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<\/a><\/p>\nFounding editor David Beers is passing the baton to a new leader. Is it you?<\/p>\n
One of the discouraging things about U.S. president Donald Trump is that he will be the subject of countless books long after he is gone \u2014 not for years, but for centuries. We and our descendants will never be free of him.<\/p>\n
Future authors will no doubt document crimes that we still don\u2019t know about, as well as follies and behaviours that are, for now, kept secret by his staff and his most loyal vassals.<\/p>\n
Many of those books will turn to Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower\u2019s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID<\/a> as a key source. That is because it documents the destruction of an American government agency as seen by one of its members, foreshadowing the destruction of many more.<\/p>\n
And very significantly, it leaves us to imagine what kind of people could cause so much death and misery.<\/p>\n Former civil servant Nicholas Enrich authored a book about the Trump administration\u2019s destruction of a life-saving international aid program.<\/p>\n Shortly after his election in 2024, Trump appointed Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to root out \u201cwaste and fraud<\/a>\u201d in the civil service. Ramaswamy was soon gone, but Musk and a handful of young men known as the Department of Government Efficiency<\/a> were in place as government \u201cadvisors.”<\/p>\n On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order putting a halt to American foreign aid until the new administration had decided which programs suited its policies. That meant the U.S. Agency For International Development, or USAID, was the first government institution to be explicitly dismantled<\/a> by the new regime.<\/p>\n The order stunned Nicholas Enrich, then an American civil servant. He was the Bureau of Global Health\u2019s director of policy, planning and programs until January 2025, when he was designated USAID\u2019s acting assistant administrator for global health. <\/p>\n In the first few days after DOGE was installed, Enrich and his colleagues at USAID struggled to make sense of what was happening to them. They spent the following weeks trying to save as much of it as they could. <\/p>\n By March 2, 2025, Enrich\u2019s employer placed him on administrative leave for issuing a series of whistleblowing memos that exposed the Trump administration\u2019s dismantling of USAID.<\/p>\n As historically valuable as Enrich\u2019s account may be, it\u2019s the response to it that I found alarming: almost total apathy in both the public and the media.<\/p>\n Saving lives with soft power<\/p>\n Founded by former president John F. Kennedy in 1961, USAID had been a major expression of American \u201csoft power\u201d for over 60 years. It had fed the hungry, healed the sick, responded to disasters and built up immense good will toward the U.S. <\/p>\n Enrich sums it up:<\/p>\n \u201cIt starts with a number: 92 million. That is how many deaths USAID prevented over the past two decades, according to a recent study in The Lancet, a leading medical journal. \u2026 And all it cost was an average of $24 a year per American.\u201d<\/p>\n Enrich had dealt with the first Trump administration, which seemed unaware of USAID\u2019s existence. Trump sent no transition team before his inauguration in 2017, and didn\u2019t appoint a director until that summer. Enrich and his colleagues hadn\u2019t agreed with Trump\u2019s policies, but as civil servants they carried them out.<\/p>\n \u201cEven though I felt that parts of the agenda were problematic,\u201d Enrich writes, \u201cI recognized that my role was to implement the policies of the president and his administration, and I ensured that those policies were executed coherently and lawfully.\u201d<\/p>\n
By Trump\u2019s second term, Enrich tells us, the president\u2019s political appointees arrived promptly, ready to carry out Executive Order 14169, a 90-day \u201cpause\u201d on all foreign aid. <\/p>\n On a ski vacation in B.C., Enrich read the executive order on his phone.<\/p>\n \u201cMy heart started to race,\u201d he writes in his book. <\/p>\n \u201cHow could we do this without completely destabilizing our global health programs and endangering people\u2019s lives? The order didn\u2019t affect a mere portion of our work; it stopped everything USAID did.\u201d<\/p>\n Life or death decisions<\/p>\n Back in Washington, Enrich, as temporary head of USAID\u2019s global health division, had to deal with the urgency of literal life and death. Clinical trials for tuberculosis had to stop at once, depriving hundreds of patients of essential drugs. <\/p>\n Meanwhile, Trump\u2019s appointees issued a ban on external communications; USAID could not reply to the thousands of contractors \u2014 health agencies, universities, clinics \u2014 who had been suddenly cut off from funding, even for ongoing programs.<\/p>\n Enrich\u2019s own motives are clear. He had aspired to work for USAID, and he was immensely proud of his agency and the good work it did.<\/p>\n Only when it was clear that USAID would cease to exist did Enrich and some of his colleagues decide to publicize what they had witnessed.<\/p>\n Former USAID staff and supporters rally in Washington to mark one year since the international aid program was dismantled on Feb. 27, 2026.
<\/p>\n AP Photo\/Allison Robbert.<\/p>\n Blazing a paper trail<\/p>\n Knowing what they were up against, Enrich and some of his colleagues blazed a paper trail of emails, texts and documents. From these, Enrich built a retrospective diary of the first 40 days of the destruction of USAID.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a meticulous account of bureaucratic horror: medical tests suspended, babies born with preventable HIV, experts placed on \u201cadministrative leave\u201d for imaginary offences. <\/p>\n The motives of the Trump appointees who oversaw the destruction are a mystery. <\/p>\n We learn that one, who had been appointed in Trump\u2019s first term, was convinced that an agency employee had killed the appointee\u2019s dog. He wanted revenge. <\/p>\n Another appointee in the first term had been ousted after just four months when staff had protested his mismanagement. Now he was back and had some scores to settle.<\/p>\n But the appointees were American citizens who had presumably gone to American schools and learned something about American history and institutions. Many had served in the military or other government agencies. Their previous careers had sometimes (not always) qualified them for senior management roles. Like the Republicans and Democrats in Congress, America since Reagan had made them what they were.<\/p>\n Yet, including Musk and the DOGE boys, they had moved into USAID knowing or caring very little about it, and then dismantled the agency regardless of the suffering that would result. <\/p>\n Musk boasted on X<\/a> that he had \u201cSpent the weekend putting USAID into the wood chipper.\u201d<\/p>\n Standing in the Oval Office next to Trump, Musk told the media that funding to fight an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo was \u201caccidentally cancelled very briefly<\/a>.\u201d Enrich watched Musk say it, knowing that Musk had already cancelled Ebola funding permanently.<\/p>\n People like Musk and his boys were doing the same across the government, demolishing the institutions and agencies that had made the U.S. the world\u2019s superpower.<\/p>\n Something had clearly gone wrong with the U.S. long before Trump descended his golden escalator in 2015 to declare his candidacy for president. Many of those in school in the 1980s and 1990s must have tuned out in their history and civics classes, internalizing instead the racism and misogyny that have persisted throughout American history. With nothing but contempt for the institutions that had taught and protected then, they were well-qualified to break the country\u2019s civil service.<\/p>\n And they weren\u2019t the only ones who\u2019d gone wrong. A study in the British medical journal The Lancet Global Health estimated<\/a> that by 2030, continued defunding of official development assistance would result in 9.4 million deaths, 2.5 million of them children under the age of five. Severe defunding would cost 22.6 million deaths, including 5.4 million under age five.<\/p>\n If development funding had continued at previous levels, the study said, all-cause mortality by 2030 would fall by 23 per cent, and 39 per cent in mortality in children under five. <\/p>\n Mortality from HIV\/AIDS would fall by 70 per cent, by 56 per cent for malaria and by 56 per cent for nutritional deficiencies.<\/p>\n \u2018Tens of millions of excess deaths\u2019<\/p>\n Considering the available evidence, the study concluded that \u201cSudden and severe reductions in official development funding could have catastrophic consequences, with a potential global death toll comparable to \u2014 or even exceeding \u2014 that of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even modest defunding that simply extends current downward trends is likely to lead to sharp increases in preventable adult and child mortality, potentially resulting in tens of millions of excess deaths in the coming years.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower\u2019s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID
Nicholas Enrich
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