DOGE took over U.S. Institute of Peace after three-day standoff

Federal judge ordered building returned before appeals court stayed ruling

Colin O’Brien, the chief security officer of the U.S. Institute of Peace, had spent years keeping the institute’s 400 employees safe across 28 countries — tamping down tribal warfare in southern Iraq, surviving close calls in Haiti and rocket fire in Kyiv, without losing a life. On the late afternoon of March 14, 2025, the threat was not in any of those places. Three young men from the Department of Government Efficiency were on the sidewalk outside the institute’s building in Washington, D.C., trying to argue their way in. O’Brien had left work early to help his daughter with math homework. When a colleague called to say the DOGE representatives were asking to be let in, he texted his IT staff: “Shut it down.” The building’s magnetic locks snapped shut — no one inside could get out, no one outside could get in. By the time O’Brien arrived, the three had given up and left.

Two hours later they returned with reinforcements: a female DOGE staffer and two FBI agents. One of the FBI agents told O’Brien he was hoping “to facilitate a cordial conversation.” The lead DOGE representative, Nate Cavanaugh, was not cordial. “He was expecting me to jump to,” O’Brien said. O’Brien, big and broad with an army haircut and a polite attentiveness, knew what was public about Cavanaugh: that he had dropped out of Indiana University to start a tech company in Los Angeles, and that his authority came entirely from his personal association with Elon Musk, whose own came from his personal association with President Donald Trump. By night, the account says, Cavanaugh and other 20-something DOGE colleagues were bunking with Musk on the sixth floor of the General Services Administration, like another tech startup; by day Cavanaugh was marching into executive office buildings and telling everyone he was now in charge and they were fired. The DOGE team eventually gave up and left, and O’Brien unlocked the building and let out the few employees who remained inside. By the time he ushered Cavanaugh back into his big black car, O’Brien had a fully formed opinion of him: “Had this air of superiority. You could feel him looking down on you.” Cavanaugh declined to be interviewed for the account.

Asked what made a good security officer, O’Brien would start with what didn’t. “The problem in the security field is that there are so many asshats in it,” he’d say. “Either they’re Paul Blart the Mall Cop and just mailing it in. Or they’re the Navy SEAL who wants to tell you what a badass Navy SEAL they were.” The quality he looked for was an ability to improvise: “You can’t wargame out whatever s—is going to happen. There’s no checklist. When s—happens, nothing you think you know is going to work in the moment.”

During the presidential campaign, O’Brien had not taken DOGE seriously. Trump’s promise to create a Department of Government Efficiency run by Musk felt, to him, like the promise to make Mexico pay for the wall, or to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. “It was not something that would ever survive contact with reality,” he said. His views changed after DOGE entered federal agencies to shut them down and Congress failed to respond. “If that could happen in broad daylight with no response, then no organization was safe,” he said.

The 1984 law signed by President Ronald Reagan establishing the U.S. Institute of Peace stipulated that it would be run by a board of 15 people, only eight of whom could belong to a single political party. Congress provided $100 million for the building; private donors added $70 million. The land was leased to the institute for free, in perpetuity, and the building was wholly owned by the private corporation. The White House had no control over its spending. The account describes “a long history of congressionally bred mongrels — institutions that both received help from and gave help to the federal government while remaining privately controlled,” the first of which had been the Red Cross, in 1900. Of all the mongrel institutions created by Congress — the Federal Trade Commission, the Inter-American Foundation, the Legal Services Corporation, and others — the U.S. Institute of Peace was legally the most removed from presidential control. If Musk, acting on behalf of Trump, could send Cavanaugh in to take the building away and fire everyone inside, the account argues, he could take anything and fire anyone: the Federal Reserve, the Kennedy Center, the entire two-million-person civil service.

The account compares the two Trump transitions. In 2016, Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and close Trump ally, assembled a transition team of 500 or so people, many with government experience; right after the election, Trump fired the entire team. The federal government, the account says, was “arguably the most complex and powerful machine ever designed by man,” and Trump had no personal experience inside it — in many agencies no one from the new administration showed up, or they arrived months late. This time, instead of firing his transition team, Trump created what the account calls the most energetic and empowered transition team in history and put Musk in charge of it. From annual federal spending just shy of $7 trillion, Musk claimed he could cut $2 trillion. In the first couple of months, the team closed or shrunk beyond recognition the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Education Department, USAID, the African Development Foundation, and a series of other agencies. Then, in mid-March, the account says, they entered the U.S. Institute of Peace.

O’Brien’s first encounter with DOGE had felt mostly like luck. They had shown up with a dubious-looking document announcing that they were firing the institute’s acting president and replacing him with a DOGE pick, without the legal authority to do it. The attempt to strip a building from its rightful owner was, in his view, a pure assertion of power. “I knew what I was fighting for,” he said. “I knew what I was trying to protect.” Whatever Cavanaugh was up to, O’Brien concluded, it was not deficit reduction: more than 80% of federal spending went to national defense, entitlement programs, and interest payments on the federal debt, and DOGE was not even pretending to touch any of that. Congress controlled federal spending, and DOGE was making no effort to engage Congress. His bosses believed the institute could survive — “They thought they could hide in the tall grass,” O’Brien said — but he was almost sure it was doomed. “These people I work for are eternal optimists, and they believe in the rule of law,” he said. “I’m thinking: You can’t fight an army with a piece of paper.” His goal became simple: “to keep possession of the building until we can get in front of a judge.”

The next day, Saturday, March 15, a retired former employee of Inter-Con — the private company the institute had hired to guard the building — called O’Brien. The man said he had just received a strange call from the FBI asking whether he was still in charge of the institute’s security guards. “These f—ing kids just ran it through Grok,” O’Brien said, concluding that the DOGE team believed the contractor could get them into the building. Inter-Con was paid $460 million a year by the State Department to guard its properties, against $2.7 million from the Institute of Peace; O’Brien reasoned the firm would not hesitate to choose the larger contract. “I realize that we need to get rid of the guards,” he said — the way to make the building safer was to remove the people protecting it. When he was done, only one key to the building’s single mechanical lock remained outstanding, held by Kevin Simpson, who oversaw Inter-Con’s security guards. O’Brien could not find him, and Simpson was an old and trusted friend of several people who worked for the institute.

On Sunday, a senior FBI agent called O’Brien to say he was “under investigation by the Department of Justice for the events of March 14th” and asked him to come in that day for questioning. “I said, Yeah, that’s not going to happen.” Because he was not home when the call came, O’Brien called his wife and told her to lock the doors to their house and not let anyone in, no matter who they said they were.

He got to work at 5 the next morning, St. Patrick’s Day. The staff had been told to stay home; it was just him and his boss and their lawyers. “I know their objective was going to be to destroy us,” he said. “And I know I was being asked to be the D.C. version of Davy Crockett. And I know that the analogy is not exact.” From an upper-story window he watched three vehicles approach: “It’s three vehicles. A DOGE-mobile — a tinted-out black Tahoe or Escalade. Followed by a Tesla and a Jeep.” His hope that the DOGE people would never find Kevin Simpson, or his key, faded 15 minutes after the vehicles pulled up, when Simpson himself appeared inside the building.

D.C. law barred the security officers who protected the courthouses, agencies, and embassies from carrying their weapons home from work, so the guns had to be stored somewhere. The 34 9mm Glocks in the institute’s basement gun room were owned and controlled by Inter-Con, and neither O’Brien nor anyone else who worked for the institute knew the code to open the safe. The Inter-Con officers headed straight to the basement. O’Brien had someone call the D.C. police to report trespassers; the police did not show. After securing their guns, the Inter-Con officers toured the building like they owned it, refusing to answer questions or surrender Simpson’s key. When they gathered together in the portico, O’Brien seized the moment and threw the portico into lockdown, turning the self-contained space into a prison cell. He could not forcibly eject a battalion of armed private security officers by himself, but he could stop them from leaving and others from entering. For the next two hours he watched them on the security camera pushing on doors that would not yield. “They were pissed,” he said.

The standoff triggered irate phone calls to the institute’s outside general counsel, George Foote. O’Brien had stashed the institute’s acting president, George Moose, behind roughly ten locked doors on the fifth floor. The first call was Inter-Con’s chief executive, angrily but more or less politely asking Foote to tell Moose to tell O’Brien to release the guards. The final, less polite call came from the office of Ed Martin, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. At length, O’Brien unlocked the outside door to the portico and the security guards exited the building.

An hour later there came a knock on another door: the D.C. police, in force, followed by Inter-Con officers and, trotting after them, Cavanaugh and more DOGE people. “They are ordering the D.C. cops around like their own private army,” O’Brien said. “I didn’t see that coming. I didn’t see the police taking sides.” As the police escorted O’Brien from the building, the senior Inter-Con officer told him he was sorry it had gone down this way but that DOGE had given him no choice — the firm had been threatened with the loss of its $460 million State Department contract. DOGE soon selected Cavanaugh as the new president of the U.S. Institute of Peace. He moved the title of the building into the General Services Administration, swept its money into government accounts, and fired nearly its entire staff — a mere two days, O’Brien noted, before their health insurance was set to renew.

Once they had control of the building, the DOGE team went through the institute’s computers, and the DOGE account on X posted a list of their findings. The law that created the institute required it to move any unused funds into its endowment and to hire an accountant to audit its books every year; for those services it paid roughly $380,000 a year. The amount that DOGE accused the institute of spending on its accountants corresponded not to the accountants’ bill but to a six-year contract for legal services. The list said the institute had paid more than a million dollars to the Al-Tadhamun Iraqi League for Youth; the actual sum was less than half that.

The money had funded a single project that, because of its value under criteria set by Marco Rubio, had been explicitly approved by the State Department. The project aimed to reduce extremism and anti-American terrorism. After the collapse of the Bashar al-Assad government in December 2024, thousands of Iraqis, mostly women and children, had been stranded in a camp in Syria’s northeast — a camp that in 2019 had held 30,000 Iraqi refugees and where the Islamic State had gained traction. The institute’s local Iraqi staff, members of the League for Youth, had been working with the State Department to persuade village elders in Iraq to accept the refugees and provide them a path to a peaceful life. Before they accepted anyone, the elders demanded evidence that the refugees had no connection to ISIS or any other terrorist group; the institute’s staff arranged small conferences to walk the elders through the refugees’ personal histories, footing the bill for the venues, the tea and coffee, and occasionally lunch.

The final item on the list was $675,000 for private aviation services. When the U.S. finished pulling out of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, it imperiled the lives of every Afghan who had helped the institute, including its local staff and their families. It fell to USIP’s security chief to extract what in the end amounted to 256 people. “It was one f—ing flight,” O’Brien said. “A 737 from Kabul to Qatar. To get them out before they were taken by the Taliban. You said we had private jets. F—you. We had a charter plane to rescue our people from a war zone.”

The account also describes the institute’s 2007 work in Iraq, in an area south of Baghdad that had become known as the Triangle of Death. A region of a million people was riven by tribal warfare and laced with insurgents who had killed 54 members of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division and wounded hundreds more. At the army’s behest, the institute brought together 30 elders of warring tribes. The staff handed out questionnaires to fill out anonymously; each man made his list of grievances, and the lists were passed around for everyone to read. The collective realization of how they had all endured the same terrible losses took enough steam out of the room that they began to talk. The talks led to a peace that has lasted to this day. In the Pentagon’s view, according to a letter of thanks from General David Petraeus, the initiative had saved American lives. Before the institute became involved, the U.S. Army had been spending $150 million a month to pacify the Triangle of Death; the peace talks cost a million dollars. The savings, the account notes, were likely greater than the entire cost up to that point of the Institute of Peace.

O’Brien had lost the first round over the physical building, but legally the battle was not over. In mid-May, U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell of Washington issued what the account describes as a scathing ruling requiring the Trump administration to vacate the building. O’Brien had the brief pleasure of returning with an army of off-duty Baltimore police officers, old friends of his, and taking it back. Inside, he found that the institute’s flags had been stolen, its logo ripped from the wall, and that the DOGE team had left behind a pile of beer bottles and cheap weed. But a month later, a panel of Trump-appointed judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a stay, and the building was returned to the Trump administration. In December 2025, it was renamed the Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace.

The account is adapted from “Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State” by Michael Lewis, to be published October 6, 2026, by W.W. Norton & Company.