The U.S. Institute of Peace looked like a frat house after an all-weekend rager when its employees were granted access to its Washington headquarters last month, according to USIP’s head of security, COLIN O’BRIEN.
USIP is an independent, congressionally funded organization that DOGE took over in March. When employees returned following a court order that blocked the Trump administration from dismantling the institute, they found the multimillion-dollar building on the National Mall in disarray.
O’Brien said that based on accounts from people who were in the building during the two month-long DOGE takeover, “they were smoking weed in the building” and leftover marijuana was scattered about. Numerous USIP flags throughout the building were missing when the institute’s employees returned, he added.
When USIP employees were removed from their positions following a dramatic standoff with DOGE staffers, they had to turn in their laptops, cell phones and chargers. But when they came back last week, the hundreds of laptops were haphazardly stacked on top of each other, with no documentation of their ownership.
Hundreds of chargers were thrown in recycle and waste baskets, which employees had to dig out, O’Brien said.
“It was neglect,” he said. “These folks don’t know how to run a large, multi- building commercial office complex.”
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