Almost all the employees of the Wilson Center, an important foreign policy Think Tank not partisan in Washington, were put on leave on Thursday and blocked by their work email accounts while Elon Musk’s Task Force quickly closed most of the center.
About 130 employees received orders by telling them not to return to the office after the end of the day, according to an and -mase examined by the New York Times and by people with direct knowledge of the actions.
Employees must be paid on leave but will soon be fired, in line with what happened in other institutions that Mr. Musk’s workers have dismantled in recent weeks.
Only five employees will remain: a president, two federal employees and two researchers in scholarships. These positions are obliged to the Congress Charter of the Center. The cuts align with a president of the Trump executive order signed in March.
The private donations in the center will be returned to donors, according to a person who is familiar with the center who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid punishment. It was not clear what would be done with the provision of the center.
Thursday afternoon, dozens of employees brought boxes and bags full of documents, plants and posters outside the offices of the center in the Ronald Reagan building, which houses several government agencies offices.
Tears shone on the face of a woman as she went. The workers launched trolleys full of documents.
Thursday it was not clear how the offices will be used, but the center card requires space to be part of the Woodrow Wilson Memorial.
On Monday, four members of the Musk team entered the center offices and started detecting its systems. The next day, the president of the center, Mark Green, resigned.
The White House of Trump has fired the members of the Council of the Center in recent weeks, said a person informed about events. Green, a former republican deputy and ambassador, was said this week that he would have been fired if he hadn’t resigned, said another person. The White House refused to comment.
The workers who surround the Musk government have gone over several other institutions in Washington, also at the United States Agency for international development.
They closed centers that receive federal funding but that have done independent research for decades with the aim of providing evaluations of non -ideological experts on politicians, legislators and people outside the government.
The Wilson Center, created in 1968 as a work memorial to honor the 28th president, Woodrow Wilson, receives about 30 percent of his funding from the congress; The rest comes from private donations.
The Center was managed by former democratic and republican officials appointed by the Board of Directors. Before Mr. Green, who led Usaid in the first administration of Trump, became president and CEO of the center in 2021, Jane Harman, a former democratic deputy of California, managed the Think Tank.
The center was a meeting place for scholars in all areas of foreign policy over the decades. It hosts the personal library of George F. Kennan, the diplomat and the politician who studied the Soviet Union. Thursday, the director of the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center, Michael Kimmage, published photos of the online library and compared him with the library of ancient Alessandria, who “fell victim to political vicissitudes and war”, he wrote.
One question is something to happen to those materials and large digital archives that the Wilson Center has compiled. Researchers from all over the world have used archives for projects and scholars appreciate in particular the registers of the center of the documents of the era of the Cold War.
A person who is familiar with the center said to host historic records from Wilson’s countryside and the presidency.
The over 50 companions of the center had to be paid until the end of their program, but those who are foreign citizens expect to cancel the visas. Two of the companions are in the center through a program for scholars whose work endangers them in their countries of origin, according to a person who is familiar with the center.
Each class of companions is generally composed of academic researchers and one or more journalists who work on book projects. New York Times journalists received scholarships.
An official of the Trump administration said that Natasha Jacome, Green’s senior councilor, was the new president of the center.