'That's a break-in': MSNBC's Rachel Maddow sounds alarm as DOGE resorts to guns in dispute

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow sounded off Monday night on what she called “a qualitatively more worrying” development in President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE-led dismantling of the federal government – and raised the possibility that the cost-cutting agency is slowing morphing into an Army.

Maddow, during her show’s opening monologue, went after the Trump administration over reports that DOGE staffers – accompanied by what were reportedly claimed to be U.S. Marshals – had forced their way inside the U.S African Development Foundation.

That followed reporting Monday that DOGE had "broken into” the building of the nonprofit U.S. Institute of Peace after trying unsuccessfully to gain entry days early with two FBI agents.

The alarming unauthorized entries into the private, independent agencies’ buildings – which are both detached from the executive branch – sent Maddow into a fierce rebuke of the administration with guns blazing.

“There are legitimate legal disputes as to whether this DOGE group has any legal authority over some of these agencies that they're trying to get into, so they can take over their systems and fire their staff and shut them down,” Maddow said. “Those disputes are legal disputes that need to be sorted out legally.”

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She added: “You can't just use guns to force your way in, in the meantime, as a means of settling that dispute.”

The MSNBC host, who has emerged as a frequent critic of the Trump administration as the first eight weeks of his new term have unfolded, didn’t mince words as she warned viewers: “What that is, is an armed assault on the U.S. government.”

“If there's a legal dispute as to whether or not you are allowed in a U.S. government building and you cast that aside and say, ‘we've got guns,’ and that's the grounds on which we're coming in…that is an armed assault on a U.S. government office,” she said bluntly. “That’s a break-in, that's ‘call the cops’ territory, that's 'barricade the doors' territory.”

The episodes at the independent agencies left Maddow to conclude that DOGE “is something different than we thought it was” if U.S. Marshals are now working for them and “against other parts of the government.”

“Did they have an army?” she wondered aloud. “I mean, if the president has given his top campaign donor the ability to use physical force, the ability to use the force of arms against other parts of the U.S. government, we are in a different place than we thought we were.”

Watch the clip below or at this link: