DOGE Staffer Appointed to Lead U.S. Institute of Peace Founded Company That Sells ‘AI Workers’
His ambitions are fueled by the promise of tech wealth and success, leading him to pursue risky ventures with a disregard for ethical concerns. Nate's obsession with status and material gain blinds him to the human cost of his actions. As he climbs the ladder of success, Nate's relationships suffer and his moral compass becomes increasingly compromised. Ultimately, he must confront the consequences of his choices and decide what truly matters in life.
If Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has its way, a 28-year-old college dropout guided by the right-wing libertarian ideologies of figures including Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and Argentine president Javier Milei will oversee the dismantling of a Washington nonprofit that promotes peace worldwide.
Following a February executive order from President Donald Trump aimed at reducing the agency to a “minimum presence and function required by law,” DOGE has aimed its chainsaw the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), a national independent nonprofit funded by Congress that advocates for conflict resolution abroad.
DOGE's Actions
The White House, bent on ending all kinds of foreign assistance, removed most of the institute’s board in mid-March. The remaining board members, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, fired CEO George Moose — who had objected to DOGE’s occupation of USIP headquarters, arguing that the agency is not even part of the executive branch. Then Hegseth and Rubio filed an undated resolution to remove USIP’s acting president, Kenneth Jackson (an administrator who had previously helped to tear down the U.S. Agency for International Development), as well as its chief financial and operating officers.
The document declared the appointment of DOGE staffer Nate Cavanaugh to the acting president role. The secretaries wrote that Cavanaugh would have “the authority and is instructed to transfer USIP’s assets, including USIP’s real property and rights thereof, and including all assets recently received from the Endowment, to the General Services Administration.”
Response and Controversy
The GSA, an organizational agency where Cavanaugh draws an annual salary of $120,500 — almost as much as employees who have worked there for more than a decade — is one of the places where DOGE has concentrated its power over the federal bureaucracy. DOGE is even attempting to seize USIP’s $500 million headquarters for itself via the GSA, according to a Wired report.
On Monday, USIP filed a motion to prevent the transfer of its property to the GSA, contending that the dismissal of most of its headquarters staff and DOGE’s intrusions were unlawful. But given that a federal judge already declined to block DOGE from raiding the institution when it filed a motion for a temporary restraining order against the group, it seems more than plausible that Cavanaugh will soon be able to import USIP materials to the GSA, presumably to look for programs, contracts, and staff to be cut.
Cavanaugh's Background and Influence
Cavanaugh’s résumé is not without impressive items (though his complete lack of government experience does not compare favorably to Moose’s nearly five decades of diplomacy work, beginning when he joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1967). Even before Cavanaugh enrolled in college, he has said in an interview, he planned to drop out and become a tech entrepreneur as soon as possible.
In his one year at the University of Indiana Bloomington — he chose the school because he wanted to follow in billionaire Mark Cuban’s footsteps — he founded the esports tournament platform Guuf and sold it after leaving higher education behind. Since then, Cavanaugh has co-founded FlowFi, a financial services platform that connects small businesses with accounting and tax experts, a company that helped land him on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list of young entrepreneurs in 2021.
Cavanaugh's Affiliations and Ideologies
One of DOGE’s key objectives is to apply generative AI models to automate work done by the civil service employees it is firing by the thousands. It is curious that Cavanaugh would find himself a part of this mission given that he has often cited the late CEO of Intel Corp., Andrew Grove, as an important personal influence.
On his X account, which is only sporadically active and has been dormant since January, Cavanaugh follows essentially no one except Big Tech and cryptocurrency figures, apart from President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. He has shown an admiration for billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who also backed Trump in the last election, and called a 2024 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by Argentine president Javier Milei “one of the most inspiring yet necessary talks I have heard in a long time.”
HONESTAI ANALYSIS
All told, Cavanaugh’s online presence suggests a confident young man with a worldview completely captured by Silicon Valley’s self-mythologizing, the belief that tech entrepreneurs are uniquely qualified to make decisions for everyone else, and the assumption that the rich and powerful in that industry have universally earned their privilege — as opposed to anyone who might have benefited from considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion.