Elon Musk’s DOGE goons left a huge mess at the office of a nonprofit they illegally tried to take over, with staff allegedly finding drugs and evidence of cockroaches in the building.
The chief executive of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) said the organization’s Washington, D.C., headquarters became infested with vermin on DOGE’s watch. And after a federal judge ruled against DOGE’s takeover and Musk’s lackeys vacated the building, cleaning staff also found discarded marijuana, according to The Economist.
A judge ruled last month that the “department” of government efficiency, the secretive cost-cutting initiative helmed by President Donald Trump’s top donor Musk, didn’t have the authority to seize the $500 million USIP headquarters or to fire the agency’s employees. USIP, which Congress founded as a nonprofit corporation in 1984, describes itself as being dedicated to “promoting peace by preventing, mitigating and resolving violent conflict abroad.”
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When the USIP’s rightful leadership returned to their building for the first time in two months on May 22, they found water damage and evidence of rats and cockroaches in the building—problems they’d never had before, USIP’s Acting President and CEO George Moose said in a sworn statement.
Economist journalist Daniel Knowles—who reported that cleaners found “marijuana apparently thrown out by DOGE staffers”—shared a photo of the drugs on the social media platform Bluesky.
“A photo shared with me earlier of uh, DOGE’s legacy at USIP,” he captioned the picture.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment. It comes after a bombshell report on Musk’s own alleged drug use during Trump’s election campaign last year, with insiders claiming that the Tesla boss took Ecstasy, magic mushrooms, and confessed to taking so much ketamine that it affected his bladder.
Although the USIP is an independent, non-executive branch agency with its own assets and endowment, Musk’s team declared the institute “unnecessary” and tried to fire all of its employees in mid-March.
When the employees—who maintained DOGE’s actions were illegal—refused to leave, DOGE brought in armed agents from the FBI, the D.C. Metropolitan Police, the U.S. District Attorney’s Office, and a private security firm to force them out.
Having gained access to the building, DOGE then proceeded to wipe out USIP’s IT systems, shred its documents, seize its funding, and take down the USIP website—including all of the research the agency had conducted over the past 40 years, one of its employees told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
After the takeover, Musk’s 28-year-old minion Nate Cavanaugh—a college dropout with no experience in government or international affairs—was put in charge of the agency.
Now, the newly reinstated USIP now has to clean up the mess created by DOGE—an office that was ostensibly tasked with rooting out abuse, waste, and fraud in the federal government, Maddow said on her show Monday night.
“Because all of that was totally illegal, the folks at the U.S. Institute of Peace will have to repair everything and stand everything back up in order to even start to get back to where they were before this whole thing started,” she said. “It’s just pure pointlessness and waste.”
