he night the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) was taken over, March 17th, staffers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) walked round its headquarters smoking cigars and drinking beers while they dismantled the signage and disabled the computer systems. The takeover of the USIP building in Washington, DC, earlier that afternoon was one of the more notable moments of President Donald Trump’s revolution in the capital, because the think-tank is not actually part of the executive branch. The Institute’s board and president, George Moose, a veteran diplomat, were summarily fired. He and other senior staff were ultimately forced out of the building at the behest of three different police agencies.
Lambert here: “Three different police agencies” is not appropriately nuanced, given that the security firm hired by USIP handed over the keys to DOGE.
Then a DOGE staffer handed over the keys to the building to the federal government.
All this was illegal, according to Judge Beryl Howell, of the Washington, DC district court, in a ruling on May 19th. Judge Howell declared that the dissolution of USIP was “effectuated by illegitimately-installed leaders who lacked legal authority to take these actions”, and so was “null and void”. The result implies that Mr Moose is once again the president, and the board reinstated. The building, which was paid for partly with private money, must be returned. So too must the Institute’s $25m endowment (of which around $15m was donated privately). USIP staffers, almost all of whom were fired in late March, must decide if they want their jobs back. George Foote, USIP’s lawyer, says he expects the government to appeal. A White House spokeswoman called the ruling the result of a “rogue judge”, and said it “will not be the last say on the matter”.
In her judgment, Judge Howell argued that the government chose “blunt force, backed up by law enforcement officers” to impose its legal view that the president has almost unlimited power over almost anything the government funds. In reality, she concluded, not everything funded by Congress is part of the “executive branch”, and so the government’s sweeping assertion of absolute power is unjustified. In effect she ruled that the legislature retains the right to restrict the president’s power over certain institutions. This, Mr Foote argues, has implications that go beyond USIP. It is a “victory for the rule of law”, he says.
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