Many of those tasked with shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development last year were completely unaware of the agency’s purpose and effectiveness, a former USAID official said.
“I put Trump administration officials into two categories: Those who were cruel and those who were buffoons,” Nicholas Enrich, the former head of global health for the agency, said on MS Now’s “Morning Joe” program April 15.
Nicholas Enrich
“And most of the DOGE folks fell into that second category in that they had absolutely no idea what the agency they were trying to destroy even did. They were uninformed; they were unqualified.”
Some of the administration officials appointed to oversee the process were surprised to learn how USAID’s global health initiatives had saved millions of lives and prevented deadly diseases from reaching the U.S., he added in an op-ed published for MS Now.
“USAID’s new chief of staff, Joel Borkert, was equally astonished by the global impact I had laid out. His reaction: ‘I had no idea you did all this! When I think of what USAID does in global health, I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.’”
Enrich shared his experiences and observations in a new book, Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID.
USAID was the first government agency Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency targeted in its disruption of federal agencies. And it was Musk’s infamous social media post that inspired the book’s title.
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead,” Musk posted Feb. 3 last year.
Just the day before, he described the agency as “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”
“I’m hoping to show readers what it looked like inside of that wood chipper, and to show the impossible decisions that civil servants were forced to make as our programs collapsed with millions of lives hanging in the balance,” Enrich said during his interview with MS Now. “I was the top global health official at the time at the agency, and so I had a front-row seat to the destruction, the ignorance, the indifference of him (Musk) and his and the Trump administration.”
“I’m hoping to show readers what it looked like inside of that wood chipper.”
USAID was the main government agency providing international aid in more than 130 nations. Assistance included support for education, economic growth and global health, and each was designed with national security interests in mind.
“It was American generosity overseas, and over the last two decades saved 92 million lives on a budget of less than 1% of the federal budget. It also kept Americans safe from things like infectious diseases, and it helped build partnerships,” Enrich said.
But the administration used DOGE to rapidly dismantle the agency and canceled 83% of USAID-managed foreign assistance projects. The remainder were moved to the U.S. State Department. Nearly all its 10,000 employees were fired.
The federal government is still embroiled in legal actions around the destruction of USAID, including one arguing the move was illegal without congressional approval. Another lawsuit targets Musk’s exercise of federal authority was illegal.
An especially infuriating aspect of the process was hearing political appointees describe USAID programs and employees in derogatory terms, Enrich said in testimony before Congress in March 2025.
One Trump appointee to the agency “came to the Hill recently and blamed failure to implement lifesaving programs on what he called ‘malicious over-compliance’ on the part of USAID/GH staff. To suggest that career civil servants who have dedicated their lives to improving global health would intentionally fail to implement lifesaving programs to make the administration look bad is not only facially ludicrous, but provides a helpful window into the cynicism and disdain that colors some of the administration’s view of the federal workforce and our critical programs.”
For the moment, no other nation has filled the void in global assistance created by the demise of USAID, while many other nations have since cut back on their foreign aid as well.
But the human and national security consequences already are being felt, Erich wrote.
“USAID’s work to enable countries’ health systems to detect outbreaks before they spread made us safer at home, as improving health care is well-known to alleviate migration and conflict, saving Americans from needing to resort to much more costly interventions.”
And the benefits weren’t just in global health, he said. “Those pro-democracy groups in Iran that Trump is now calling upon to rise up and take over their government? USAID supported those organizations until the agency was dismantled last year, increasing their vulnerability to persecution by the regime.”
The scale of human suffering has been immense, he said on “Morning Joe.”
“To date, we’re looking at over 750,000 people who have already died, most of those children, and those are deaths that are unnecessary. They absolutely would not have happened had the USAID continued to exist.”
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