Gift link to essay in today’s Wall Street Journal:
Michael Lewis on the Lone Security Guard Who Resisted DOGE
In an exclusive excerpt from ‘Blockers,’ the inside story of the high-stakes D.C. standoff where security chief Colin O’Brien fought off DOGE operatives.
**COLIN O’BRIEN** was the chief security officer at the United States Institute of Peace. Mostly that meant keeping the institute’s 400 employees, scattered across 28 difficult countries, safe from harm.Mostly, he’d succeeded. A mission in southern Iraq had tamped down tribal warfare and insurgency without bloodshed. There’d been close calls in Haiti, and Colin himself had been with a group that had come under rocket fire in Kyiv, but no one had been killed.
Now, on this late afternoon of March 14, 2025, the threat was right here, in Washington, D.C. Three young men from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were trying to argue their way into the institute building—a building that housed an institute that should have been far removed from the politics of the day