takeover. But after getting access to the computers and canceling all the contracts, they kind of lost interest and got bored with having to run the USIP building. So they turned the place over to the General Services Administration. And the building was basically abandoned and under the nominal control of the GSA until it was reclaimed by Institute staff.
Ken Jackson was the State Department official Trump purportedly appointed as the new president of the Institute and the guy who helped manage the forced takeover. But once they got possession of the building and after he got installed in the Institute president’s office, Jackson apparently had a partial change of heart, deciding that actually running the U.S. Institute of Peace as opposed to shutting it down might be a better idea. And that was the end of Jackson being president of the USIP. He was replaced by Nate Kavanaugh, one of the most notorious DOGE boys, who played a role in shutting numerous other government agencies. Kavanaugh took the roughly $13 million the USIP had in the bank and returned it to the Treasury Department. The Institute is now in the process of trying to get that money back and they think they will be able to do so.
The success of the USIP at actually winning in court, having the whole takeover be declared unlawful and retaking possession of their former premises, is something of an outlier in the shameful story of DOGE. But it’s also an illustration of the facts on the ground DOGE created in its wake. During their brief period actually running the Institute, DOGE’s main work was shutting down the peace promotion contracts the Institute had in countries around the world. When those contracts were canceled, those projects just disappeared. They collapsed. People move on to other things. There’s no money. Many of the Institute’s DC staff have also had to take other jobs. Foote told me that there are some stringers in some of these countries who can be involved at some level in trying to reconstitute some of the efforts. But my impression was that in most cases it’s close to starting from scratch.
The Institute also faces the administration’s ongoing effort to shut it down in ways that are theoretically more legal, mainly by zeroing out its funding or leaving some residual “shutting things down” funding in the 2026 budget. At present, Foote and his colleagues are trying to retake possession of the aforementioned $13 million dollars, to access what additional moneys remain from the 2025 appropriation and to survive as an organization while trying build support on Capitol Hill to continue funding the Institute in 2026 and going forward. As Foote explained to me, while it’s the first time a President tried sending a firing squad to take over the Institute by force, it’s not the first time people have tried to zero out its budget.
The details of this part of the story are quite complicated. The gist is that they are operating in the midst of 1) OMB’s ongoing efforts to get Congress to okay a “rescission” package, the one way to make the shutdown of lawful appropriations legitimate or quasi-legitimate after the fact, or 2) simply impound the money (arguing the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional) and 3) the ongoing effort to pass the President’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.” The USIP is a mid-sized cod swimming through that vast ocean and hoping for the best. They’re hoping that the USIP is both important enough (especially given the shattered state of U.S. foreign aid generally) and inexpensive enough that it can secure some reprieve (probably in the Senate) and carry on its work.
One final note. The original reports I’d heard yesterday suggested that the building might have been kind of trashed by DOGE. That doesn’t seem to have been the case. To the extent there was damage, it seemed mostly to have been because of lack of maintenance after DOGE got bored and left — leaks, rodents and vermin getting into places they shouldn’t and so on. But there was one specific and highly symbolic act of vandalism.
You’ll remember that back when Elon Musk was shutting down USAID, they called some camera crews over to film a crew literally prying the metal letters which spelled “U.S. Agency for International Development” off the agency’s building, a kind of government version of seeding the ruins of Carthage with salt so it would never rise again. The DOGE boys did something similar at USIP, prying the metal letters which spelled “United States Institute of Peace” off the wall in the foyer of the building and throwing them away. Foote told me that the returning staff were able to find the letters in the building somewhere and they’ve now been reinstalled. But not every letter. The capital letters U, S, I and P were gone, as was the eye of the peace dove which was part of the USIP name installation.
So presumably those four letters and the eye were a trophy for one of the DOGE boys and probably sitting on his mantlepiece maybe somewhere in the Northern Virginia suburbs or back in Palo Alto. Who knows? They may soon show up on eBay.