DOGE fires nearly all staff at U.S. Institute of Peace headquarters

Between 200 and 300 people — nearly the entirety of the institute’s headquarters staff — had been fired.

Some employees were offered severance and one additional month of health insurance, in exchange for their signatures to waive their rights to sue.

The institute has a total staff of about 600 people in offices worldwide.

It is actively involved in negotiating peace deals and helping war-torn countries to implement peace settlements and rebuild.

But the Trump administration has pushed forward in its efforts to aggressively disband or shrink operations, ranging from complete government departments to smaller nonprofits. On Friday , the administration moved to formally collapse the U.S. Agency for International Development — an early target of Musk ’s dismantling effort — with a notification to remaining employees that their positions will be eliminated and that residual functions will soon be folded into the State Department . The agency has annually delivered billions of dollars of lifesaving food, water and medical aid to millions of people worldwide. Karen DeYoung and Hannah Natanson contributed to this report..