Every 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’t touch a poppy seed bagel lest they be subject to a randomized drug test. It’s 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, as the young engineers of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) gleefully fired federal employees en masse, they may have been celebrating by lighting up in government buildings.
According to The Economist, a cleaning crew that entered the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) — which DOGE and the Trump administration attempted to shut down by force earlier this year — found a stash of weed that had apparently been thrown out by young DOGE staffers. The Economist obtained a photo of the weed that had been left in the building.
As previously reported by Rolling Stone, the gutting of USIP was led by 28-year-old college dropout and Silicon Valley devotee Nate Cavanaugh, who was tasked with taking over the institute, and attempting to transfer its assets — including its offices — to the General Services Administration, potentially to use them as new headquarters.
In 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’s actions were unlawful, they found the building in a state of disrepair. “The building has been essentially abandoned for many weeks,” Moose wrote in May, adding that USIP staff “reported evidence of rats and roaches in the building,” as well as graffiti, “failure 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.”
According to a Monday report from The Independent, following the DOGE takeover, the administration didn’t even bother to throw out food and other perishables that were in the building.
“They 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’re still missing four letters: U, S, I, and P?” USIP chief of security Colin O’Brien told outlet. “That’s not coincidental.” O’Brien said that other objects bearing the institute’s logo — including flags and logos — were taken as “war trophies.”
Last week, a bombshell report from The New York Times suggested that, not unlike his DOGE underlings, Elon Musk is known to enjoy a fair bit of recreational drug use. 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.
Musk, the de-facto head of DOGE during the first months of Trump’s second term, ended his direct employment with the White House last week, having accomplished little under DOGE outside of securing some modest savings — nowhere near the $2 trillion originally promised — violating practically every ethics rule in government, including an avalanche of lawsuits, and tanking his public reputation.
Among the tens of thousands of employees caught in the chaos of Musk’s firings and agency transformations, DOGE’s destruction of the United States Agency for International Development (UDAID) may be the most consequential. According to models produced by Boston University, 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.
He certainly will not be missed.
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