A senior official from the State Department, previously dismissed as a speechwriter during President Donald Trump’s initial term due to controversial remarks, has now been named to head the troubled U.S. Institute of Peace.
The decision to appoint Darren Beattie as the acting president of the institute is perceived as a further attempt by the administration to undermine the challenged entity. This organization, created as an independent and non-profit research group, is supported by Congressional funding aimed at fostering peace and resolving global conflicts. Presently, the dispute over this move is unfolding in the legal arena.
Beattie, who also holds the position of under secretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, will continue in this role. His earlier dismissal during Trump’s initial term followed a CNN report revealing his presence at a 2016 conference that included white nationalists. He defended his speech from that event, asserting it contained nothing inappropriate.
A former academic who taught at Duke University, Beattie also founded a right-wing website that shared conspiracies about the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and has a long history of posting inflammatory statements on social media.
“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” he wrote on October 2024. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
A State Department official confirmed Beattie’s appointment by the USIP board of directors, which currently includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. “(W)e look forward to seeing him advance President Trump’s America First agenda in this new role,” they said.
The USPI has been embroiled in turmoil since Trump moved to dismantle it shortly after taking office as part of his broader effort to shrink the size of the federal government and eliminate independent agencies.
Trump issued an executive order in February that targeted the organization and three other agencies for closure. The first attempt by the Department of Government Efficiency, formerly under the command of tech billionaire Elon Musk, to take over its headquarters led to a dramatic standoff.
Members of Musk’s group returned days later with the FBI and Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police to help them gain entry.
The administration fired most of the institute’s board, followed by the mass firing of nearly all of its 300 employees in what they called “the Friday night massacre.”
The institute and many of its board members sued the Trump administration in March, seeking to prevent their removal and to prevent DOGE from taking over the institute’s operations. DOGE transferred administrative oversight of the organization’s headquarters and assets to the General Services Administration that weekend.
District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell overturned those actions in May, concluding that Trump was outside his authority in firing the board and its acting president and that, therefore, all subsequent actions were also moot.
Her ruling allowed the institute to regain control of its headquarters in a rare victory for the agencies and organizations that have been caught up in the Trump administration’s downsizing. The employees were rehired, although many did not return to work because of the complexity of restarting operations.
They received termination orders — for the second time, however, — after an appeals court stayed Howell’s order.
Most recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied the U.S. Institute of Peace’s request for a hearing of the full court to lift the stay of a three-judge panel in June. That stay led to the organization turning its headquarters back over to the Trump Administration.
In a statement, George Foote, former counsel for the institute, said Beattie’s appointment “flies in the face of the values at the core of USIP’s work and America’s commitment to working respectfully with international partners” and also called it “illegal under Judge Howell’s May 19 decision.”
“We are committed to defending that decision against the government’s appeal. We are confident that we will succeed on the merits of our case, and we look forward to USIP resuming its essential work in Washington, D.C. and in conflict zones around the world,” he said.
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