I recently received this email from Nate Cavanaugh, listed as the “Acting Chairman and President” of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP):
It cancelled a contract for a special report I’d been working on with USIP. The report was mostly finished and very little money remained to be paid, so few savings will go to the taxpayer. But it was a tiny part of the much broader destruction of the USIP by DOGE and the Trump administration. This contest is still locked up in legal battles, but regardless seems to have cut a broad swath through the institution. Even the website has been taken down.
Now the Wilson Center is being de facto eliminated as well; it’s announced that it is shutting down its programming and activities. In addition to firing the vast majority of its staff, I assume it will end the Cold War International History project that provides fascinating insights from translated primary documents, archive or delete the website and its publications, etc, just like USIP.
As a result of these moves, a number of most publicly engaged Asia policy analysts in the US have been fired (plus other regions/topics of course; I know the Asia side best). USIP had a large and excellent Asia Program, which included a rich roster of people and publications on Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and various other states in the region. I believe – though with the website down it’s hard to count people now, so I could be wrong! – USIP was the single densest concentration of full-time South(-ish) Asianists in DC outside the US government. The Wilson Center has experts on South Asia, Myanmar, and the Indo-Pacific.
In addition to the loss of experienced researchers, these were places where young people would go as RAs, interns, or program officers to build up subject matter skills. USIP also helped to fund doctoral students’ research in the Peace Scholar program (I was a Peace Scholar in 2009-10, as have been a number of my students since).
The freely available publications produced by USIP and Wilson will no longer be produced. The USIP publications have been stripped from the internet already, so no one will be able to benefit from them now or in the future. This is a sample of the kind of work they produced, courtesy of the Wayback Machine – it’s obvious how relevant these topics are.
There’s no point to any of this beyond performative wrecking; the budgetary savings will be minuscule compared to the tax cuts working their way through Congress, and efficiencies obviously could have been achieved without institutional annihilation. DOGE seems to be flailing about for politically-weak things to kill while failing to achieve its broader goals. The result is to destroy much of a crucial layer of analysis and expertise that lies between 1. intra-government work that is not publicly accessible (and apparently controlled by Laura Loomer), and 2. specialized, often niche academic work that primarily speaks to other scholars.
Both government and academic work are valuable, but wiping out much of the in-between space will make both worse-off. Organizations like USIP and Wilson provided real expertise to both official and non-official audiences, could support projects with a longer time horizon than is often possible within the government, and were far more accessible to the public than most scholarly research.
Combined with eliminating or reducing social science and area studies research funding in other contexts (plus slicing the State Department), the administration seems intent on limiting home-grown American knowledge about the rest of the world. Policymaking shouldn’t be handed over to experts; the “best and the brightest” get plenty wrong, and choices often come down to hard judgment calls rather than clear technocratic answers. But it’s generally better to have more information and analysis rather than less. Administration officials talk a big game about waging major power competition with China – and then gut the places that produce data and analysis and eliminate the programs that could be sources of influence.
Former CIA deputy director of operations (1959-62) Richard Bissell noted in his posthumous memoir – quoted in William Rust’s excellent Before the Quagmire about Laos – that if he and other government leaders had “shown more open-mindedness . . . the advice and perceptions of experts on Laotian politics, history, and culture might have received more attention,” and the US government could have avoided a set of huge policy mistakes. It’s rare that in retrospect US foreign policy failures turn out to be the result of listening too carefully to area specialists. Avoiding rule by experts doesn’t imply destroying all expertise, nor does pursuing efficiency require gutting valuable institutions for a pittance of savings.
Paul Staniland 