Michael Lewis on the Lone Security Guard Who Resisted DOGE
By Michael Lewis - October 2, 2026
COLIN O’BRIEN was the chief security officer at the United States Institute of Peace. Mostly that meant keeping the institute’s 400 employees, scattered across 28 difficult countries, safe from harm.
Mostly, he’d succeeded. A mission in southern Iraq had tamped down tribal warfare and insurgency without bloodshed. There’d been close calls in Haiti, and Colin himself had been with a group that had come under rocket fire in Kyiv, but no one had been killed.
Now, on this late afternoon of March 14, 2025, the threat was right here, in Washington, D.C. Three young men from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were trying to argue their way into the institute building—a building that housed an institute that should have been far removed from the politics of the day.
The 1984 law signed by Ronald Reagan establishing the U.S. Institute of Peace stipulated that it would be run by a board of 15 people, only eight of whom could belong to a single political party. The money for the new institute would come from Congress and private donations. The land for its building would be leased to the institute for free, in perpetuity. The building wound up being paid for with $100 million from Congress and $70 million in private donations. But it was wholly owned by the private corporation. The White House had no control over its spending.
Once DOGE got inside, it was game over. Just as it had been at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the African Development Foundation and a bunch of other places.
During the presidential campaign, Colin hadn’t taken DOGE seriously. Trump’s promise to create a Department of Government Efficiency run by Elon Musk felt, to Colin, like his promise to make Mexico pay for the wall, or to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. “It was not something that would ever survive contact with reality,” said Colin.
His views changed after DOGE busted into federal agencies to shut them down and Congress had failed to respond. “If that could happen in broad daylight with no response, then no organization was safe,” he said.
He’d left work early that day. His daughter needed help with her math homework, and he assumed nothing would happen late on a Friday afternoon. Then came the call from one of his guys saying that these DOGE kids were on the sidewalk and asking to be let in. Colin immediately sent a text to his IT people that said simply, “Shut it down,” and they’d instantly thrown the building into lockdown. After the magnetic locks snapped shut, no one on the inside could get out and no one on the outside could get in. By the time Colin arrived, the three DOGE guys had given up and left.
Two hours later they returned with reinforcements: a rare DOGE female and two FBI agents. This time Colin went out to meet them.
The DOGE trio didn’t have a warrant or a court order or really anything except attitudes. One of the FBI men told Colin that he was just hoping “to facilitate a cordial conversation.” But the lead DOGE guy, Nate Cavanaugh, was not cordial. “He was expecting me to jump to,” said Colin.
Colin wasn’t really built to jump to. His appearance was deceptive. He was big and broad, like an offensive tackle, with an army haircut and a polite attentiveness that suggested he was just here to take orders. What he was really doing was watching you closely and figuring out just how full of s—you were.
He knew what little was public about Nate Cavanaugh: that he’d dropped out of Indiana University to start a tech company in Los Angeles. His authority came entirely from his personal association with Elon Musk, whose own came from his personal association with Donald Trump. By night he and some other 20-something DOGE guys were bunking with Musk on the sixth floor of the General Services Administration, like it was another tech startup. By day he was marching into other executive office buildings and telling everyone that he was now in charge and they were fired.
Eventually, the DOGE team gave up and left. Colin unlocked the building and let out the few employees who remained inside the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Then he waited for DOGE to return.
BACK IN 2016, the first time Donald Trump was running for president, Chris Christie, former New Jersey governor and close Trump ally, assembled a transition team of 500 or so people, many of them with government experience. The idea was that if Trump won, his team would rush into the federal government, figure out what was going on, and teach the president-elect whatever he needed to know. Instead, right after the 2016 election, Trump fired his entire transition team.
The U.S. government was arguably the most complex and powerful machine ever designed by man. Trump had no personal experience inside it. Right after the election, experts from across the federal government sat around waiting for someone from the Trump administration to turn up. In many agencies no one showed, or they showed up months late.
Mostly that didn’t seem to matter. Or, if it mattered, it was hard to see why. The federal bureaucracy wasn’t exactly out of touch with the society it served, but its society was out of touch with it. For better and worse, the U.S. government has a crude autopilot feature that, like a Tesla’s, works well enough to lull you into a stupor.
The U.S. government’s performance in the global pandemic may partly explain why Trump’s second collision with the U.S. government felt so different from the first.
This time, instead of firing his transition team after the election, Trump created the most energetic and empowered transition team in history and put the world’s most famous businessman in charge of it. The stated ambition of the Department of Government Efficiency was huge. From annual federal spending just shy of $7 trillion, Elon Musk claimed he could cut $2 trillion.
In just the first couple of months, his team had either closed or shrunk beyond recognition entire federal agencies: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Education Department, USAID and more.
Then in mid-March they invaded the U.S. Institute of Peace.
There was a long history of congressionally bred mongrels—institutions that both received help from and gave help to the federal government while remaining privately controlled—the first of which had been the Red Cross, back in 1900.
Of all the mongrel institutions created by Congress—the Federal Trade Commission, the Inter-American Foundation, the Legal Services Corporation, and others—the U.S. Institute of Peace was legally the most removed from presidential control.
If Elon Musk, acting on behalf of Donald Trump, could send Nate Cavanaugh in to just take the building away and fire everyone inside, he could take anything and fire anyone. The Federal Reserve, for example. Or the Kennedy Center. Or the entire two-million-person civil service.
IF YOU ASKED COLIN what made a person a good security officer, he’d start by telling you what didn’t. “The problem in the security field is that there are so many asshats in it,” he’d say. “Either they’re Paul Blart the Mall Cop and just mailing it in. Or they’re the Navy SEAL who wants to tell you what a badass Navy SEAL they were.”
If you pressed him a bit, he’d tell you that one of the qualities he looked for was an ability to improvise. “You can’t wargame out whatever s—is going to happen,” he said. “There’s no checklist. When s—happens, nothing you think you know is going to work in the moment.”
His first encounter with DOGE, on that Friday in March in 2025, had felt mostly like luck. They’d shown up with a dubious-looking document that announced that they were firing the institute’s acting president and replacing him with a DOGE guy, but didn’t have the legal authority to do it.
The attempt to strip a building from its rightful owner was a pure assertion of power. “I knew what I was fighting for,” Colin said. “I knew what I was trying to protect.”
By the time he ushered Nate Cavanaugh back into his big black car, Colin had a fully formed opinion of him. “Had this air of superiority. You could feel him looking down on you.” (Cavanaugh declined to be interviewed.)
Whatever Cavanaugh was up to, as far as Colin could see, it wasn’t deficit reduction. More than 80% of federal spending went to national defense, entitlement programs and interest payments on the federal debt. DOGE wasn’t even pretending to touch any of that. Anyway, Congress controlled federal spending, and DOGE was making no effort to engage Congress.
The people who ran the U.S. Institute of Peace were less fatalistic than Colin. They believed they could survive. “They thought they could hide in the tall grass,” said Colin.
But even as the DOGE people drove off, even as his bosses made hopeful noises, Colin was almost sure that the institute was doomed. “These people I work for are eternal optimists, and they believe in the rule of law,” he said. “I’m thinking: You can’t fight an army with a piece of paper.” His goal was now simple: “to keep possession of the building until we can get in front of a judge.”
The next day, Saturday, March 15, Colin received a phone call from a retired former employee of the private company, Inter-Con, that the Institute of Peace hired to guard the building. The guy told Colin he’d just gotten this weird call from the FBI asking if he was still in charge of the institute’s security guards.
“These f—ing kids just ran it through Grok,” said Colin. “And they think he’s still in charge of security. That’s when the lightbulb went off in my head. They’re going to use Inter-Con to get into the building.”
The U.S. Department of State alone paid Inter-Con $460 million a year to guard its properties. If forced to choose between that and the $2.7 million they were being paid by the Institute of Peace, Inter-Con wouldn’t think twice.
“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 Inter-Con’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.
On Sunday Colin had another phone call, this one from a senior FBI agent who 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 5 the next morning, St. Patrick’s Day. They’d told the staff to stay home, so it was just him and his boss, 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 DOGE-mobile—a tinted-out black Tahoe or Escalade. Followed by a Tesla and a Jeep.”
Colin’s hope that the DOGE people would never find Kevin Simpson, or his key, faded 15 minutes after the DOGE-mobiles pulled up, when Simpson himself appeared inside the building.
Colin descended to find him and three other Inter-Con patrol people wandering around. D.C. 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 that neither Colin nor anyone else who actually worked for the institute knew the code to open the safe. The 34 9mm Glocks were owned and controlled by Inter-Con. The Inter-Con 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 Inter-Con guards secured their guns, they toured the building like they owned it, refusing either to answer questions or surrender Simpson’s key.
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 Inter-Con guys on the security cam pushing on doors that wouldn’t yield. “They were pissed,” said Colin.
That triggered some irate phone calls to the institute’s outside general counsel, George Foote. (Colin had stashed George Moose behind roughly ten locked doors on the fifth floor of the building.) The first call was Inter-Con’s CEO angrily but more or less politely asking Foote to tell Moose to tell Colin O’Brien that he needed to release his guards. The final, less polite call came from the office of Ed Martin, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. 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 f—ing jobs.In streamed an army of cops, followed by a bunch of Inter-Con guys and, trotting after them, Nate Cavanaugh, along with more DOGE people. “They are 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.”
As the D.C. cops escorted Colin from the building, the senior Inter-Con guy approached him and said he was sorry that it had gone down this way but that DOGE had given him no choice. They’d indeed threatened to pull Inter-Con’s $460 million State Department contract.
DOGE soon selected the new president of the U.S. Institute of Peace: Nate Cavanaugh. 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 could not help but note, before their health insurance was set to renew.
Once they had control of the building, Nate and the other guys went rooting around in the institute’s computers. Elon Musk was given a crack at the fresh material. Then the DOGE account on X posted a list of their findings.
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-Tadhamun Iraqi League for Youth was not more than a million dollars but less than half that. The money had funded a single project that, because it had such obvious value according to criteria set by Marco Rubio, had been explicitly approved by the State Department.
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 Iraqi refugees, and it 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 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 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 brought together 30 elders of warring tribes. The staff had started by handing out questionnaires 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.
In the Pentagon’s view, according to a letter of thanks from General David Petraeus, the initiative had saved American lives. 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.
What especially infuriated Colin was the final item on their list: $675,000 for private aviation services. When the U.S. 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. It fell to USIP’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 f—ing flight,” said Colin. “A 737 from Kabul to Qatar. To get them out before they were taken by the Taliban. You said we had private jets. F—you. We had a charter plane to rescue our people from a war zone.”
COLIN O’BRIEN HAD LOST the first round over the physical building. Legally, the battle wasn’t 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 building.
Colin had the brief pleasure of rolling in with an army of off-duty Baltimore cops, old pals of his, and taking it back. Once inside, he found 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.
But 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.
ssAdapted from “Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State” by Michael Lewis, to be published on October 6, 2026, by W.W. Norton & Company. Copyright © 2026 by Michael Lewis.