Mother Jones illustration; Hu Yousong/Xinhua/ZUMA; US State Dept.; Wikimedia
In February, President Trump included the U.S. Institute of Peace in an executive order targeting federal entities he deemed “unnecessary” and which he planned to cut as much as he legally could. In March, the USIP’s Washington D.C. offices were invaded by armed private security as part of a brute force takeover by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Amid the subsequent running court battle, the USIP, which once employed over 200 people, has been reduced to a ghost organization, with around four total workers. In court, DOGE and the Trump administration continue to insist they can seize both USIP’s famous headquarters, situated near the National Mall, as well as its finances.
“How can this person be one to lead any peace-building? It just seems absurd.”
In late July, the State Department also announced a new, eyebrow-raising acting president for what’s left of USIP: former academic Darren Beattie, who was fired from the first Trump administration for speaking at a conference heavily attended by white nationalists.
Beattie is also an undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department, despite the act that created the USIP seemingly barring him from accepting a salary for both roles. When asked for comment, a State Department spokesperson did not address the issue, but sent an anonymous statement suggesting Beattie’s appointment was in response to USIP having “slipped in its mission over recent decades” and saying he would “advance President Trump’s America First agenda in this new role.”
Beattie’s background and history of racist and extremist remarks has generated concern. He tweeted in 2024 that “competent white men must be in charge if you want anything to work;” another time that year, he floated an inflammatory rhetorical question: “What if America moved on to some national religion other than coddling and excusing inner city black dysfunction, violence, and misbehavior?” He has also advocated for stripping what he called “undesirables” of US citizenship, adding, “ship them out, put them to work extracting rare earth minerals. Peace through strength!”
The USIP was founded in 1984 under President Ronald Reagan as an independent, nonprofit, and nonpartisan organization to train people here and abroad in mediation, diplomacy, conflict management, and other peace-building skills. Staffers who were forced out of USIP, as well as an attorney who represents them, say it’s unclear what, precisely, Beattie could even do with today’s skeleton organization.
“Nobody knows if the intention is for this man to come in and reinstate the institute with this America First lens, or he’s there just to dismantle it,” a former USIP staffer who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation said. “How can this person be one to lead any peace-building? It just seems absurd.”
“At the very least, it’s an incredibly peculiar appointment,” dryly observed another former USIP staffer, who also requested anonymity. “I don’t know the motivation. I’m not sure what it positions what’s left of the institute to do.”
Beattie, a former visiting professor at Duke University, has very little experience in anything that could be called “peace-building,” either at home or abroad. After being forced out of his White House job in 2018 in disgrace, he worked for then-Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz before founding Revolver News, a pro-Trump site that has repeatedly advanced conspiracy theories about the January 6 attack; just this April, a Revolver writer described the Capitol attack as a “totally manipulated event, crawling with fed involvement, unanswered questions, and a phony threat to democracy used to justify a slew of political crackdowns and North Korea-style arrests.” In November 2020, the week after Trump faced voters, he appointed Beattie to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. The Biden administration forced Beattie to resign from the federal board in January 2022 over Revolver’s false claims about January 6.
Revolver, a website founded by Beattie, called January 6 a “totally manipulated event.”
In his time away from government, Beattie became obsessed with attacking research on disinformation, writing in 2022 that the term “disinformation” is “principally a pretext for domestic political censorship,” and tweeting derogatory remarks about Renee DiResta and Joan Donovan, two female disinformation scholars.
In his multiplying roles in the Trump administration, Beattie has largely seemed concerned with attacking disinformation research, and limiting the government’s participation in it. In April, Rubio shuttered the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub, a small office that studied, tracked, and countered government-backed disinformation from foreign states like China, Russia, and Iran. According to reporting from MIT Technology Review and the New York Times, Beattie carried out the firings himself.
In April, between two rounds of USIP firings, Beattie tweeted from his official Department of State account that the disinformation industry is “a scam to monitor, demonetize, and censor Americans.” The exact same statement was immediately shared by Twitter accounts for the U.S. Embassy in London, the U.S. Mission to the EU, and the U.S. Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria. The State Department did not respond a to a request for comment at the time about why the diplomatic accounts shared the statement.
The only indication about how Beattie views the organization he now heads is a tweet that he retweeted on July 25—the day his appointment was announced— from Mike Benz, a far-right activist who’s made his name as a crusader against “online censorship.” In 2023, NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny reported Benz had worked as a pseudonymous alt-right content creator and described himself as a “white identitarian” and railed against “Jewish influence.” (Beattie is Jewish.)
The post Beattie retweeted claimed that the organization he was about to take charge of was responsible for “dirty deeds in everything from drugs to riots to color revolutions”—essentially accusing it of undertaking espionage and regime change abroad.
The claim, says attorney George Foote, who until recently represented USIP for thirty years, and who is acting as outside counsel for former USIP employees, is “absurd” and “total fiction.” Friends of USIP, an organization supporting former staffers, has also denied claims in far-right media that the agency’s officials “funded the Taliban,” bought drugs, or carried guns. This week, Revolver News, the outlet that Beattie founded, described USIP as “a DC institution that has been accused of shady backroom operations, regime-change meddling, and more than a few quiet coups,” adding, “Thankfully, with Darren at the helm, that era may finally be coming to an end.”
This is not the first time that a right-wing ideologue has been appointed to the USIP. In 2003, uproar ensued when a Middle East scholar named Daniel Pipes, described by his critics as an anti-Muslim extremist, was nominated to the organization’s board by George W. Bush. While Democratic Senators launched a filibuster against his nomination, Bush used a recess appointment to install him anyway; he served until 2005.
“The peacemakers are fighting the fight. And we’ll keep doing it.”
But the Pipes appointment, however controversial, was not designed to undo or remake USIP as an organization. Under Trump, Foote says, the stakes are far higher, as the administration has insisted it can “transfer USIP’s assets, including USIP’s real property” elsewhere in the government.
“The principle that we’re fighting for here is one that matters from everything from the Fed down to Meals on Wheels,” he says. “If the government wins this case and can crush USIP—take a private corporation, privately owned building, private donor money, all in the guise of the president being the chief executive—we’ve got a different country.
USIP will put up the toughest possible fight. We’re going to fight this thing ot the end. There are people fighting in a similar way, all to defend this executive whose desire for power we don’t know the limits of. We don’t know where they’ll stop in the reach to control economic and political activity in the country. Not to over blow it, but here the peacemakers are fighting the fight. And we’ll keep doing it.”
Whatever Beattie’s plans for USIP, the reputational damage of his appointment, according to those familiar with the organization, will be hard to recover from.
“The name USIP means something… They’re known around the world for training tens of thousands of UN peacekeepers and others—really good, substantive work,” says Foote. “It would be a travesty of justice and criminal if that name is used as cover as any of the sort of things that Mr. Beattie is known for.”