A tiny U.S. agency tasked with defusing violent conflicts abroad found itself on the losing end of a days-long standoff with Elon Musk’s shadowy cost-cutting task force DOGE, with Capitol police kicking its employees out of their headquarters.
Despite reportedly receiving threats from the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office, employees at the U.S. Institute of Peace refused to let Musk’s DOGE goons enter their offices—which aren’t even housed in a federal building, according to the agency’s ousted president—until police escorted them out on Monday, The New York Times reported.
The institute is an independent agency created by Congress in 1984 to broker peace deals in unstable regions, with the goal of keeping the U.S. from being drawn into foreign wars, according to its website.
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On Friday, the White House sent emails to 12 members of the institute’s 15-member board telling them they had been fired based on President Donald Trump’s February executive order instructing a handful of agencies, including the USIP, to reduce their activity and personnel to the “minimum… required by law.”
The remaining three board members—Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and National Defense University President Peter A. Garvin—then voted to replace the institute’s acting president, George Moose, with Kenneth Jackson, a State Department employee who has been helping DOGE dismantle international agencies, the Times reported.
But the United States Institute of Peace Act, which created the agency, explicitly says the board must have 12 other members appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate, and that the board must be bipartisan. Members can only be removed under specific circumstances, including a felony conviction, inability to do the job, or a majority vote from the rest of the board or from five key congressional committees.
As a result, the fired board members refused to recognize the terminations. Musk’s DOGE lackeys showed up on Friday afternoon to begin gutting the agency, but the institute turned them away, according to the Times.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
A few hours later, DOGE returned with a document signed by Rubio, Hegseth, and Garvin saying Moose had been removed. But a lawyer for the institute told them USIP was an independent agency, and the president couldn’t just fire the board members at will, the Times reported.
Over the weekend, the FBI threatened the institute over the lack of access to the building, its lawyers told the paper.
A division chief at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., also called the agency’s lawyers and demanded access to the institute’s “books and records.” When they refused, they were threatened with a criminal investigation.
Things came to a head on Monday afternoon, when the DOGE team returned in a black SUV with government plates and private security guards. As the car circled the building looking for a way in, two lawyers for the institute went to meet them at the curb, according to the Times.
Jackson, who was inside, told them to get in the SUV. They refused.
“I mean, I don’t know where you’re going to take us,” one lawyer said. The other calmly suggested they all “take a walk” instead of sitting in the back of a dark SUV.
But Jackson refused to get out, and everyone kept speaking through the window while traffic piled up behind the SUV. Eventually, they agreed to discuss via video call.
But apparently, DOGE called the police, because members of the FBI and the Metropolitan Police then arrived and escorted the institute employees out of the building.
“Our statute is very clear about the status of this building and this institute,” Moose, the ousted president, told reporters gathered outside. “So, what has happened here today is an illegal takeover by elements of the executive branch of a private nonprofit corporation.”
The institute’s headquarters is not a federal building, he added.
A spokesperson for the White House told the AP that the board members were “lawfully removed” based on the executive order—even though executive orders cannot override or violate acts of Congress, according to the ACLU. The standoff echoed that earlier this month at another tiny federal agency, the U.S. African Development Foundation, where staff also tried to hold off DOGE’s goons.
“Rogue bureaucrats will not be allowed to hold agencies hostage,” Anna Kelly told the AP in a statement. “The Trump administration will enforce the President’s executive authority and ensure his agencies remain accountable to the American people.”
