Property rights can be a contentious issue. But what happens when one of the parties claiming ownership of a piece of real estate is the federal government, regardless of legal precedents indicating otherwise?
This is the saga George Foote, Esq., long-time general counsel at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), has been grappling with since the seizure of USIP’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., in March 2025.
Foote set the stage by walking October Research Chief Knowledge Officer Mary Schuster through a first-hand account of the timeline of events leading to the unprecedented takeover of a building built and maintained with private funds during an episode of the Keys to Real Estate podcast.
“In February, President (Donald) Trump issued an executive order in which he declared the US Institute of Peace to be unnecessary and declared that it should reduce its operations to the statutory minimum level,” Foote said in this abridged quote from the episode. “We saw that order and recognized its illegality immediately. And we notified OMB (Office of Management and Budget) and the White House that was not accurate, that the president can’t tell the Institute of Peace what to do. This is at the core of our litigation, too. The president treated USIP as part of the executive branch and tried to tell the institute how to act in his capacity as the chief executive. Well, that’s not what USIP is.”
The situation has massive legal implications for private property rights issues, as well as for nonprofit organizations, the constitutional separation of powers and the rule of law itself.
The two experts viewed the extraordinary circumstances at play through the lens of real estate professionals, for whom consistency in the rule of law is critically important for the purpose of drawing up contracts and defending clients’ ownership rights.
Listen to the discussion by following this link.