DOGE toppled US Institute for Peace. Here's why that means war

The unqualified randos staffing Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency notched a victory last week with their takeover of the U.S. Institute for Peace despite a complete lack of authority to do so. Now there’s nothing stopping the administration from turning its sights on other similar organizations. 

After DOGE seized control of the USIP building and Trump removed 11 of USIP’s 15 board members, the White House put out a statement gloating that “rogue bureaucrats will not be allowed to hold agencies hostage. The Trump administration will enforce the President’s executive authority and ensure his agencies remain accountable to the American people.”

A couple small problems here: the USIP employees aren’t “rogue bureaucrats” because they’re not federal employees, and oh, also the part where USIP isn’t an agency. It’s actually a private nonprofit corporation created and funded by Congress.

In a normal presidential administration, you could likely have avoided ever learning about the rules governing USIP’s board or trying to parse the legal status of various government-related corporations. But we live in a fresh new hell where every day we get to try to figure out if the president is indeed allowed to attack whatever it is he’s attacking that day. 

And his successful attack on USIP doesn’t bode well for other private nonprofit corporations that conservatives already hate, like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or the Legal Services Corporation, which funds legal aid. 

Congress creates and directly funds those corporations, similar to USIP. Funding doesn’t go through any larger agency or even any part of the executive branch. The president’s role in all three is limited to appointing board members. In USIP’s case, the president doesn’t even have the right to remove board members unilaterally—a removal for cause still requires the president to consult with the USIP board. 

The problem here is that Trump neither understands nor cares about this distinction. Why would he? He no longer believes that Congress or the courts have any real authority over him, so he’s not afraid of being stopped. He also suffers from an almost catastrophic lack of understanding about the workings of government, so trying to explain that things like USIP are not actually “his agencies”—or even agencies at all—is pointless. 

It doesn’t help matters that despite U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell saying DOGE’s takeover of USIP—complete with armed police support—was “terrorizing” and that she was “offended on behalf of the American citizens,” she still declined to grant the USIP plaintiffs a temporary restraining order. Part of her reasoning was that USIP was a “very complicated entity” with features of both nongovernmental organizations and government agencies and that not all ousted board members had joined the suit. 

Howell isn’t wrong, but her refusal to stop DOGE, even just temporarily, highlights the asymmetric nature of the warfare the administration is waging. This administration has no interest in waiting for a court decision determining what authority, if any, the president has over USIP. 

It won’t exercise restraint and leave USIP alone while a case is pending. It definitely won’t treat any uncertainty about the status of USIP as a reason to wait on dismantling other organizations. While everyone else dithers over the complicated details, Trump and DOGE will just show up and tear things down to the studs. 

The biggest danger is likely to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has been in the crosshairs of the GOP for decades, as they remain utterly convinced that public media like PBS and NPR are hotbeds of lavishly funded Marxist thought. House Republicans have proposed entirely zeroing out CPB’s budget in the past, which is an awful stance. At least that one is supported by law—Congress has the sole authority to set CPB’s funding. 

But you’d never know from the way Heritage Foundation types are crowing about how PBS and NPR face an “impending reckoning” with DOGE. Musk has been “very outspoken” that public broadcasting funding “is a target as he seeks to reduce federal spending.”

Setting aside the absurdity of targeting CPB’s meager $535 million budget—which isn’t even one-third of the $1.8 billion in taxpayer funding showered on Musk’s SpaceX in 2024 alone—the more important point here is that Musk has no power to target that funding. There’s no “reckoning” with DOGE to be had here. 

DOGE has exactly the same amount of power over public broadcasting spending as you do—zero. But what DOGE does have is the power to get the D.C. Metro Police, the FBI, and the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. to help them literally break into buildings whether they have a right to be there or not. 

Trump’s view of presidential power doesn’t stop at the limits of the executive branch. The idea there is government spending that he can’t unilaterally cut is foreign to him. The notion that Congress has the power to create an independent organization over which the president has no control would stymie him intellectually and infuriate him as an impermissible limit on his authority. 

USIP was the first time the administration tried to test that limit, and what they succeeded in learning is that courts won’t act with any urgency because these types of entities are complicated. There’s no reason for the administration to treat that as anything but a green light to swiftly attack more independent corporations, secure in the knowledge that the one thing DOGE is actually good at is destroying things quickly. 

By the time the normal course of litigation catches up with the administration, they’ll have already so effectively dismantled things such that all the court orders in the world won’t put Humpty back together again.