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.
Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, responded to questions about the suit by repeating a statement she made Monday, when the White House accused institute staff members of ignoring Mr. Trump’s executive order.
“Rogue bureaucrats will not be allowed to hold agencies hostage,” Ms. Kelly said.
The suit accuses Mr. Trump of not abiding by the 1984 legislation that created the institute as an independent nonprofit organization when the White House fired all but three members of the board of directors on Friday. The remaining three board members — Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Peter A. Garvin, the president of the National Defense University — then replaced the institute’s acting president, George Moose, with Mr. Jackson.
The suit asks the court to order that Mr. Moose cannot be “removed, denied or obstructed” from continuing as the institute’s president. 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.
The simmering dispute between the Trump administration and the institute burst into the public eye on Monday, when Mr. Jackson and a DOGE team arrived at the agency’s offices and attempted to enter. They were held off by the institute’s lawyers, who negotiated with Mr. Jackson while Mr. Moose and some staff members refused to leave.
Washington’s 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.
The institute’s office is situated 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.