The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on Monday, May 19 that the actions undertaken by President Donald Trump’s administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in unilaterally closing down the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) were illegal, unconstitutional and beyond the statutory limits of federal executive power. In the ruling, Judge Beryl A. Howell declared all the administration’s efforts to dismantle USIP without Congressional approval or consultation to be “null and void.”
USIP filed the lawsuit after March 17, when representatives of DOGE, accompanied by agents from the FBI and D.C. Metropolitan Police officers, illegally gained entry into USIP offices through “brute force” with the help of former USIP security personnel. Once inside, USIP staff were escorted out of the building, and DOGE was given full access to the organization’s records. Both private and public assets associated with the institution were seized.
Analysts say the May 19 ruling is an important win for the legal rights of independent organizations in the U.S. and for international peace efforts around the globe, but that they expect the Trump administration to appeal the ruling.
USIP: A nonprofit think tank trying to build peace
“This is a story of intimidation, of lying, deception, extortion and bribery,” George Foote said about the administration’s attempt to shutter USIP.
Foote was the outside general counsel for USIP for almost 40 years. He said in that time, he’s seen Congress debate the merits of USIP before, but ultimately there was always bipartisan support for the organization’s core function of promoting peace around the world through soft power, diplomacy and negotiations, avoiding armed conflict wherever possible.
Stopping wars before they start
The underlying premise of the institute is that it’s more cost-efficient to prevent conflict proactively rather than respond to a conflict once it’s already begun to spiral out of control. USIP’s work includes both conflict resolution and conflict prevention.
Congress allocates just $55 million annually to USIP, with individual donations and grants helping to make up the rest of its funding.
The independent nonprofit is less well-known than major federal agencies like USAID. That’s partially because when USIP succeeds in its work, nothing big happens. Catastrophes are averted. Wars don’t start, people don’t die and there are no headlines.
Now, the agency suddenly finds itself under a national spotlight, fighting for its right to exist.
What happened to USIP after Trump took office?
“In February, the president issued an executive order that declared USIP to be unnecessary, and that it should close down to its statutory minimum operations,” Foote explained during a virtual interview with Straight Arrow News. “We responded immediately to let the White House know that we were not covered by that order, that the president did not have the authority to say what he said.”
Foote explained that because Congress established USIP as an independent entity, and since leadership of entities like USIP are protected from political firings, every action taken by DOGE and the White House to shut down the agency was outside the scope of what the law allows, or “ultra vires,” to use the legal jargon.
Foote said that he tried to explain all of this to the DOGE reps and FBI agents in March at USIP headquarters.
“At which point I was surrounded by policemen, along with my colleague Sophia and with Colin O’Brien, our security man, and we were escorted out of the building. If I had taken one more step, I would have been physically restrained by the police. And so, out we went into the cold.”
Foote said DOGE didn’t stop at just firing all of USIP’s 300 staff members and 100 contractors around the world. In addition to seizing the building, DOGE also seized USIP bank accounts.
“There was about $28 million in the bank accounts of USIP,” Foote told Straight Arrow News. “Appropriated money and donor money, private donor money. They’ve seized all that. We don’t know what’s happened to it, but we think some of it’s been sent back to the Treasury [Department]. It’s been very difficult to know what’s going on in the building because the DOGE approach is to move fast and break things. They moved in, they seized the building, they closed it down, they took the money, they fired the employees. They have moved on to other places now, and it’s pretty much a dark building.”
Straight Arrow News reached out DOGE for comment on this story. As of publication, the group has not replied.
Global impact
Supporters of the organization argue that closing down USIP makes the world less safe and more vulnerable to armed conflicts.
Brian Harding is a former Southeast Asia/Western Pacific expert for USIP
“The Presidential Palace in Manila considers it a national security problem that the U.S. Institute of Peace is trying to be dismantled here in Washington by DOGE. Simple as that,” Harding told Straight Arrow News in an interview.
Harding was one of the USIP employees fired in March. He said he was brought on to help build a new Southeast Asia and Pacific Islands program. Over the last few years, he worked on establishing new offices in the Philippines, Vietnam and Papua New Guinea as part of a broader push to be more focused on the region. Harding said the work was “what Congress wanted us to do.”
“If you go visit this new Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, which is really the greatest hope for a sustainable peace in Mindanao in a generation,” Harding explained, “they’ll say they’ve been fighting Manila, whoever’s been ruling the country, whether it was the Spanish, the Americans, or the current Catholics, for as long as 400 years.
“But this was a conflict that took about 100,000 lives, displaced millions over the course of the last 50 years. And in a really incredible landmark agreement in 2014, the national government and the former combatants, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, made a peace deal, and now there’s this new autonomous region. They’re going to have their first parliamentary elections in this autonomous region later this year. Our work at USIP was to plug holes in ceasefire arrangements that were really threatening to fall apart.”
Now that Harding and his team aren’t on the ground, he worries those fragile ceasefires he helped secure are much closer to falling apart. If they do, Manila will need to dedicate more military resources to the conflict, which pulls attention away from other regional threats like China.
Legal implications
According to Foote, the U.S. government’s actions in shuttering USIP will also have legal repercussions closer to home.
“Because the government did stand up in court and say that if you get appropriations and you make grants, you’re performing executive functions, therefore you’re in the executive branch and sent to presidential control,” Foote explained. “Which is a threat to the 400,000 nonprofits in this country that get those. More importantly, it’s also a threat to the Federal Reserve. And we’ve mentioned in our papers that we filed that the Federal Reserve was created by Congress to be independent and outside of political control because monetary and jobs policy in the country are pretty important and shouldn’t be subject to short-term political variations.”
While the district court’s ruling is an important victory for the plantiffs, the administration is likely to appeal the decision, and it may ultimately have to be decided by the United States Supreme Court.
