COLIN O'BRIEN was the chief security officer at the United States Institute of Peace. Mostly that meant keeping the institute's 400 employees, scattered across 28 difficult countries, safe from harm.

Mostly, he'd succeeded. A mission in southern Iraq had tamped down tribal warfare and insurgency without bloodshed. There'd been close calls in Haiti, and Colin himself had been with a group that had come under rocket fire in Kyiv, but no one had been killed.

Now, on this late afternoon of March 14, 2025, the threat was right here, in Washington, D.C. Three young men from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were trying to argue their way into the institute building-a building that housed an institute that should have been far removed from the politics of the day.

The 1984 law signed by 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. The money for the new institute would come from Congress and private donations. The land for its building would be leased to the institute for free, in perpetuity. The building wound up being paid for with $100 million from Congress and $70 million in private donations. But it was wholly owned by the private corporation. The White House had no control over its spending.

Once DOGE got inside, it was game over. Just as it had been at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the African Development Foundation and a bunch of other places.

During the presidential campaign, Colin hadn't taken DOGE seriously. Trump's promise to create a Department of Government Efficiency run by Elon Musk felt, to Colin, like his 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," said Colin.

His views changed after DOGE busted into federal agencies to shut them down and Congress had failed to respond. "If that could happen in broad daylight with no response, then no organization was safe," he said.

He'd left work early that day. His daughter needed help with her math homework, and he assumed nothing would happen late on a Friday afternoon. Then came the call from one of his guys saying that these DOGE kids were on the sidewalk and asking to be let in. Colin immediately sent a text to his IT people that said simply, "Shut it down," and they'd instantly thrown the building into lockdown. After the magnetic locks snapped shut, no one on the inside could get out and no one on the outside could get in. By the time Colin arrived, the three DOGE guys had given up and left.

Two hours later they returned with reinforcements: a rare DOGE female and two FBI agents. This time Colin went out to meet them.

The DOGE trio didn't have a warrant or a court order or really anything except attitudes. One of the FBI men told Colin that he was just hoping "to facilitate a cordial conversation." But the lead DOGE guy, Nate Cavanaugh, was not cordial. "He was expecting me to jump to," said Colin.

Colin wasn't really built to jump to. His appearance was deceptive. He was big and broad, like an offensive tackle, with an army haircut and a polite attentiveness that suggested he was just here to take orders. What he was really doing was watching you closely and figuring out just how full of s-you were.

He knew what little was public about Nate Cavanaugh: that he'd dropped out of Indiana University to start a tech company in Los Angeles. His authority came entirely from his personal association with Elon Musk, whose own came from his personal association with Donald Trump. By night he and some other 20-something DOGE guys were bunking with Musk on the sixth floor of the General Services Administration, like it was another tech startup. By day he was marching into other executive office buildings and telling everyone that he was now in charge and they were fired.

Eventually, the DOGE team gave up and left. Colin unlocked the building, let out the few employees who remained inside the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Then he waited for DOGE to return.

BACK IN 2016, the first time Donald Trump was running for president, Chris Christie, former New Jersey governor and close Trump ally, assembled a transition team of 500 or so people, many of them with government experience. The idea was that if Trump won, his team would rush into the federal government, figure out what was going on, and teach the president-elect whatever he needed to know. Instead, right after the 2016 election, Trump fired his entire transition team.

The U.S. government was arguably the most complex and powerful machine ever designed by man. Trump had no personal experience inside it. Right after the election, experts from across the federal government sat around waiting for someone from the Trump administration to turn up. In many agencies no one showed, or they showed up months late.

Mostly that didn't seem to matter. Or, if it mattered, it was hard to see why. The federal bureaucracy wasn't exactly out of touch with the society it served, but its society was out of touch with it. For better and worse, the U.S. government has a crude autopilot feature that, like a Tesla's, works well enough to lull you into a stupor.

The U.S. government's performance in the global pandemic may partly explain why Trump's second collision with the U.S. government felt so different from the first.

This time, instead of firing his transition team after the election, Trump created the most energetic and empowered transition team in history and put the world's most famous businessman in charge of it. The stated ambition of the Department of Government Efficiency was huge. From annual federal spending just shy of $7 trillion, Elon Musk claimed he could cut $2 trillion.

In just the first couple of months, his team had either closed or shrunk beyond recognition entire federal agencies: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Education Department, USAID and more.

Then in mid-March they invaded the U.S. Institute of Peace.

There was 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, back 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 Elon Musk, acting on behalf of Donald Trump, could send Nate Cavanaugh in to just take the building away and fire everyone inside, he could take anything and fire anyone. The Federal Reserve, for example. Or the Kennedy Center. Or the entire two-million-person civil service.

IF YOU ASKED COLIN what made a person a good security officer, he'd start by telling you 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."

If you pressed him a bit, he'd tell you that one of the qualities Colin looked for was an ability to improvise. "You can't wargame out whatever s-is going to happen," he said. "There's no checklist. When s-happens, nothing you think you know is going to work in the moment."

His first encounter with DOGE, on that Friday in March in 2025, had felt mostly like luck. They'd shown up with a dubious-looking document that announced that they were firing the institute's acting president and replacing him with a DOGE guy, but didn't have the legal authority to do it.

The attempt to strip a building from its rightful owner was a pure assertion of power. "I knew what I was fighting for," Colin said. "I knew what I was trying to protect."

By the time he ushered Nate Cavanaugh back into his big black car, Colin 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.)

Whatever Cavanaugh was up to, as far as Colin could see, it wasn't deficit reduction. More than 80% of federal spending went to national defense, entitlement programs and interest payments on the federal debt. DOGE wasn't even pretending to touch any of that. Anyway, Congress controlled federal spending, and DOGE was making no effort to engage Congress.

The people who ran the U.S. Institute of Peace were less fatalistic than Colin. They believed they could survive. "They thought they could hide in the tall grass," said Colin.

But even as the DOGE people drove off, even as his bosses made hopeful noises, Colin was almost sure that the institute 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 was now simple: "to keep possession of the building until we can get in front of a judge."

The next day, Saturday, March 15, Colin received a phone call from a retired former employee of the private company, Inter-Con, that the Institute of Peace hired to guard the building. The guy told Colin he'd just gotten this weird call from the FBI asking if he was still in charge of the institute's security guards.

"These f-ing kids just ran it through Grok," said Colin. "And they think he's still in charge of security. That's when the lightbulb went off in my head. They're going to use Inter-Con to get into the building."

The U.S. Department of State alone paid Inter-Con $460 million a year to guard its properties. If forced to choose between that and the $2.7 million they were being paid by the Institute of Peace, Inter-Con wouldn't think twice.