Officials at an independent institute dedicated to promoting peace will ask a federal judge on Wednesday to block the Trump administration officials and Elon Musk’s government cost-cutting team from mounting what they called a “lawless assault” against it.
The organization, the U.S. Institute of Peace, sued President Trump and others on Tuesday, asking the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia to intervene against what it said was an illegal “takeover by force.”
A standoff on Monday between the institute and Mr. Musk’s team ended when police officers helped evict staff members from the institute’s headquarters in Washington. That came after the White House has in recent days gutted the institute’s board and appointed a new acting president.
Mr. Trump signed an executive order last month directing the institute to reduce its operations to the “statutory minimum.” But institute officials have said that Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk do not have the authority to dismantle its operations because the organization is a congressionally chartered nonprofit that is not part of the executive branch.
In the lawsuit, the institute said that the executive order incorrectly labeled the organization as a “government entity.” It accuses members of Mr. Musk’s Department for Government Efficiency and others of having “plundered” the agency’s office “in an effort to access and gain control of the Institute’s infrastructure, including sensitive computer systems.
The Justice Department pushed back on claims the institute is not a government entity, and said that the president did have the power to remove members of its board. In response to the lawsuit, department lawyers argued that the institute could not file such a complaint, because it had not been authorized by its new acting president, Kenneth Jackson, a State Department official.