How DOGE Thugs Enlisted the Police to Takeover a Private Building Belonging to an Independent Agency
Musk and his minions are perverting neutral law enforcement whose job is to protect, not violate, the rights and property of organizations
Federally created institutions don’t often get closed down, but it does happen. The Civil Aeronautics Board, which long regulated airline fares, was humanely euthanized in 1985, and the Interstate Commerce Commission received last rites in 1995. There are rational, responsible, and legally airtight ways to go about dismantling a body created by Congress. But instead of availing itself of an old-fashioned but constitutional method, the Trump administration has resorted to a reckless, messy, and thuggish one—and, in the process, perverted the neutrality of law enforcement agents whose job it is to protect not those who control the levers of state power but those whose rights are jeopardized.
DOGE’s War Against the Institute of Peace
This is exactly how the administration has treated the U.S. Institute of Peace, which Trump designated for termination—and which in March was the victim of an abrupt forcible takeover by Elon Musk’s apparatchiks.
The nonprofit think tank, established in 1984 by Congress and President Ronald Reagan, by design occupies a space somewhere between the private and the public spheres. It is formally independent of the federal government and owns its own building, erected with private contributions. Its employees are not part of the federal civil service. But it gets federal funding, by law, to ensure it is not susceptible to outside influence; its governing board includes the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and the president of the National Defense University; and its other members are presidential appointees. Though it’s hardly the equivalent of the Department of Commerce, the Trump White House decided it was an executive agency and thus subject to presidential evisceration.
On March 14, the Trump administration dismissed the 10 voting members of the board of directors and named a new president, Kenneth Jackson—an appointment that USIP officials regarded as an illegal circumvention of rules established by Congress that barred his predecessor from being fired without cause. When DOGE minions showed up to USIP’s offices, a lawyer for USIP informed them that it was not a federal agency and not in a federal building and asked them to produce a court order for their admission. Lacking one, they left.
A few days later, Jackson arrived, and with the help of the institute’s private security officers, employed by a company called Inter-Con, he tried to enter. But USIP officials had revoked their access in anticipation of his attempt. The institute’s head of security, Colin O’Brien, called the Washington Police Department, hoping that the cops would block Musk’s interlopers. When officers arrived, O’Brien opened the door—only to see the cops come in and let Jackson and two of his aides enter. Even more astonishingly, the cops then escorted the USIP staffers out, leaving Musk’s team in control. In their court filing, the institute’s lawyers contended that DOGE’s cadres “plundered the offices in an effort to access and gain control of the Institute’s infrastructure, including sensitive computer systems.” They submitted a photo of a trash can filled with files, some containing the agency’s financial records, labeled “SHRED.” Try to imagine the Reagan administration taking this approach to the Civil Aeronautics Board.
Shortly after, nearly all USIP employees were notified that they were being fired. Two board members replaced Jackson, the temporary president, with Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old tech entrepreneur, according to a court filing. “They ordered him ... to transfer the institute’s property to the General Services Administration, the federal government’s real estate manager, which is terminating hundreds of leases at DOGE’s behest,” reported the AP. Musk then turned around and accused institute staffers on X of deleteing a “terabyte of financial data to cover their crimes, but they don't understand technology, so we recovered it”—a sensational claim that he conspicuously failed to document.
One of the more shameful features of the episode is the involvement of Ed Martin, the right-wing activist and election denier Trump chose as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. After DOGE was first turned away, O’Brien got a call from the head of the U.S. attorney’s criminal division, who threatened him and other staff with criminal investigation if they didn’t surrender. The police who arrived to facilitate Jackson’s entry, it turned out, were responding to a call from Martin “regarding an ongoing incident at the United States Institute of Peace” and were told that there was “at least one person who was refusing to leave the property at the direction of the acting USIP president, who was lawfully in charge of the facility.” It also turned out that Inter-Con, the aforementioned private firm that was contracted to provide security for the institute, had been told that if it declined to go along with the takeover, “DOGE threatened to cancel every federal contract Inter-Con held.”
Martin represents the worst of MAGA world’s impulses—armed with the fearsome power of a federal prosecutor. In February, after Trump banished the AP from the Oval Office for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by its longstanding name, the account on X for the Martin-led U.S. attorney’s office for D.C. posted: “As President Trumps’ lawyers, we are proud to fight to protect his leadership as our President and we are vigilant in standing against entities like the AP that refuse to put America first.” Martin has also pledged fealty to Musk, vowing to “pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work.” He kept that promise when DOGE invaded USIP’s headquarters.
Martin’s conduct has been so egregious that it drew a withering rebuke from 95 former U.S. attorneys for D.C. Their letter said Martin “has butchered the position, effectively destroying it as a vehicle by which to pursue justice and turning it into a political arm of the current administration. He has done these things in ways that typify authoritarian and indeed totalitarian regimes of the most notorious sort.” On April 14, a group of lawyers that include five former Jan. 6 prosecutors sent the D.C. Court of Appeals a letter requesting an investigation of Martin, saying, “In word and in deed he has portrayed himself as an advocate for private and political interests of others, in violation of his oath of office and the Rules of Professional Conduct.” Former Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig, one of the signers, says that during Martin’s time as interim U.S. attorney, he “has proven himself to be the single most corrupt nominee for high public office, to my knowledge, in my lifetime.”
MAGA’s Governing Strategy: Traumatize the Federal Workforce
None of what occurred in the USIP travesty would have been considered legitimate under previous standards of conduct for federal officials. It was an extraordinary intervention by a Justice Department official, a transparent exercise in extortion by DOGE, and a gratuitous abuse of power by the president. But it’s perfectly in keeping with the governing posture of Trump and Musk, who are intent on wreaking so much destruction that it can never be undone.
And it epitomizes the malevolent sentiments of Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, who said in October, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” Clearly, the administration intends to visit hell not only on federal employees but anyone whose institutions get federal funding and somehow displease Trump and Co.—whether it’s National Public Radio, Columbia University, or the U.S. Institute for Peace. Brutal methods, which seem to gratify the baser instincts of the MAGA crowd, are also meant to intimidate anyone tempted to cross those in power.
The crudeness and gravity of the administration’s assault on USIP were not lost on U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who was asked to issue a temporary restraining order to evict DOGE and put the fired officers back in charge. She declined, for the time being, citing uncertainty about the legal status of the institute. But she expressed shock at the administration’s tactics. “I’m offended on behalf of the Americans that did so much service for the country to be treated so abominably,” she told DOJ lawyer Brian Hudak. “All that targeting, probably terrorizing of employees and staff at the institute when there are so many other lawful ways to accomplish the goals. Why? Just because DOGE was in a rush?”
It’s also worth asking if this was a proper use of armed law enforcement agents. “For the first time in a very, very long time, street level police officers have to ask themselves whether they’re being told to do something that is itself lawful,” Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor and a former MPD reserve officer, told NPR. “I don’t think they can fully trust the politically appointed people who are giving them direction, which places them in a really impossible position.” The politically appointed people can’t be trusted because they are clearly bent on using any means available, legal or not, to advance the goals of an administration that has no qualms about the indiscriminate destruction of federal agencies and other Washington institutions.
Reasonable people can differ on whether the institute does meritorious work or deserves the $54 million a year it gets in federal funding. Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Command, wrote in 2011:
You will find the institute’s competent work behind practically every American success in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has undertaken missions from the Balkans and Sudan to the Philippines and Somalia, where I supported the institute’s efforts to mediate conflicts, promote the rule of law, and encourage democracy.
(That was in the days when American presidents favored democracy and the rule of law.) Critics, notably the Heritage Foundation, portray it as a left-leaning bastion that has greatly outgrown its original mission and evades accountability for its spending.
The DOGE approach, here and elsewhere, resembles a bull raging through a china shop. It has announced plans to cut the Social Security Administration workforce by 12% and close or downsize dozens of offices across the country—even as the retirement of baby boomers has ballooned Social Security outlays. It has reduced staff at national parks that were already overstretched by the pandemic-led surge in visits. It has done likewise at National Weather Service field offices that gather information crucial in foreseeing natural disasters. The policy across the board appears to be: cut first, and figure out the consequences later.
Whatever one thinks of the institute’s work, it could be curtailed or cashiered without the need to sic the cops on innocent souls who were doing a job sanctioned by law. Congress, currently under Republican control, is free to zero out the institute’s funding and sever its ties to the federal government. Even the Heritage Foundation’s scathing 2024 report on USIP concluded with temperate recommendations for Congress, such as “clarify the USIP’s mandate to eliminate duplication of effort with other federal agencies” and “reimpose reporting requirements on the USIP”—not sack the place.
It’s possible to make a case that the U.S. Institute of Peace has failed to justify its budget, or veered off into the wrong territory, and then press Congress to take corrective action. That policy could be justified as a sensible pursuit of fiscal economy and limited government. But the DOGE takeover has little to do with budgetary discipline or constitutional constraints. It showcases the administration’s contempt for the idea that anything should limit its power in any way.
It exemplifies a new approach to governing: coercive vandalism.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Steve, please stay on the case, keeping the public informed about Trump's excesses and blatant overstepping. He is a menace to democracy and our unique society which, traditionally, has been the guardian of liberty and democracy. Under Trumpian oversight, it would become deformed and unrecognizable to our Founding Fathers, and no longer what it was established to be.
The past three months have been a horror show, and this show of force by an unofficial-official group officially *not* (depending on the day) headed by unelected Musk that's suddenly in charge is abysmal. I'm starting to wonder if a GoFundMe to send copies of "Ordinary Men" to police departments would be a good idea. And a stack of them to the DC department that had to respond to these calls.