A judge in the District of Columbia allowed the $ 500 million headquarters of the US Institute of Peace to be seized without compensation after almost all employees were fired and its operations were closed by Elon Musk's Office of Government Efficiency (DOGE), reported Wired magazine, citing court documents.
Representatives of the institute demanded compensation for the transfer of the building to the US General Services Administration (GSA), since the institution, officially founded during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, is in no way connected with the executive branch, operates independently and is funded by Congress and private donors. It was also noted that the building itself, worth $ 500 million. UDS, was built with private investments and the state has nothing to do with it. The court denied the claims for damages and also noted that the transfer of the building had already been completed.
“It's like letting a burglar break into your house, steal your TV, and then the court says, well, the TV is gone, so there's nothing we can do,“ George Foote, general counsel at the U.S. Institute of Peace, told Wired.
A GSA representative in court, speaking about the need to get the building, noted that the transfer of the institute's headquarters “is a priority of the Trump-Vance administration“, but the budget is not ready to pay for it.
In late March, Musk's department ordered mass layoffs at the institute. After conducting layoffs among specialists and the institution's leadership, DOGE achieved the appointment of an acting director. president of the institute, an employee who previously held a position in the GSA. The new administrator initiated the gratuitous transfer of the building to the GSA, despite the fact that formally in such cases the state must compensate for the cost of the seized property. The dismissed employees of the US Institute of Peace filed a lawsuit arguing that the mass layoffs were illegal and demanded that the process of transferring the headquarters to the state be stopped.
The US Institute of Peace was founded in 1984 as a national, nonpartisan, and independent of the executive branch institution, whose stated purpose is to promote the resolution and prevention of conflicts around the world.
< p>Source: tass.ru
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