A federal judge on Wednesday declined to temporarily block the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s government cost-cutting team from seizing control of an independent peace-promoting institute, which has accused the administration of mounting 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.”
In a hearing on Wednesday, Judge Beryl Howell said she was “very offended” by how Mr. Musk’s team, the Department of Government Efficiency, had operated at the institute and how it “treated American citizens trying to do their jobs.” Judge Howell expressed disbelief as she recounted the administration’s use of multiple law enforcement agencies in its bid to gain access to the institute’s headquarters “with the force of guns.”
But Judge Howell said she based her decision on the limits of the law, and that she was concerned the institute would not succeed on the legal merits of the case because the board members had filed suit in their official capacity. The White House dismissed them from those roles on Friday.
The move to gut the board, as well as the appointment of a new acting president, incited a standoff with the institute. It reached a peak on Monday when police officers helped evict staff members from the institute’s headquarters in Washington and allowed Mr. Musk’s team and Trump administration officials to enter.
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 the organization’s operations because it 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.” The institute accused members of Mr. Musk’s team 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.”
It also accused them of destroying documents, which a Justice Department lawyer, Brian P. Hudak, denied in court on Wednesday.
The Justice Department pushed back on claims the institute was not a government entity, and argued that the president did indeed have the power to remove members of its board even if the manner of firing them did not follow a process laid out in law. In response to the lawsuit, lawyers for the U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Columbia 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.
Judge Howell pried at that question, asking Andrew Goldfarb, a lawyer who filed the complaint on behalf of the institute, “Who’s giving you as counsel the right to represent the U.S. Institute of Peace?”
In a briefing on Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called the institute staff and the former acting president “rogue bureaucrats,” and said that the White House learned they were refusing to accept their ouster only after being informed by Mr. Musk’s team and the State Department.
“This is what DOGE and this administration is facing: It’s a resistance from bureaucrats who don’t want to see change in this city,” Ms. Leavitt said.
The suit accuses Mr. Trump of not abiding by the 1984 legislation that created the institute as an independent nonprofit when the White House fired all but three members of its board on Friday. The remaining three board members — Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Peter A. Garvin, the president of National Defense University — then replaced the institute’s acting president, George Moose, with Mr. Jackson.
Mr. Rubio, Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Garvin are also named as defendants, along with Mr. Jackson, who was involved in the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
In Wednesday’s hearing, Judge Howell said she had studied some of the numerous other challenges to Mr. Trump’s attempts to wield the executive branch’s dominion over the government and gut agencies like U.S.A.I.D. Some of those challenges have succeeded in curtailing Mr. Trump’s reach.
She suggested the dispute between the administration and the institute should have been resolved in court, without the involvement of law enforcement.
The Metropolitan Police Department said that its officers were called to the institute on Monday afternoon by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, an arm of the Justice Department, over reports that there were “unauthorized individuals inside of the building that were refusing to leave.”
The police department said documents were provided showing that Mr. Jackson “was lawfully in charge of the facility” and officers left the scene once all those inside the building had left.
“All that targeting, probably terrorizing of employees and staff at the institute when there are so many other lawful ways to accomplish the goals?” Judge Howell said on Wednesday. “Why? Just because DOGE was in a rush?”
Mr. Hudak, the lawyer for the Justice Department, argued law enforcement had to get involved because the institute’s staff had behaved like disgruntled employees who, despite being fired, locked themselves in the office and refused to leave.
The institute’s office is on land owned by the Navy. But the organization said that its headquarters, a white glass-roofed building designed with five levels of window walls as a symbol of transparency, was funded by private donors.
