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Speaker 1: Hi there, it's Michael Lewis here. I'm the author of books like Liar's Poker, The Blind Side, and Moneyball, The Big Short, and on and on and on, and host of the podcast Against the Rules. In my new book, Blockers, I tell the story of these characters who are just so good, you know, you couldn't make them up. People inside the federal government who are doing things like keeping our most sensitive data secure and saving us from crazy risks and doing life-changing, world-altering scientific research, all of whom came afoul of the Trump administration for different reasons. What fascinated me about them wasn't their politics, and the book, in a funny way, has almost nothing to do with politics. Certainly not theirs. What fascinated me was when a society decides it no longer values these people who are doing the work that we all depend on. Here's a preview of Blockers. I hope you like it, and if you do, you can get Blockers now on blockers.fm or wherever audiobooks are sold.
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Speaker 2: I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
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Speaker 3: Against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that.
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Speaker 1: I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.
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Speaker 3: And that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.
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Speaker 2: So help me God.
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Speaker 1: Civil Service Oath of Office, Title V, U.S. Code, Section 3331.
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Speaker 3: From at MU's, Doge. The Doge team fought for days to gain access to the United States Institute of Peace. Eventually, with help from the FBI and Metro Police, Doge was able to access the agency and discovered massive fraud, waste, and abuse, including payments to Taliban and Iraq.
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Speaker 4: Elon Musk. Any government institution is most likely to be the opposite of its name. Elon Musk. They deleted a terabyte of financial data to cover their crimes. But they don't understand technology, so we recovered it.
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Speaker 1: Prologue, The Guns 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, it succeeded. There'd been close calls in Haiti, and Colin himself had been with a group that had come under rocket fire in Kiev. But no one had been killed. No new doves to add to the five already on the Wall of the Fallen. 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 were trying to argue their way into the Institute building. Once 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, he 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. Watching Musk do various weird things on various political stages only reinforced his sense that Doge was pure theater. His views had changed only after they'd 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 on the 14th, a Friday. His daughter needed help with her math homework, and he assumed nothing would happen late in the afternoon before a holiday weekend. Then came the call from one of his guys, saying that these Doge kids were out 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 had instantly thrown the building into lockdown. After the magnetic lock snapped shut, no one on the inside could get out, and no one on the outside could get in. By the time Colin arrived to spring the staff from the building, 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. He'd been tracking Doge's movements through the federal bureaucracy. He'd created files on each member. The security guys who had called Colin had spotted them from the photos Colin had provided. But this was the first time Colin had seen any of them in the flesh. Skinny jeans, T-shirts, and little backpacks. Tech bro wear. The FBI agents, like Colin, wore suits to work and were clearly uneasy in their new role as Doge Muscle. The Doge trio didn't have a warrant or a court order or really anything else 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 too, said Colin. Colin wasn't really built to jump too. His appearance was deceptive. He looked like the sort of guy who could fix your car, but he was more like the guy who noticed what your choice of car said about you. 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 shit you were. He knew what little was public about Nate Kavanaugh, that he'd dropped out of Indiana University to start some not-obviously-world-changing 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 Government 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. While the young Doge guys tried to talk their way past Colin and into the front of the building, the young Doge woman, Laken Rapier, ran around to the back and pounded on the door and asked to be let in to use the bathroom. When the guards refused to open the door, she shouted at them that as she was a government employee and this was a government building, she had a right to relieve herself inside of it. She didn't seem to understand that the Institute wasn't a government building. Even the FBI agents seemed to get that point. Eventually, they gave up and left, Colin unlocked the building, let out the few employees who remained inside the U.S. Institute of Peace, then waited for Doge to return. You never know what's going to catch your eye and become a story. Back in 2016, the first time Donald Trump collided with the U.S. government, it was a throwaway line, something Trump said. In the months before the election, well-meaning people tried to prepare Trump to govern. 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, not just into the White House, but into all the federal agencies, from the CIA to the Department of Agriculture, and figure out what was going on. They'd teach the president-elect whatever he needed to know about, say, the Iran nuclear deal. or the plight of the American farmer. Trump might not know or even really care about this complicated machine, but all was still well. Chris Christie's transition team would study the machine and teach him how it worked. That never happened. Instead, right after the 2016 election, Trump fired his entire transition team. Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves, he'd told Christie. That was the throwaway line that caught my eye and invited me to reach out and pull on it until a story unspooled. The United States government was arguably the most complex and powerful machine ever designed by man. Trump had no personal experience inside it and had made no effort to educate himself. Handed the task of managing it, he was just going to wing it. And that's what he did. Right after the election, all these experts across the federal government people who managed the nuclear stockpile in the Department of Energy, people who ran pandemic preparedness at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people who ran the National Weather Service in the Department of Commerce, and on and on and on, put out finger sandwiches and sparkling water and sat around waiting for someone from the Trump administration to turn up just to let them know what they were working on and what they might need to do to prevent various horrible things from happening. In most agencies, no one showed. or they showed up months late, without questions. But, and here was the happy news, mostly that didn't seem to matter much. Or, if it mattered, it was hard to see why. Total neglect didn't result in immediate catastrophe. I wound up writing a short book called The Fifth Risk, the gist of which was that inside the federal government, there were lots of public-spirited people dealing with an insane number of big problems that the private sector would never address. The entire system was screwed up, budgets changing wildly year to year, bosses coming and going like Tinder dates. But the people working in it often were not. Their stories were often inspiring. But those stories were seldom told. American civil servants, as a group, have learned that any attention they receive tends to be negative attention. And in any case, the sort of person who goes to work for the government isn't usually looking to be the life of the party. The federal bureaucracy wasn't exactly out of touch with the society it served, but its society was out of touch with it. But that, too, seemed okay. For better and worse, the United States government has a crude autopilot feature that, like a Tesla's, works well enough to lull you into a stupor. You can play the Battle of Polytopia while doing 75 on the interstate and after a while feel that you don't even need to look up. But there will come a moment when something happens that requires your attention. And in that moment, if you are wholly absorbed with the decision of whether to attack to kill or attack to wound, you'll wind up not only dead, but trending on X. That's sort of what happened at the end of 2019, when a virus in China leapt from either a lab or an animal and raced towards an unprepared American population. The United States government's shockingly poor performance in the global pandemic is another story. I wrote a book about that, too. though it may partly explain why Trump's second collision with the U.S. government felt so different from the first. This time, Trump kept at least one eye on the road. Instead of firing his transition team after the election, he 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. And from the moment his minions began their hunt for waste, fraud, and abuse, his tweets, subtweets, and reposts came thick and fast. In his first two months on the job, Musk averaged more than 100 posts every day on X. And every day, he generated new material to tweet about. 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 Department of Education, USAID, and more. Then, in mid-March, they invaded the U.S. Institute of Peace. Odd as it might sound, that's what finally grabbed my attention this time. In the year I'd spent wandering around the first Trump administration, I thought I'd seen or at least heard about most of our government. I'd spent weeks wrestling with what seemed at the time like pressing questions. Which is inherently more thrilling, the Department of Energy or the Department of the Interior? Or, why is an agency that spends three-fifths of its budget collecting and analyzing and disseminating weather data called the Department of Commerce? I carried around with me a U.S. government org chart and reduced every federal agency to a file on the floor of my office. And yet, I'd never even heard of the U.S. Institute of Peace. Not so much as a faint whisper about it. That's why what might seem in context like a trivial event, pulled me up short. I couldn't begin to guess what the U.S. Institute of Peace actually did. It sounded like a front for a drug operation. And so I asked around and learned that the reason it never wound up in a file on my office floor with the federal agencies is that it wasn't a federal agency. It was a private corporation. Its employees weren't civil servants, but ordinary workers.
00:14:08
Speaker 5: The U.S.
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Speaker 1: Institute of Peace wasn't a thing the president was supposed to control. Donald Trump had gone from paying no attention at all to the federal government to paying more attention than any president ever. He had become so interested in running the federal government that he was now trying to run even the parts of it that he wasn't meant to. The effect was to create a kind of negative space. The story to tell about Trump's first term was all about the price of ignorance and the risk of radical neglect. The story to tell about his second term was different. It was about all those people in roles in and around the United States government, once taken for granted, that were now gone. The second Trump administration was a bit like a meteor strike or some other massive environmental shift. It killed off entire species and made room for new ones. That different species had died in different ways and for different reasons only heightened the story's interest. It enabled you to cobble together the various wiped-out species into a portrait of the new environment. That new environment needed to be understood not merely by the new life forms it sustained, but by the old ones that it didn't. If you asked Colin O'Brien 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 when he was hiring someone for a security job, he looked not just for the protective instincts of an offensive lineman and a taste for work, those were a given, but for an extreme sensitivity to the environment. To be any good, you had to notice things that most people didn't. It might be that the landscaping or the lighting created possibilities for concealment, or that the wrong type of screw in a door frame caused it to fail faster under force. You have to see all the little things, said Colin. And you have to have a passion for it. The other quality Colin looked for was an ability to improvise. You can't war game out whatever shit is going to happen, he said. There's no checklist. When shit happens, nothing you think you know is going to work in the moment. Interviewing people for security work, he'd always try to surprise them. Have it come out of left field and see how they respond. How did they adapt to an uncomfortable situation? One time, after an applicant had sat down for what he assumed would be the conventional interview, Colin had simply tossed a tourniquet at him and said, What is this and how do you use it? I didn't care if he knew how to use a tourniquet, said Colin. I just wanted to see how he'd respond. For as long as Colin could remember, he'd wanted to be a cop. It is such a badass job. I love the idea of law enforcement. I love the idea of serving something bigger than myself, and I love catching bad guys. His parents hated the idea. They thought it was too dangerous. If you would have asked my parents, they would have told you I was going to grow out of it, said Colin. He didn't grow out of it. As he approached his high school graduation, his mother insisted he go on to college. Colin loved playing for his high school football team, offensive line and linebacker, but hated the classroom. He thought college would be a waste of money, and he didn't want to spend another minute, much less the rest of his life, behind a desk. He cut a deal with his mom. If she signed the papers that allowed him to enlist in the U.S. Army at the age of 17, he'd serve on active duty only the required five years. After that, if she still wanted him to go to college, he'd go to college. And then, this part he didn't tell her, he'd become a cop. He loved his mom and dad, but he was always his own guy. And in any case, the best way to show you loved your mom and dad was to insist on being who you were. He'd scored so high on the aptitude test that they told him he could pick his first assignment. He chose the place he knew the least about, South Korea. There he wound up assigned to the elite SWAT team as a sniper. He did well enough that they pulled him to work on the security detail of Leon Laporte, the four-star general who ran the region. I loved it, said Colin. When his five years were up, Laporte's successor, Burwell Baxter B.B. Bell III, another four-star general, called him into his office and told him that if he agreed to reenlist, he could have most any other job at his pay grade that he wanted in the U.S.
00:18:49
Speaker 5: Army.
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Speaker 1: Colin found himself nervously explaining to General B.B. Bell how his mom had raised him to keep his promises and that he had made a promise to his mom. But he'd never lost his original ambitions. After studying constitutional law and graduating from the University of Maryland, he joined the Montgomery County Police Force. He was as suited to the job as he'd imagined, but it beat the hell out of him. In a police boxing class, they tossed him into a ring with a guy even bigger than him, who with a single punch broke Collins' neck. Another time, he found himself racing after four kids, speeding in a stolen car. The kids ran the car off the road and into a tree, where it caught fire. As Colin sprinted into the wreck to yank the kids out, the car exploded into flames ten feet high. He extracted the driver before grabbing a second kid who was on fire. I had one of those weird moments, said Colin. I just remembered the phrase, drop and roll. I dropped on top of him and rolled him down the street and the flames went out. That boy survived. The other two burned to death before he could get to them. The driver died later in the hospital. Colin emerged with burns and a broken shoulder that never again felt right. He'd spent eight years as a cop before leaving in 2016 when his body couldn't take it anymore. He'd gone from wearing a gun every day to reaching down only to realize he didn't have one. It took me a little bit before I was like, I don't have to have a gun to be safe. He'd gone from chasing down people who'd done bad things to preventing the bad things from happening in the first place. You can't really measure prevention, he said. When something bad does not happen... there's no clear way to prove why. Did it not occur because you noticed and fixed a problem no one else saw? Because you were good at your job? Because you were lucky? Or because nothing was ever going to happen in the first place? That ambiguity is part of the work. It's about noticing small details, understanding human behavior, and acting on things that feel just slightly out of place. When it works, nothing happens. His first encounter with Doge... on that Friday in March in 2025, had felt mostly like luck. They were the Keystone Cops, he said. They'd shown up with a dubious-looking document on Institute of Peace letterhead signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Pete Garvin, head of the National Defense University, the three ex officio members of the Institute's board. It announced that they were firing the Institute's acting president, George Moose, and replacing him with a Doge guy. But they didn't have the legal authority to do it. Colin, and for that matter, the FBI agents, could see the document was fake. The letterhead had been photocopied from some genuine Institute stationery, probably from the letter George Moose himself had sent to the Doge people to explain the law. That law wasn't complicated.
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Speaker 2: It is the purpose of this title to establish an independent nonprofit national institute to serve the people and the government through the widest possible range of education and training, basic and applied research opportunities, and peace information services on the means to promote international peace and the resolution of conflicts among the nations and peoples of the world without recourse to violence.
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Speaker 1: That was one of its nine big bullet points. Passed by Congress and signed by Ronald Reagan in 1984, the law stipulated that the U.S. Institute of Peace would be run by a board of 15 people, only eight of whom could belong to a single political party. All served longer terms than the president. The president could appoint board members but not remove them, except for extreme malfeasance. The White House had no control over its spending. The money for the new institute would come from both 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 whole point of the structure was to remove the U.S. Institute of Peace from day-to-day politics. There was a long history of these 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. In 1935, the Supreme Court upheld, by unanimous vote, the right of Congress to breed mongrel institutions, and Congress had since bred more of them. But in a funny way, the U.S. Institute of Peace predated them all, even the Red Cross. In his final address to Congress in 1796, George Washington had proposed creating two private but national colleges, one to train warriors, the other to train peacemakers. Six years later, Congress agreed to fund West Point, but not the Peace College, whose merits were the subject of an on-again, off-again debate for the next 188 years. The idea got a massive push after the Vietnam War from a handful of United States senators who'd served in combat and emerged from the experience with a conviction that the best war was the war that never happened, and that one way to prevent war was to invest a bit more in the art of peace. Yeah, you can have a Department of War, but what you really want to do is stay out of war, said Colin. How do you stop people from blowing other people up? These were people who genuinely want to make the world a less shitty place. 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 Kavanaugh 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. Plus, of course, the entire two-million-person civil service. This attempt to strip a building from its rightful owner was a pure assertion of power, an attempt to change the way the government had been run for more than a century, to reduce it to nothing more or less than a servant of whoever happens to be president. Holding the building meant more to Colin than just holding the building. I knew what I was fighting for, he said. I knew what I was trying to protect. By the time he ushered Nate Kavanaugh back into his big black car, Colin had a fully formed opinion of him. It wasn't favorable. He had these white Converse sneakers that make you want to scuff them with whatever you have, said Colin. Had this air of superiority. You could feel him looking down on you. Whatever he was up to, 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. What was happening felt to Colin less like cost-cutting than total destruction. 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. He heard them talk about the traits that the Institute possessed, lacked by other quasi-government institutions, that enhanced its likelihood of survival. Number one, they were tiny. The Institute's $ 55 million annual budget was. 0007857 % of the federal budget. Number two, They had nothing inside it labeled diversity, equity, and inclusion. Their workforce was diverse, but they came by that without making a point of it. Number three, people close to Trump, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, had long supported the Institute's work. Number four, Trump's obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize. Destroying something called the United States Institute of Peace would look bad on his application. Number five, the actual importance of their work. Though how many Americans, let alone the Americans who had just moved into the White House, could tell you what they did? Number six, their legal independence. Even as the Doge people drove off, and 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. As he said, to keep possession of the building until we can get in front of a judge. But the situation was moving fast. The next day, Saturday, March 15th, Colin received a phone call from a retired former employee of the private company Intercon 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 him if he was still in charge of the Institute's security guards. These fucking kids just ran it through grok, said Colin, and they think he's still in charge of security. That's when the light bulb went off in my head. They're going to use Intercon to get into the building.
00:29:08
Speaker 3: The U.S.
00:29:09
Speaker 1: Department of State alone paid Intercon orders $ 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, Intercon wouldn't think twice. I realize that we need to get rid of the guards, said Colin, that the way to make us safer is to get rid of the people protecting us. When he was done, there was only one outstanding key to the single mechanical lock on the entire building. held by Kevin Simpson, who oversaw Intercon's security guards. Colin couldn't find him, and in any case, he was an old and trusted friend of several people who worked for the Institute of Peace. Colin hoped that if Doge found him, Kevin Simpson would just keep mum about the key. Of all the people out there, he said, Kevin is the person I can trust. On Sunday, Colin had another phone call, this one from a senior FBI agent named Doug Silk. Silk told Colin that he was under investigation by the Department of Justice for the events of March 14th and asked him to come in that day for questioning. I said, yeah, that's not going to happen. Then, because he was not home when he received the threat, Colin called his wife and told her to lock the doors to their house and not let anyone in. no matter who they said they were. He got to work at five the next morning, St. Patrick's Day. They'd told the staff to stay home, so it was just him and George Moose and their lawyers. I know their objective was going to be to destroy us, said Colin. And I know I was being asked to be the D.C. version of Davy Crockett. And I know that the analogy is not exact. He was looking out over the streets from an upper story window when he saw them approach. It's three vehicles, a Dogemobile, a tinted-out black Tahoe or Escalade, followed by a Tesla.
00:31:06
Speaker 3: And a Jeep.
00:31:07
Speaker 1: He watched as an intercom guy named Derek left one of the cars and tried to open the front door. His badge doesn't work, said Colin. The U.S. Institute of Peace building hadn't been designed to repel an invading force. It had been designed to emit light. It was all clerestory windows topped by a roof of glass panels shaped like the wings of a dove. The Valhalla of think tank architecture, one critic called it. Colin had no idea where the next assault would come from, but he knew the most vulnerable point in his defense. The side door. The door that still had the mechanical lock. Colin's hope that the Doge people would never find Kevin Simpson, or his key, faded 15 minutes after the Dogemobiles pulled up. when Simpson himself appeared inside the building. Colin descended to find him and three other intercom patrol people in plain clothes just wandering around.
00:32:05
Speaker 3: D.C.
00:32:05
Speaker 1: Law banned the security officers who protected the courthouses and agencies and embassies from carrying their weapons home from work. The guns needed to be stored someplace. The only odd fact about the gun room in the basement of the Institute of Peace is is that neither Colin nor anyone who actually worked for the Institute knew the code to open the safe. The 34 9mm Glocks were owned and controlled by Intercon. The Intercon cops headed straight to the basement. Colin had someone call the D.C. police to report trespassers. The D.C. police didn't show. After the Intercon guards secured their guns, they toured the building like they owned it, refusing either to answer questions or surrender Simpson's key. The Institute, out of the kindness of its heart, was still paying their salaries. They were now an obviously hostile presence, but they didn't really know how to play the new role. At one point, they gathered all together in one place, the portico. Colin seized that moment to throw the portico into lockdown. The portico was self-contained. At the press of a button, Colin turned it into a prison cell. He couldn't forcibly eject a battalion of armed private security guys all by himself. but he could stop them from leaving and others from entering. For the next two hours, he watched the intercom guys on the security cam pushing on doors that wouldn't yield and making phone calls to anyone they thought might rescue them. They were pissed, said Colin. With the guards all trapped, Colin walked outside and removed the mechanical lock cylinder from the side door so no one else could use a key to enter. It's not a fire code violation if you can't get into the building, he explained. That triggered some irate phone calls to his boss, George Moose, whom Colin had safely locked behind roughly ten different doors on the fifth floor of the building. The first call was Intercon's CEO, angrily but more or less politely asking Moose to tell Colin O'Brien that he needed to release his guards. The final, less polite call came from the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin. At length, Colin unlocked the outside door to the portico. and the security guards exited the building. An hour later, there came a knock on another door. The D.C. police. Finally, Colin thought, the D.C. police are doing their fucking jobs. Someone opened the door and in-streamed an army of cops, followed by a bunch of intercom guys and, trotting after them, Nate Cavanaugh, along with more Doge people. They're ordering the D.C. cops around like their own private army, said Colin. I didn't see that coming. I didn't see the police taking sides. It's like the cops showing up at your house and saying, get the fuck out. These people live here now. As the D.C. cops escorted Colin from the building, the senior Intercon guy approached him and said he was sorry that it had gone down this way, but that Doge had given him no choice. They had indeed threatened to pull Intercon's $ 460 million State Department contract. Doge soon selected the next president of the U.S. Institute of Peace. Nate Kavanaugh, who until that moment had exhibited zero interest in or knowledge of the United States government or its foreign policy, who promptly moved the title of the Institute's building into the General Services Administration, swept its money into government accounts, and fired nearly its entire staff. A mere two days, Colin couldn't help but notice, before their health insurance was set to renew. There was intent to hurt these families, he said. It was, let's fuck 400 families, and then they laughed about it. In his time as a police officer, Colin had seen many different kinds of anger. There was the fury of the drunk NFL defensive lineman who bull rushed him and proved to Colin that his taser worked. That was just the alcohol doing its job, and the lineman apologized the next day. There was the anger of victims after the law failed to satisfy their need for vengeance. That felt more like frustration. There was the general hatred of the police, but that didn't really feel personal, and Colin never took it personally. Police rarely meet people on their best day, he said. Whatever was animating these doge people didn't feel like any of those. They weren't reacting to an event, said Colin. They were on a crusade. Their hostility didn't come from fear, loss, and pain. It came from a lack of empathy and an inability to deal with complexity. It was just fundamentally different from anything I had encountered before. But in their attitude to the world around them, they did remind Colin of something that had happened back when he was a cop. He'd responded to a home invasion in a poor black neighborhood. His partner was a younger guy who had come from a well-to-do family. They had arrived at the scene to find a terrified and distraught single mother with two small children. Her next-door neighbor was a drug dealer, she explained. and these disturbed addicts kept mistaking her apartment for his. They kept breaking in to steal drugs. Colin's partner had listened to her and then said matter-of-factly, why don't you just move? And Colin thought, this guy has no ability to imagine himself into her situation. Why does that happen, he asked. Because this is someone who has no worldly experience to understand that she can't move. It simply didn't occur to the guy. just as it didn't seriously occur to Nate Kavanaugh, to consider the suffering he was making possible. Once Doge had control of the building, Nate and the other guys went rooting around in the Institute's computers. Elon Musk was given first crack at the fresh material. Then the Doge account on X posted a list of their findings.
00:38:10
Speaker 4: Each year, the United States Institute for Peace, UCIB, receives $ 55 million in congressional taxpayer funds. Prior management would sweep excess funds into its private endowment, zero congressional oversight. In the past 10 years, USIP has transferred about $ 13 million to its private endowment, mainly used for private events and travel. USIP contracts, now canceled, include $ 132, 000 to Mohamed Qasem Halimi, an ex-Taliban member who was Afghanistan's former chief of protocol. $ 2, 232, 500 to its outside accountant, who attempted to delete over one terabyte of accounting data, now recovered, after new leadership entered the building. $ 1, 307, 061 to the Al-Tadamun Iraqi League for Youth. $ 675, 000 for private aviation services.
00:39:18
Speaker 1: The list was both interesting and true, but as it turned out, the bits that were interesting weren't true, and the bits that were true weren't interesting. For instance, the law that had created the Institute required it to move any unused funds into its endowment, and so, by law, for the past 40 years, that's what they'd done. The Institute was also required by law to hire an accountant to audit its books every year so that it might report its spending to Congress. For those services, it paid roughly $ 380, 000 a year. The amount that Doge accused the Institute of Spending on its accountants corresponded not to their accountants' bill, but to a six-year contract for legal services. The actual sum paid to the Al-Tataman Iraqi League for Youth was not more than a million dollars, but less than half that. The money had funded a single project, which, because it had such obvious value, had been explicitly approved by Marco Rubio. Essentially, it was an attempt to reduce extremism and anti-American terrorism. The collapse of the Bashar al-Assad government in December 2024 had stranded thousands of Iraqis, mostly women and children, in a camp in Syria's northeast. The Islamic State had gained some traction inside the camp, which back in 2019 had held 30,000 refugees, and the godforsaken place had become a breeding ground for future ISIS fighters. The institute's local Iraqi staff, members of the League for Youth, had been working successfully with the U.S. State Department to persuade village elders in Iraq to accept the refugees in their villages and provide them a path to a peaceful life. Before they accepted anyone, the elders demanded evidence that they have no connection to ISIS or any other terrorist group. The Institute's staff arranged small conferences to walk the elders through the personal histories of the refugees. The Institute footed the bill for the venues plus the tea and coffee, and occasionally lunch. God knows the efficiency of that particular effort. No one inside Doge seems ever to have bothered to ask. Had they dug a bit, they could have found evidence that similar sorts of programs had been wildly efficient. For example, the work the Institute of Peace had done in 2007 in Iraq, in an area south of Baghdad, that had become known as the Triangle of Death. A region of a million people was riven by tribal warfare, and laced with insurgents, who had killed 54 members of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division and wounded hundreds more. At the behest of the Army, the Institute had brought together 30 elders of warring tribes. The Institute's structure, both an instrument of the United States and removed from its political control, created a useful ambiguity. It allowed it to facilitate conversations that official government authorities could not. Years earlier, a scholar named I. William Zartman, working on an Institute of Peace grant, had framed the idea of the hurting stalemate. His big point was the success of a peace initiative might have less to do with the specifics of the proposal than with its timing. So long as neither side saw any value in moving away from their anger and their violence, there wasn't much you could say or do to stop them fighting. But when both sensed that anger and violence weren't going to get them what they wanted, when the status quo became sufficiently painful, they became vulnerable to peace. The trick was to have trusted people on the ground who could spot these moments and seize them. The Institute's staff had started by handing out questionnaires for the warring Iraqi tribal leaders to fill out anonymously. Each made his list of grievances. The lists were then passed around for everyone to read. and something happened. The collective realization of how they'd all endured the same terrible losses took just enough steam out of the room that they began to talk. The talks led to peace that has lasted to this day. Inside the Institute's servers, the Doge guys might have found evidence of this triumph. For example, the letter of thanks from General David Petraeus. In the Pentagon's view, the Institute had saved both American lives and taxpayer dollars. Before the Institute became involved, the U.S. Army had been spending $ 150 million a month to pacify the Triangle of Death. The peace talks cost a million dollars. The savings they yielded were likely greater than the entire cost up to that point of the Institute of Peace. The most disturbing item on Doge's list was the $ 132, 000 sent to Mohamed Qasem Halimi. In the 1990s, Halimi, a religious scholar, had indeed worked in the Taliban-run government as a liaison to foreign diplomats. It was the only good job I could find, he explained to ProPublica. But after the 9-11 attack and the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in December 2001, he'd quit the Taliban and served American interests. the Taliban had tried three times to assassinate him.
00:44:41
Speaker 4: The U.S.
00:44:41
Speaker 1: Institute of Peace had paid him $ 10, 000 a month for a variety of services. Halimi had fled the country with the U.S. military, but he maintained a network that reported to him on the Taliban's treatment of women, information that the U.S. State Department was unable to gather any other way. He had earned the trust of religious scholars across the region so that he might point out when the Taliban's behavior violated the Koran. and they, in turn, might pressure the Taliban to modify its behavior. In Trump's first term, Halimi had actually prepped U.S. negotiators for their talks with the Taliban. He wasn't exactly an American spy, but he was certainly an ally. By outing him on social media, Musk had essentially exposed a U.S. asset to enemies of America. After the tweet, the Taliban rounded up Halimi's relatives still living in Afghanistan and for beatings and imprisonment. So much of what Nate Kavanaugh and his doge pals claimed was obviously outrageous. But what especially infuriated Colin O'Brien was the final item on their list, $ 675, 000 for private aviation services. When the United States finished pulling out of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, it imperiled the lives of every Afghan who had helped, including the Institute of Peace's local staff, and their families. The male staffers assumed that if they fell into the Taliban's hands, they'd be summarily executed. The female staffers expected to be enslaved and packed off into forced marriages. It fell to the Institute's security chief to extract what in the end amounted to 256 people. That was the only private aviation service the Institute had engaged. It was one fucking flight, said Colin. A 737 from Kabul to Qatar. To get them out before they were taken by the Taliban. You said we have private jets. Fuck you. We had a charter plane to rescue our people from a war zone. He took pride in that exercise. Their final two Afghan employees, who had been working in a remote part of the country and were unable to make the flight, Colin had arranged to be smuggled across the Pakistan border and kept hidden from the Pakistani government for three years before getting them to safety. A few weeks after the barrage of distortions and deceptions, Musk gathered his team on Fox News. The idea was to use host Jesse Waters' open sympathy for what they had done to reveal to the American people the specific waste and fraud they'd uncovered. As Exhibit A, Musk introduced Nate Kavanaugh and his work inside the U.S. Institute of Peace.
00:47:33
Speaker 5: What has been the biggest resistance? Is there one agency?
00:47:38
Speaker 4: Is there one department that when you guys walk in, they all start fighting you, start hiding things?
00:47:46
Speaker 3: I thought you weren't going to talk.
00:47:49
Speaker 1: I'm sorry.
00:47:51
Speaker 3: But I guess you can answer that question.
00:47:54
Speaker 5: Sure.
00:47:55
Speaker 3: I mean, yes, we've certainly had some battles.
00:47:58
Speaker 4: Battles?
00:47:59
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah. I mean, who should talk about you, Seb?
00:48:04
Speaker 3: Oh, Nate. Okay.
00:48:06
Speaker 5: The small agency called the United States Institute of Peace is definitely the agency we had the most fight at. We actually went into the agency and found they had loaded guns inside of their headquarters.
00:48:19
Speaker 3: Institute for Peace.
00:48:20
Speaker 4: I mean, any given company, any given organizational name is going to kind of be the opposite of the title. Right.
00:48:25
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, and so it was the, by far the least peaceful agency that we've worked with, ironically. Additionally, we found that they were spending money on things like private jets, and they even had a $ 130, 000 contract with a former member of the Taliban.
00:48:40
Speaker 1: This is real.
00:48:41
Speaker 5: We don't encounter that at most agencies.
00:48:45
Speaker 1: That is how Colin O'Brien had lost the building. He'd expected to lose it, but still he was surprised by how it had gone down. It really was true that in security work, you could never war game out what eventually happened. He had lost the building to its own private security company after it was blackmailed by the Trump administration. To the D.C. police, which for some reason were now acting as a private security force for these random kids Elon Musk had empowered. To the FBI, which had somehow reconfigured itself as yet another battalion in the White House's army. Thrust into this new environment, these people and institutions had done what they needed to do to survive. All that now mattered was power. Who had physical control of a building? Who had the guns? an institution dedicated to the idea that conflict did not need to lead to violence, now found itself in a society in which might meant right. Of course it had to die. Legally, the battle wasn't completely over. In mid-May, U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell of Washington issued a scathing ruling that required the Trump administration to vacate the buildings. Colin had the brief pleasure of rolling in with an army of off-duty Baltimore cops, old pals of his, and taking it back. And finding that the Institute's flags had been stolen, its logo had been ripped from the wall, and that the Doge Boys had left behind a pile of beer bottles and cheap weed. A month later, a panel of Trump-appointed judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a stay, and the building was returned to the Trump administration. And in December 2025, it was renamed Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace.
Speaker 1: Hi there, it's Michael Lewis here. I'm the author of books like Liar's Poker, The Blind Side, and Moneyball, The Big Short, and on and on and on, and host of the podcast Against the Rules. In my new book, Blockers, I tell the story of these characters who are just so good, you know, you couldn't make them up. People inside the federal government who are doing things like keeping our most sensitive data secure and saving us from crazy risks and doing life-changing, world-altering scientific research, all of whom came afoul of the Trump administration for different reasons. What fascinated me about them wasn't their politics, and the book, in a funny way, has almost nothing to do with politics. Certainly not theirs. What fascinated me was when a society decides it no longer values these people who are doing the work that we all depend on. Here's a preview of Blockers. I hope you like it, and if you do, you can get Blockers now on blockers.fm or wherever audiobooks are sold.
00:01:11
Speaker 2: I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
00:01:16
Speaker 3: Against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that.
00:01:23
Speaker 1: I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.
00:01:28
Speaker 3: And that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.
00:01:33
Speaker 2: So help me God.
00:01:35
Speaker 1: Civil Service Oath of Office, Title V, U.S. Code, Section 3331.
00:01:46
Speaker 3: From at MU's, Doge. The Doge team fought for days to gain access to the United States Institute of Peace. Eventually, with help from the FBI and Metro Police, Doge was able to access the agency and discovered massive fraud, waste, and abuse, including payments to Taliban and Iraq.
00:02:06
Speaker 4: Elon Musk. Any government institution is most likely to be the opposite of its name. Elon Musk. They deleted a terabyte of financial data to cover their crimes. But they don't understand technology, so we recovered it.
00:02:27
Speaker 1: Prologue, The Guns 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, it succeeded. There'd been close calls in Haiti, and Colin himself had been with a group that had come under rocket fire in Kiev. But no one had been killed. No new doves to add to the five already on the Wall of the Fallen. 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 were trying to argue their way into the Institute building. Once 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, he 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. Watching Musk do various weird things on various political stages only reinforced his sense that Doge was pure theater. His views had changed only after they'd 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 on the 14th, a Friday. His daughter needed help with her math homework, and he assumed nothing would happen late in the afternoon before a holiday weekend. Then came the call from one of his guys, saying that these Doge kids were out 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 had instantly thrown the building into lockdown. After the magnetic lock snapped shut, no one on the inside could get out, and no one on the outside could get in. By the time Colin arrived to spring the staff from the building, 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. He'd been tracking Doge's movements through the federal bureaucracy. He'd created files on each member. The security guys who had called Colin had spotted them from the photos Colin had provided. But this was the first time Colin had seen any of them in the flesh. Skinny jeans, T-shirts, and little backpacks. Tech bro wear. The FBI agents, like Colin, wore suits to work and were clearly uneasy in their new role as Doge Muscle. The Doge trio didn't have a warrant or a court order or really anything else 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 too, said Colin. Colin wasn't really built to jump too. His appearance was deceptive. He looked like the sort of guy who could fix your car, but he was more like the guy who noticed what your choice of car said about you. 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 shit you were. He knew what little was public about Nate Kavanaugh, that he'd dropped out of Indiana University to start some not-obviously-world-changing 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 Government 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. While the young Doge guys tried to talk their way past Colin and into the front of the building, the young Doge woman, Laken Rapier, ran around to the back and pounded on the door and asked to be let in to use the bathroom. When the guards refused to open the door, she shouted at them that as she was a government employee and this was a government building, she had a right to relieve herself inside of it. She didn't seem to understand that the Institute wasn't a government building. Even the FBI agents seemed to get that point. Eventually, they gave up and left, Colin unlocked the building, let out the few employees who remained inside the U.S. Institute of Peace, then waited for Doge to return. You never know what's going to catch your eye and become a story. Back in 2016, the first time Donald Trump collided with the U.S. government, it was a throwaway line, something Trump said. In the months before the election, well-meaning people tried to prepare Trump to govern. 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, not just into the White House, but into all the federal agencies, from the CIA to the Department of Agriculture, and figure out what was going on. They'd teach the president-elect whatever he needed to know about, say, the Iran nuclear deal. or the plight of the American farmer. Trump might not know or even really care about this complicated machine, but all was still well. Chris Christie's transition team would study the machine and teach him how it worked. That never happened. Instead, right after the 2016 election, Trump fired his entire transition team. Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves, he'd told Christie. That was the throwaway line that caught my eye and invited me to reach out and pull on it until a story unspooled. The United States government was arguably the most complex and powerful machine ever designed by man. Trump had no personal experience inside it and had made no effort to educate himself. Handed the task of managing it, he was just going to wing it. And that's what he did. Right after the election, all these experts across the federal government people who managed the nuclear stockpile in the Department of Energy, people who ran pandemic preparedness at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people who ran the National Weather Service in the Department of Commerce, and on and on and on, put out finger sandwiches and sparkling water and sat around waiting for someone from the Trump administration to turn up just to let them know what they were working on and what they might need to do to prevent various horrible things from happening. In most agencies, no one showed. or they showed up months late, without questions. But, and here was the happy news, mostly that didn't seem to matter much. Or, if it mattered, it was hard to see why. Total neglect didn't result in immediate catastrophe. I wound up writing a short book called The Fifth Risk, the gist of which was that inside the federal government, there were lots of public-spirited people dealing with an insane number of big problems that the private sector would never address. The entire system was screwed up, budgets changing wildly year to year, bosses coming and going like Tinder dates. But the people working in it often were not. Their stories were often inspiring. But those stories were seldom told. American civil servants, as a group, have learned that any attention they receive tends to be negative attention. And in any case, the sort of person who goes to work for the government isn't usually looking to be the life of the party. The federal bureaucracy wasn't exactly out of touch with the society it served, but its society was out of touch with it. But that, too, seemed okay. For better and worse, the United States government has a crude autopilot feature that, like a Tesla's, works well enough to lull you into a stupor. You can play the Battle of Polytopia while doing 75 on the interstate and after a while feel that you don't even need to look up. But there will come a moment when something happens that requires your attention. And in that moment, if you are wholly absorbed with the decision of whether to attack to kill or attack to wound, you'll wind up not only dead, but trending on X. That's sort of what happened at the end of 2019, when a virus in China leapt from either a lab or an animal and raced towards an unprepared American population. The United States government's shockingly poor performance in the global pandemic is another story. I wrote a book about that, too. though it may partly explain why Trump's second collision with the U.S. government felt so different from the first. This time, Trump kept at least one eye on the road. Instead of firing his transition team after the election, he 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. And from the moment his minions began their hunt for waste, fraud, and abuse, his tweets, subtweets, and reposts came thick and fast. In his first two months on the job, Musk averaged more than 100 posts every day on X. And every day, he generated new material to tweet about. 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 Department of Education, USAID, and more. Then, in mid-March, they invaded the U.S. Institute of Peace. Odd as it might sound, that's what finally grabbed my attention this time. In the year I'd spent wandering around the first Trump administration, I thought I'd seen or at least heard about most of our government. I'd spent weeks wrestling with what seemed at the time like pressing questions. Which is inherently more thrilling, the Department of Energy or the Department of the Interior? Or, why is an agency that spends three-fifths of its budget collecting and analyzing and disseminating weather data called the Department of Commerce? I carried around with me a U.S. government org chart and reduced every federal agency to a file on the floor of my office. And yet, I'd never even heard of the U.S. Institute of Peace. Not so much as a faint whisper about it. That's why what might seem in context like a trivial event, pulled me up short. I couldn't begin to guess what the U.S. Institute of Peace actually did. It sounded like a front for a drug operation. And so I asked around and learned that the reason it never wound up in a file on my office floor with the federal agencies is that it wasn't a federal agency. It was a private corporation. Its employees weren't civil servants, but ordinary workers.
00:14:08
Speaker 5: The U.S.
00:14:08
Speaker 1: Institute of Peace wasn't a thing the president was supposed to control. Donald Trump had gone from paying no attention at all to the federal government to paying more attention than any president ever. He had become so interested in running the federal government that he was now trying to run even the parts of it that he wasn't meant to. The effect was to create a kind of negative space. The story to tell about Trump's first term was all about the price of ignorance and the risk of radical neglect. The story to tell about his second term was different. It was about all those people in roles in and around the United States government, once taken for granted, that were now gone. The second Trump administration was a bit like a meteor strike or some other massive environmental shift. It killed off entire species and made room for new ones. That different species had died in different ways and for different reasons only heightened the story's interest. It enabled you to cobble together the various wiped-out species into a portrait of the new environment. That new environment needed to be understood not merely by the new life forms it sustained, but by the old ones that it didn't. If you asked Colin O'Brien 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 when he was hiring someone for a security job, he looked not just for the protective instincts of an offensive lineman and a taste for work, those were a given, but for an extreme sensitivity to the environment. To be any good, you had to notice things that most people didn't. It might be that the landscaping or the lighting created possibilities for concealment, or that the wrong type of screw in a door frame caused it to fail faster under force. You have to see all the little things, said Colin. And you have to have a passion for it. The other quality Colin looked for was an ability to improvise. You can't war game out whatever shit is going to happen, he said. There's no checklist. When shit happens, nothing you think you know is going to work in the moment. Interviewing people for security work, he'd always try to surprise them. Have it come out of left field and see how they respond. How did they adapt to an uncomfortable situation? One time, after an applicant had sat down for what he assumed would be the conventional interview, Colin had simply tossed a tourniquet at him and said, What is this and how do you use it? I didn't care if he knew how to use a tourniquet, said Colin. I just wanted to see how he'd respond. For as long as Colin could remember, he'd wanted to be a cop. It is such a badass job. I love the idea of law enforcement. I love the idea of serving something bigger than myself, and I love catching bad guys. His parents hated the idea. They thought it was too dangerous. If you would have asked my parents, they would have told you I was going to grow out of it, said Colin. He didn't grow out of it. As he approached his high school graduation, his mother insisted he go on to college. Colin loved playing for his high school football team, offensive line and linebacker, but hated the classroom. He thought college would be a waste of money, and he didn't want to spend another minute, much less the rest of his life, behind a desk. He cut a deal with his mom. If she signed the papers that allowed him to enlist in the U.S. Army at the age of 17, he'd serve on active duty only the required five years. After that, if she still wanted him to go to college, he'd go to college. And then, this part he didn't tell her, he'd become a cop. He loved his mom and dad, but he was always his own guy. And in any case, the best way to show you loved your mom and dad was to insist on being who you were. He'd scored so high on the aptitude test that they told him he could pick his first assignment. He chose the place he knew the least about, South Korea. There he wound up assigned to the elite SWAT team as a sniper. He did well enough that they pulled him to work on the security detail of Leon Laporte, the four-star general who ran the region. I loved it, said Colin. When his five years were up, Laporte's successor, Burwell Baxter B.B. Bell III, another four-star general, called him into his office and told him that if he agreed to reenlist, he could have most any other job at his pay grade that he wanted in the U.S.
00:18:49
Speaker 5: Army.
00:18:51
Speaker 1: Colin found himself nervously explaining to General B.B. Bell how his mom had raised him to keep his promises and that he had made a promise to his mom. But he'd never lost his original ambitions. After studying constitutional law and graduating from the University of Maryland, he joined the Montgomery County Police Force. He was as suited to the job as he'd imagined, but it beat the hell out of him. In a police boxing class, they tossed him into a ring with a guy even bigger than him, who with a single punch broke Collins' neck. Another time, he found himself racing after four kids, speeding in a stolen car. The kids ran the car off the road and into a tree, where it caught fire. As Colin sprinted into the wreck to yank the kids out, the car exploded into flames ten feet high. He extracted the driver before grabbing a second kid who was on fire. I had one of those weird moments, said Colin. I just remembered the phrase, drop and roll. I dropped on top of him and rolled him down the street and the flames went out. That boy survived. The other two burned to death before he could get to them. The driver died later in the hospital. Colin emerged with burns and a broken shoulder that never again felt right. He'd spent eight years as a cop before leaving in 2016 when his body couldn't take it anymore. He'd gone from wearing a gun every day to reaching down only to realize he didn't have one. It took me a little bit before I was like, I don't have to have a gun to be safe. He'd gone from chasing down people who'd done bad things to preventing the bad things from happening in the first place. You can't really measure prevention, he said. When something bad does not happen... there's no clear way to prove why. Did it not occur because you noticed and fixed a problem no one else saw? Because you were good at your job? Because you were lucky? Or because nothing was ever going to happen in the first place? That ambiguity is part of the work. It's about noticing small details, understanding human behavior, and acting on things that feel just slightly out of place. When it works, nothing happens. His first encounter with Doge... on that Friday in March in 2025, had felt mostly like luck. They were the Keystone Cops, he said. They'd shown up with a dubious-looking document on Institute of Peace letterhead signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Pete Garvin, head of the National Defense University, the three ex officio members of the Institute's board. It announced that they were firing the Institute's acting president, George Moose, and replacing him with a Doge guy. But they didn't have the legal authority to do it. Colin, and for that matter, the FBI agents, could see the document was fake. The letterhead had been photocopied from some genuine Institute stationery, probably from the letter George Moose himself had sent to the Doge people to explain the law. That law wasn't complicated.
00:21:56
Speaker 2: It is the purpose of this title to establish an independent nonprofit national institute to serve the people and the government through the widest possible range of education and training, basic and applied research opportunities, and peace information services on the means to promote international peace and the resolution of conflicts among the nations and peoples of the world without recourse to violence.
00:22:27
Speaker 1: That was one of its nine big bullet points. Passed by Congress and signed by Ronald Reagan in 1984, the law stipulated that the U.S. Institute of Peace would be run by a board of 15 people, only eight of whom could belong to a single political party. All served longer terms than the president. The president could appoint board members but not remove them, except for extreme malfeasance. The White House had no control over its spending. The money for the new institute would come from both 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 whole point of the structure was to remove the U.S. Institute of Peace from day-to-day politics. There was a long history of these 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. In 1935, the Supreme Court upheld, by unanimous vote, the right of Congress to breed mongrel institutions, and Congress had since bred more of them. But in a funny way, the U.S. Institute of Peace predated them all, even the Red Cross. In his final address to Congress in 1796, George Washington had proposed creating two private but national colleges, one to train warriors, the other to train peacemakers. Six years later, Congress agreed to fund West Point, but not the Peace College, whose merits were the subject of an on-again, off-again debate for the next 188 years. The idea got a massive push after the Vietnam War from a handful of United States senators who'd served in combat and emerged from the experience with a conviction that the best war was the war that never happened, and that one way to prevent war was to invest a bit more in the art of peace. Yeah, you can have a Department of War, but what you really want to do is stay out of war, said Colin. How do you stop people from blowing other people up? These were people who genuinely want to make the world a less shitty place. 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 Kavanaugh 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. Plus, of course, the entire two-million-person civil service. This attempt to strip a building from its rightful owner was a pure assertion of power, an attempt to change the way the government had been run for more than a century, to reduce it to nothing more or less than a servant of whoever happens to be president. Holding the building meant more to Colin than just holding the building. I knew what I was fighting for, he said. I knew what I was trying to protect. By the time he ushered Nate Kavanaugh back into his big black car, Colin had a fully formed opinion of him. It wasn't favorable. He had these white Converse sneakers that make you want to scuff them with whatever you have, said Colin. Had this air of superiority. You could feel him looking down on you. Whatever he was up to, 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. What was happening felt to Colin less like cost-cutting than total destruction. 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. He heard them talk about the traits that the Institute possessed, lacked by other quasi-government institutions, that enhanced its likelihood of survival. Number one, they were tiny. The Institute's $ 55 million annual budget was. 0007857 % of the federal budget. Number two, They had nothing inside it labeled diversity, equity, and inclusion. Their workforce was diverse, but they came by that without making a point of it. Number three, people close to Trump, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, had long supported the Institute's work. Number four, Trump's obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize. Destroying something called the United States Institute of Peace would look bad on his application. Number five, the actual importance of their work. Though how many Americans, let alone the Americans who had just moved into the White House, could tell you what they did? Number six, their legal independence. Even as the Doge people drove off, and 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. As he said, to keep possession of the building until we can get in front of a judge. But the situation was moving fast. The next day, Saturday, March 15th, Colin received a phone call from a retired former employee of the private company Intercon 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 him if he was still in charge of the Institute's security guards. These fucking kids just ran it through grok, said Colin, and they think he's still in charge of security. That's when the light bulb went off in my head. They're going to use Intercon to get into the building.
00:29:08
Speaker 3: The U.S.
00:29:09
Speaker 1: Department of State alone paid Intercon orders $ 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, Intercon wouldn't think twice. I realize that we need to get rid of the guards, said Colin, that the way to make us safer is to get rid of the people protecting us. When he was done, there was only one outstanding key to the single mechanical lock on the entire building. held by Kevin Simpson, who oversaw Intercon's security guards. Colin couldn't find him, and in any case, he was an old and trusted friend of several people who worked for the Institute of Peace. Colin hoped that if Doge found him, Kevin Simpson would just keep mum about the key. Of all the people out there, he said, Kevin is the person I can trust. On Sunday, Colin had another phone call, this one from a senior FBI agent named Doug Silk. Silk told Colin that he was under investigation by the Department of Justice for the events of March 14th and asked him to come in that day for questioning. I said, yeah, that's not going to happen. Then, because he was not home when he received the threat, Colin called his wife and told her to lock the doors to their house and not let anyone in. no matter who they said they were. He got to work at five the next morning, St. Patrick's Day. They'd told the staff to stay home, so it was just him and George Moose and their lawyers. I know their objective was going to be to destroy us, said Colin. And I know I was being asked to be the D.C. version of Davy Crockett. And I know that the analogy is not exact. He was looking out over the streets from an upper story window when he saw them approach. It's three vehicles, a Dogemobile, a tinted-out black Tahoe or Escalade, followed by a Tesla.
00:31:06
Speaker 3: And a Jeep.
00:31:07
Speaker 1: He watched as an intercom guy named Derek left one of the cars and tried to open the front door. His badge doesn't work, said Colin. The U.S. Institute of Peace building hadn't been designed to repel an invading force. It had been designed to emit light. It was all clerestory windows topped by a roof of glass panels shaped like the wings of a dove. The Valhalla of think tank architecture, one critic called it. Colin had no idea where the next assault would come from, but he knew the most vulnerable point in his defense. The side door. The door that still had the mechanical lock. Colin's hope that the Doge people would never find Kevin Simpson, or his key, faded 15 minutes after the Dogemobiles pulled up. when Simpson himself appeared inside the building. Colin descended to find him and three other intercom patrol people in plain clothes just wandering around.
00:32:05
Speaker 3: D.C.
00:32:05
Speaker 1: Law banned the security officers who protected the courthouses and agencies and embassies from carrying their weapons home from work. The guns needed to be stored someplace. The only odd fact about the gun room in the basement of the Institute of Peace is is that neither Colin nor anyone who actually worked for the Institute knew the code to open the safe. The 34 9mm Glocks were owned and controlled by Intercon. The Intercon cops headed straight to the basement. Colin had someone call the D.C. police to report trespassers. The D.C. police didn't show. After the Intercon guards secured their guns, they toured the building like they owned it, refusing either to answer questions or surrender Simpson's key. The Institute, out of the kindness of its heart, was still paying their salaries. They were now an obviously hostile presence, but they didn't really know how to play the new role. At one point, they gathered all together in one place, the portico. Colin seized that moment to throw the portico into lockdown. The portico was self-contained. At the press of a button, Colin turned it into a prison cell. He couldn't forcibly eject a battalion of armed private security guys all by himself. but he could stop them from leaving and others from entering. For the next two hours, he watched the intercom guys on the security cam pushing on doors that wouldn't yield and making phone calls to anyone they thought might rescue them. They were pissed, said Colin. With the guards all trapped, Colin walked outside and removed the mechanical lock cylinder from the side door so no one else could use a key to enter. It's not a fire code violation if you can't get into the building, he explained. That triggered some irate phone calls to his boss, George Moose, whom Colin had safely locked behind roughly ten different doors on the fifth floor of the building. The first call was Intercon's CEO, angrily but more or less politely asking Moose to tell Colin O'Brien that he needed to release his guards. The final, less polite call came from the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin. At length, Colin unlocked the outside door to the portico. and the security guards exited the building. An hour later, there came a knock on another door. The D.C. police. Finally, Colin thought, the D.C. police are doing their fucking jobs. Someone opened the door and in-streamed an army of cops, followed by a bunch of intercom guys and, trotting after them, Nate Cavanaugh, along with more Doge people. They're ordering the D.C. cops around like their own private army, said Colin. I didn't see that coming. I didn't see the police taking sides. It's like the cops showing up at your house and saying, get the fuck out. These people live here now. As the D.C. cops escorted Colin from the building, the senior Intercon guy approached him and said he was sorry that it had gone down this way, but that Doge had given him no choice. They had indeed threatened to pull Intercon's $ 460 million State Department contract. Doge soon selected the next president of the U.S. Institute of Peace. Nate Kavanaugh, who until that moment had exhibited zero interest in or knowledge of the United States government or its foreign policy, who promptly moved the title of the Institute's building into the General Services Administration, swept its money into government accounts, and fired nearly its entire staff. A mere two days, Colin couldn't help but notice, before their health insurance was set to renew. There was intent to hurt these families, he said. It was, let's fuck 400 families, and then they laughed about it. In his time as a police officer, Colin had seen many different kinds of anger. There was the fury of the drunk NFL defensive lineman who bull rushed him and proved to Colin that his taser worked. That was just the alcohol doing its job, and the lineman apologized the next day. There was the anger of victims after the law failed to satisfy their need for vengeance. That felt more like frustration. There was the general hatred of the police, but that didn't really feel personal, and Colin never took it personally. Police rarely meet people on their best day, he said. Whatever was animating these doge people didn't feel like any of those. They weren't reacting to an event, said Colin. They were on a crusade. Their hostility didn't come from fear, loss, and pain. It came from a lack of empathy and an inability to deal with complexity. It was just fundamentally different from anything I had encountered before. But in their attitude to the world around them, they did remind Colin of something that had happened back when he was a cop. He'd responded to a home invasion in a poor black neighborhood. His partner was a younger guy who had come from a well-to-do family. They had arrived at the scene to find a terrified and distraught single mother with two small children. Her next-door neighbor was a drug dealer, she explained. and these disturbed addicts kept mistaking her apartment for his. They kept breaking in to steal drugs. Colin's partner had listened to her and then said matter-of-factly, why don't you just move? And Colin thought, this guy has no ability to imagine himself into her situation. Why does that happen, he asked. Because this is someone who has no worldly experience to understand that she can't move. It simply didn't occur to the guy. just as it didn't seriously occur to Nate Kavanaugh, to consider the suffering he was making possible. Once Doge had control of the building, Nate and the other guys went rooting around in the Institute's computers. Elon Musk was given first crack at the fresh material. Then the Doge account on X posted a list of their findings.
00:38:10
Speaker 4: Each year, the United States Institute for Peace, UCIB, receives $ 55 million in congressional taxpayer funds. Prior management would sweep excess funds into its private endowment, zero congressional oversight. In the past 10 years, USIP has transferred about $ 13 million to its private endowment, mainly used for private events and travel. USIP contracts, now canceled, include $ 132, 000 to Mohamed Qasem Halimi, an ex-Taliban member who was Afghanistan's former chief of protocol. $ 2, 232, 500 to its outside accountant, who attempted to delete over one terabyte of accounting data, now recovered, after new leadership entered the building. $ 1, 307, 061 to the Al-Tadamun Iraqi League for Youth. $ 675, 000 for private aviation services.
00:39:18
Speaker 1: The list was both interesting and true, but as it turned out, the bits that were interesting weren't true, and the bits that were true weren't interesting. For instance, the law that had created the Institute required it to move any unused funds into its endowment, and so, by law, for the past 40 years, that's what they'd done. The Institute was also required by law to hire an accountant to audit its books every year so that it might report its spending to Congress. For those services, it paid roughly $ 380, 000 a year. The amount that Doge accused the Institute of Spending on its accountants corresponded not to their accountants' bill, but to a six-year contract for legal services. The actual sum paid to the Al-Tataman Iraqi League for Youth was not more than a million dollars, but less than half that. The money had funded a single project, which, because it had such obvious value, had been explicitly approved by Marco Rubio. Essentially, it was an attempt to reduce extremism and anti-American terrorism. The collapse of the Bashar al-Assad government in December 2024 had stranded thousands of Iraqis, mostly women and children, in a camp in Syria's northeast. The Islamic State had gained some traction inside the camp, which back in 2019 had held 30,000 refugees, and the godforsaken place had become a breeding ground for future ISIS fighters. The institute's local Iraqi staff, members of the League for Youth, had been working successfully with the U.S. State Department to persuade village elders in Iraq to accept the refugees in their villages and provide them a path to a peaceful life. Before they accepted anyone, the elders demanded evidence that they have no connection to ISIS or any other terrorist group. The Institute's staff arranged small conferences to walk the elders through the personal histories of the refugees. The Institute footed the bill for the venues plus the tea and coffee, and occasionally lunch. God knows the efficiency of that particular effort. No one inside Doge seems ever to have bothered to ask. Had they dug a bit, they could have found evidence that similar sorts of programs had been wildly efficient. For example, the work the Institute of Peace had done in 2007 in Iraq, in an area south of Baghdad, that had become known as the Triangle of Death. A region of a million people was riven by tribal warfare, and laced with insurgents, who had killed 54 members of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division and wounded hundreds more. At the behest of the Army, the Institute had brought together 30 elders of warring tribes. The Institute's structure, both an instrument of the United States and removed from its political control, created a useful ambiguity. It allowed it to facilitate conversations that official government authorities could not. Years earlier, a scholar named I. William Zartman, working on an Institute of Peace grant, had framed the idea of the hurting stalemate. His big point was the success of a peace initiative might have less to do with the specifics of the proposal than with its timing. So long as neither side saw any value in moving away from their anger and their violence, there wasn't much you could say or do to stop them fighting. But when both sensed that anger and violence weren't going to get them what they wanted, when the status quo became sufficiently painful, they became vulnerable to peace. The trick was to have trusted people on the ground who could spot these moments and seize them. The Institute's staff had started by handing out questionnaires for the warring Iraqi tribal leaders to fill out anonymously. Each made his list of grievances. The lists were then passed around for everyone to read. and something happened. The collective realization of how they'd all endured the same terrible losses took just enough steam out of the room that they began to talk. The talks led to peace that has lasted to this day. Inside the Institute's servers, the Doge guys might have found evidence of this triumph. For example, the letter of thanks from General David Petraeus. In the Pentagon's view, the Institute had saved both American lives and taxpayer dollars. Before the Institute became involved, the U.S. Army had been spending $ 150 million a month to pacify the Triangle of Death. The peace talks cost a million dollars. The savings they yielded were likely greater than the entire cost up to that point of the Institute of Peace. The most disturbing item on Doge's list was the $ 132, 000 sent to Mohamed Qasem Halimi. In the 1990s, Halimi, a religious scholar, had indeed worked in the Taliban-run government as a liaison to foreign diplomats. It was the only good job I could find, he explained to ProPublica. But after the 9-11 attack and the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in December 2001, he'd quit the Taliban and served American interests. the Taliban had tried three times to assassinate him.
00:44:41
Speaker 4: The U.S.
00:44:41
Speaker 1: Institute of Peace had paid him $ 10, 000 a month for a variety of services. Halimi had fled the country with the U.S. military, but he maintained a network that reported to him on the Taliban's treatment of women, information that the U.S. State Department was unable to gather any other way. He had earned the trust of religious scholars across the region so that he might point out when the Taliban's behavior violated the Koran. and they, in turn, might pressure the Taliban to modify its behavior. In Trump's first term, Halimi had actually prepped U.S. negotiators for their talks with the Taliban. He wasn't exactly an American spy, but he was certainly an ally. By outing him on social media, Musk had essentially exposed a U.S. asset to enemies of America. After the tweet, the Taliban rounded up Halimi's relatives still living in Afghanistan and for beatings and imprisonment. So much of what Nate Kavanaugh and his doge pals claimed was obviously outrageous. But what especially infuriated Colin O'Brien was the final item on their list, $ 675, 000 for private aviation services. When the United States finished pulling out of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, it imperiled the lives of every Afghan who had helped, including the Institute of Peace's local staff, and their families. The male staffers assumed that if they fell into the Taliban's hands, they'd be summarily executed. The female staffers expected to be enslaved and packed off into forced marriages. It fell to the Institute's security chief to extract what in the end amounted to 256 people. That was the only private aviation service the Institute had engaged. It was one fucking flight, said Colin. A 737 from Kabul to Qatar. To get them out before they were taken by the Taliban. You said we have private jets. Fuck you. We had a charter plane to rescue our people from a war zone. He took pride in that exercise. Their final two Afghan employees, who had been working in a remote part of the country and were unable to make the flight, Colin had arranged to be smuggled across the Pakistan border and kept hidden from the Pakistani government for three years before getting them to safety. A few weeks after the barrage of distortions and deceptions, Musk gathered his team on Fox News. The idea was to use host Jesse Waters' open sympathy for what they had done to reveal to the American people the specific waste and fraud they'd uncovered. As Exhibit A, Musk introduced Nate Kavanaugh and his work inside the U.S. Institute of Peace.
00:47:33
Speaker 5: What has been the biggest resistance? Is there one agency?
00:47:38
Speaker 4: Is there one department that when you guys walk in, they all start fighting you, start hiding things?
00:47:46
Speaker 3: I thought you weren't going to talk.
00:47:49
Speaker 1: I'm sorry.
00:47:51
Speaker 3: But I guess you can answer that question.
00:47:54
Speaker 5: Sure.
00:47:55
Speaker 3: I mean, yes, we've certainly had some battles.
00:47:58
Speaker 4: Battles?
00:47:59
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah. I mean, who should talk about you, Seb?
00:48:04
Speaker 3: Oh, Nate. Okay.
00:48:06
Speaker 5: The small agency called the United States Institute of Peace is definitely the agency we had the most fight at. We actually went into the agency and found they had loaded guns inside of their headquarters.
00:48:19
Speaker 3: Institute for Peace.
00:48:20
Speaker 4: I mean, any given company, any given organizational name is going to kind of be the opposite of the title. Right.
00:48:25
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, and so it was the, by far the least peaceful agency that we've worked with, ironically. Additionally, we found that they were spending money on things like private jets, and they even had a $ 130, 000 contract with a former member of the Taliban.
00:48:40
Speaker 1: This is real.
00:48:41
Speaker 5: We don't encounter that at most agencies.
00:48:45
Speaker 1: That is how Colin O'Brien had lost the building. He'd expected to lose it, but still he was surprised by how it had gone down. It really was true that in security work, you could never war game out what eventually happened. He had lost the building to its own private security company after it was blackmailed by the Trump administration. To the D.C. police, which for some reason were now acting as a private security force for these random kids Elon Musk had empowered. To the FBI, which had somehow reconfigured itself as yet another battalion in the White House's army. Thrust into this new environment, these people and institutions had done what they needed to do to survive. All that now mattered was power. Who had physical control of a building? Who had the guns? an institution dedicated to the idea that conflict did not need to lead to violence, now found itself in a society in which might meant right. Of course it had to die. Legally, the battle wasn't completely over. In mid-May, U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell of Washington issued a scathing ruling that required the Trump administration to vacate the buildings. Colin had the brief pleasure of rolling in with an army of off-duty Baltimore cops, old pals of his, and taking it back. And finding that the Institute's flags had been stolen, its logo had been ripped from the wall, and that the Doge Boys had left behind a pile of beer bottles and cheap weed. A month later, a panel of Trump-appointed judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a stay, and the building was returned to the Trump administration. And in December 2025, it was renamed Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace.
