{"id":155183,"date":"2025-06-03T16:03:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-03T16:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/155183\/"},"modified":"2025-06-03T16:03:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T16:03:09","slug":"did-doge-staffers-leave-weed-in-u-s-institute-of-peace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/155183\/","title":{"rendered":"Did DOGE Staffers Leave Weed in U.S. Institute of Peace?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEvery year, scores of aspiring government employees have their applications for security clearances denied because they smoke weed recreationally. Every D.C. resident has a government or government-adjacent friend who won\u2019t touch a poppy seed bagel lest they be subject to a randomized drug test. It\u2019s a sacrifice plenty of federal workers are willing to make so they can serve the public, but according to a Monday report from The Economist,<\/a> as the young engineers of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE<\/a>) gleefully fired<\/a> federal employees en masse, they may have been celebrating by lighting up in government buildings.<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to The Economist, a cleaning crew that entered the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) \u2014 which DOGE and the Trump administration attempted to shut down by force earlier this year \u2014 found a stash of what appears to be low-quality weed that had apparently been thrown out by young DOGE staffers. The Economist obtained a photo<\/a> of it.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs previously reported by Rolling Stone, the gutting of USIP was led by 28-year-old college dropout and Silicon Valley devotee Nate Cavanaugh<\/a>, who was tasked with taking over the institute, and attempting to transfer its assets \u2014 including its offices \u2014 to the General Services Administration, potentially to use them as new headquarters<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a sworn statement filed last month, USIP President and CEO George Moose wrote that when staff was allowed to return to the office after a federal court ruled the administration\u2019s actions were unlawful, they found the building in a state of disrepair. \u201cThe building has been essentially abandoned for many weeks,\u201d Moose wrote in May<\/a>, adding that USIP staff \u201creported evidence of rats and roaches in the building,\u201d as well as graffiti, \u201cfailure to maintain vehicle barriers and the cooling tower, water leaks, damage to the garage door, and missing ceiling tiles in multiple places in the building.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to a Monday report from The Independent<\/a>, following the DOGE takeover, the administration didn\u2019t even bother to throw out food and other perishables that were in the building.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThey ripped the main logo off the wall when you come into the lobby, and while we have most of the parts back, would you be surprised that we\u2019re still missing four letters: U, S, I, and P?\u201d USIP chief of security Colin O\u2019Brien told outlet. \u201cThat\u2019s not coincidental.\u201d O\u2019Brien said that other objects bearing the institute\u2019s logo \u2014 including flags and logos \u2014 were taken as \u201cwar trophies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLast week, a bombshell report from The New York Times suggested that, not unlike his DOGE underlings, Elon Musk<\/a> is known to enjoy a fair bit of recreational drug use<\/a>. According to the Times, Musk used ketamine so frequently during the 2024 campaign, that he complained to individuals in his orbit that it was causing issues with his bladder. He also reportedly used ecstasy and mushrooms.<\/p>\n

\n\tMusk, the de-facto head of DOGE during the first months of Trump\u2019s second term, ended his direct employment<\/a> with the White House last week, having accomplished little under DOGE outside of securing some modest savings \u2014 nowhere near the $2 trillion originally promised \u2014 violating practically every ethics rule in government, including an avalanche of lawsuits, and tanking his public reputation.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tAmong the tens of thousands of employees caught in the chaos of Musk\u2019s firings and agency transformations, DOGE\u2019s destruction<\/a> of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) may be the most consequential. According to models produced by Boston University<\/a>, the cold-blooded elimination of the agency is expected to result in hundreds of thousands of deaths at a global scale, most of them children.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHe certainly will not be missed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every year, scores of aspiring government employees have their applications for security clearances denied because they smoke weed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155184,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[14306,295,49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-155183","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-doge","9":"tag-elon-musk","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-us","12":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114620281931409625","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}