Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is naming one of its young software engineers as head of the U.S. Institute of Peace after it refused to allow DOGE employees into the building earlier this month.
Nate Cavanaugh, 28, is now in charge of USIP, a White House official confirmed to the Daily Beast.
Cavanaugh is the co-founder and chairman of a tech company for accounting software, Flowfi, according to his LinkedIn profile.
At 19, he cofounded intellectual property management platform Brainbase from his college dorm room at Indiana University Bloomington, according to a Forbes profile, before he dropped out. The entrepreneur success story vaulted Cavanaugh to a spot on 2021’s Forbes 30 under 30 list for enterprise technology.
The 28-year-old has seen been interviewing General Services Administration employees during his time at DOGE, The New York Times reported. Cavanaugh also forced his way into the African Development Foundation this month, according to The Times—and did not answer questions from reporters about what DOGE planned to do there.
Cavanaugh is raking in just over $120,500 a year for his role in the Musk-ran agency, according to a Wired report. He has seemingly never worked in government before his time at DOGE.
Earlier this month, Deputy White House Press Secretary Anna Kelly announced that George Moose, the president of USIP before DOGE’s hostile takeover, had been removed.
“George is actually a career bureaucrat who wants to be unaccountable to the American people,” Kelly said at the time.
A daylong standoff at the agency’s D.C. headquarters ended in DOGE workers, including Jackson, gaining entry to the building alongside a police escort. Moose said at the time that Musk’s department had broken in. DOGE denied the claims.
“The only unlawful individual was Mr. Moose, who refused to comply,” the department posted to X on March 17.
The visit came after USIP employees turned away DOGE staffers during an unannounced visit the weekend prior.
The government-funded institute, which was founded by Congress in the 1980s to create peace deals across the globe, has fired over 200 employees since the heated confrontation at its headquarters. Last month, Trump ordered the agency to be effectively shuttered, with its website now completely shut down.
Prior to Cavanaugh, Kenneth Jackson, another DOGE employee, was its acting president—at the behest of new board members Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio.
