Employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency entered the U.S. Institute of Peace despite protests from the nonprofit that it is not part of the executive branch and is instead an independent agency.
The organization’s CEO, George Moose, said, “DOGE has broken into our building.”
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USIP employees called the Metropolitan Police Department and reported it as a break-in. Police cars were outside USIP headquarters in Northwest D.C. Monday evening.
Moose said they have been in talks with D.C. police ever since Trump issued the executive order Feb. 19, stressing the headquarters is a private building with the same rights as any other private building owner.
“The employees of our building are not federal employees, executive branch employees,” Moose said. “They are employees of the institute. We have our own, separate board; we have our own bypass authority to go directly to Congress in order to get our money. Somehow, all of those arguments have not prevailed.”
The DOGE workers gained access to the building after several unsuccessful attempts Monday and after having been turned away on Friday, a senior U.S. Institute of Peace official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
It was not immediately clear what the DOGE staffers were doing or looking for in the nonprofit’s building, which is across the street from the State Department in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood.
While Moose said he believes the entry into headquarters is unlawful and inappropriate, he also feels it was inevitable.
President Donald Trump targeted the organization and a few others in a Feb. 19 executive order that aims to shrink the size of the federal government. The administration has since moved to fire and cancel programs at some of those organizations.
DOGE has expressed interest in the U.S. Institute of Peace for weeks but has been rebuffed by lawyers who argued that the institute’s status protected it from the kind of reorganization that is occurring in other federal agencies.
On Friday, DOGE members arrived with two FBI agents, who left after the institute’s lawyer told them of USIP’s “private and independent status,” the organization said in a statement.
The U.S. Institute of Peace says on its website that it’s a nonpartisan, independent organization “dedicated to protecting U.S. interests by helping to prevent violent conflicts and broker peace deals abroad.”
The nonprofit says it was created by Congress in 1984 as an “independent nonprofit corporation,“ and it does not meet U.S. Code definitions of “government corporation,” “government-controlled corporation” or “independent establishment.”
Also named in Trump’s executive order were the U.S. African Development Foundation, a federal agency that invests in African small businesses; the Inter-American Foundation, a federal agency that invests in Latin America and the Caribbean; and the Presidio Trust, which oversees a national park site next to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
The African Development Foundation, which also unsuccessfully tried to keep DOGE staff from entering its offices in Washington, went to court, but a federal judge ruled last week that removing most grants and most staff would be legal. The president of the Inter-American Foundation sued Monday to block her firing in February by the Trump administration.
