The U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) launched a chaotic, short-lived rebellion against Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Monday, sabotaging their own building and communications infrastructure in a failed attempt to resist a Trump administration takeover, sources exclusively told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The standoff stemmed from President Donald Trump’s Feb. 19 executive order demanding the dramatic downsizing of numerous federally-funded organizations, explicitly requiring USIP to reduce its operations and personnel to the minimum levels required by law. //

Further reinforcing the deliberate, calculated nature of the rebellion, an internal memo from Feb. 6 titled “External Agency Visitor Procedure,” also obtained exclusively by the DCNF, outlined detailed contingency plans for resisting the Trump administration’s attempts at a leadership transition. The document asserts USIP’s discretion over its own facilities, security protocols and access control, buttressing the leadership’s belief that they could reject external overseers.

It also postulates the institute’s control over its own physical infrastructure, implying leadership believed they had the authority to disable security systems, destroy locks and otherwise render the building inoperable as a means of resistance. The document confirms advanced planning more than ten days before Trump’s inciting executive order, contradicting the outward appearance of Monday’s showdown as a spontaneous and purely reactionary resistance.