The head of the Wilson Center, a storied foreign policy think tank, resigned on Tuesday, a day after employees from Elon Musk’s government-overhauling team arrived at the group’s Washington headquarters to dismantle it, according to people familiar with the actions at the center.
The resignation of the president, Mark Green, a Republican, and the visit from Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, indicated that the Trump administration was carrying out an executive order President Trump signed last month directing that the organization, a nonpartisan policy group, be largely dismantled.
After DOGE team members visited the center on Monday and Tuesday, some of the leadership staff and senior government employees were ousted, including Mr. Green, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution by political appointees in the Trump administration. The center’s dozens of federal employees, about a third of its work force, were also set to be placed on administrative leave.
The apparent gutting of the Wilson Center would be the latest attempt by the Trump administration to bring federally funded institutions that have historically been independent under executive branch control, and in much diminished forms. Mr. Musk and his task force have helped lead efforts at slashing those institutions and various federal agencies.
One person familiar with Mr. Green’s resignation said he had been offered a choice: Step down or be fired. Mr. Green, who has been a Wisconsin congressman, an ambassador to Tanzania and head of the now-defunct U.S. Agency for International Development during Mr. Trump’s first term, could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.
Ryan McKenna, a spokesman for the Wilson Center, said on Wednesday that the center had no comment on Mr. Green’s resignation or DOGE’s visits. The White House declined to comment.
After the March executive order calling for the center to be reduced “to the minimum presence and function required by law,” Mr. Green wrote in an email to members and friends of the center that its leaders had “seen the order and are crafting plans to comply.” He did not say whether the center would push back against the executive order.
Members of the center’s board of trustees were fired in recent weeks. On Tuesday evening, the board was listed as vacant on the center’s website. Mr. Trump announced in January he was firing one of his own appointees, Brian Hook, who served as a special envoy for Iran during Mr. Trump’s first term before stepping down. Bill Haslam, a Republican former governor of Tennessee, has also been fired, a newspaper in Knoxville, Tenn., reported.
Joe Asher, whom former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. appointed as chairman of the board in 2023, said in a LinkedIn post last month that he and Mr. Biden’s other appointees had been fired by Mr. Trump.
“We had been asked to resign earlier in the week,” he wrote, “but I didn’t see the point of that.”
He added that the board members had served without pay and praised the center, under Mr. Green’s leadership, as “first-rate.”
In his email, Mr. Green noted that Congress had given the center “a special charter and mandate” when it was created in 1968 as a memorial to Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president. Wilson won a Nobel Prize in 1919 for his role in founding the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations, in the wake of World War I.
The Wilson Center describes it itself as “congressionally chartered, scholarship driven, and fiercely nonpartisan.” While Wilson himself was a Democrat, the center does not align itself with a political party and has historically been run by members of both parties, and by a bipartisan board. It receives federal funding for its work but also solicits and accepts private donations to run a slate of fellowships and scholarships. Those go mostly to academic researchers, but some have gone to journalists working on book projects in residence, including reporters at The New York Times.
The fellowships and scholarships appeared to continue on Wednesday, but their long-term fate is unclear. Donors could decide to end their financial support, depending on the makeup of the new board and the direction of the center.
The center is housed in the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington. That building was also the site for the headquarters of U.S.A.I.D. until Mr. Musk, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other aides to Mr. Trump dismantled that agency and ended its lease there.
Congress made the Wilson Center to honor an American president, in a similar fashion as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Mr. Trump took over in February. After he gutted its board, Mr. Trump was elected as its chair. He has since shared a vision to remake the cultural institution.
Mr. Green’s predecessor, Jane Harman, a Democrat who served as president of the Wilson Center for a decade until 2021, lamented on Tuesday the news of Mr. Green’s resignation and the administration’s decision to target the center, which she said has a global reputation of nonpartisan scholarship on foreign affairs.
“It has just extraordinary scholarship and extraordinary influence around the world,” Ms. Harman said. “It’s strictly nonpartisan. And the appeal for me — I left Congress early in my ninth term because I wanted to go to someplace that was a bipartisan problem solver focused on international issues.”
Lara Jakes contributed reporting.
