A new book tells the inside story of the second Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID. Its author, Nicholas Enrich, worked at USAID for over a decade before he was pushed out of the agency in early 2025, when the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency summarily cut its staff and funding. An estimated 14 million people are projected to die “unnecessarily” over the next five years due to these cuts, and nearly a million, mostly children, already have, says Enrich. His new memoir, Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID, is named after one of Musk’s social media posts from that period, when the South African billionaire wrote, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” Since its establishment in 1961, USAID has saved the lives of tens of millions around the world by treating and preventing serious health issues such as HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, malaria and more. By slashing the agency, the U.S. “pulled the rug out from under people around the world,” says Enrich. “We broke promises to millions who were relying on USAID services, and left them hanging out to dry. We broke promises to governments and broke partnerships that will have lasting effects for years to come.”

Transcript

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Nermeen Shaikh in New York, with Amy Goodman in Los Angeles.

We spend the rest of the hour looking at the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Founded in 1961, the agency funded global health programs around the world. Since 2000 alone, USAID programs saved more than 92 million lives, according to an independent analysis published by The Lancet.

Early in President Trump’s second term, USAID found itself in the crosshairs of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by billionaire Elon Musk. In the middle of the night on February 3rd, 2025, Musk posted on X, quote, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

AMY GOODMAN: Nicholas Enrich is a former civil servant who worked at USAID through four administrations. He served as the director of policy, programs and planning in the Bureau of Global Health until January 2025. On March 2nd, 2025, he was placed on administrative leave for exposing the Trump administration’s illegitimate and dangerous dismantling of the agency, as he describes it. His book details what happened, is just out. It’s titled Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID, joining us from Washington, D.C.

Nicholas Enrich, thanks so much for being with us. Can you start off by talking about your decision to become a whistleblower? And then describe the range of health services, since you were involved with the health program within USAID, everything from AIDS prevention to TB prevention. And what is estimated for the number of lives lost for the sudden shredding of this agency?

NICHOLAS ENRICH: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Yes, there are estimates that show that up to 14 million people will die over the next five years alone, unnecessarily, due to the cuts to USAID, if that’s not rectified. And we’re already starting to see the impacts. In fact, 750,000 people have already died, most of those children, according to conservative estimates. And we’re seeing, as bad as it is that we’re seeing so far, the worst, unfortunately, is yet to come, with the next generation of children who are unable to get immunizations, with children being born with HIV at high rates, when just a year ago those numbers were near zero. And so, I’m afraid that unless we’re able to make some changes, we will, unfortunately, be seeing those impacts years to come.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, Nicholas, could you talk about what happened in the early weeks of the Trump administration, including telling us about what the Trump-appointed people at USAID — what they were doing and how much they actually knew about the agency?

NICHOLAS ENRICH: Sure. The DOGE team and the Trump officials that came in truly knew nothing about the agency. I put the — I put the Trump officials into two categories: those who were cruel and those who were buffoons. And most of the DOGE team that came in fell into that second category. These were people who were uninformed, unqualified and truly knew nothing about the agency that they had been tasked with dismantling, and ignored the warning of experts that this would put millions of lives at risk.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Then your decision to write this book? Why did you feel you needed to write an entire book? You wrote that memo explaining what had happened. Tell us about the book and your decision to write it.

NICHOLAS ENRICH: I wrote the book because it wasn’t just — I think that there’s two critical factors that people should take away from this book. The first is that we pulled the rug out from under people around the world. We broke promises to millions who were relying on USAID services, and left them hanging out to dry. We broke promises to governments and broke partnerships that will have lasting effects for years to come. As the legacy of Trump’s administration and foreign policy becomes clear, I think when the dust settles, we’ll see that the dismantling of USAID ends up being one of the most impactful, in a terrible way, impacts of his entire legacy.

But the other reason that I wrote the book was that maybe it’s too late to save USAID, but there are other agencies, other institutions in the United States that are hanging on by a thread. And at a time that more Americans are feeling that something is fundamentally broken in our democracy, I wanted to tell this story to remind readers that normal people can make important choices every day, and when people see things that they truly believe are not OK, they’re being asked to do things that are illegal — and this is inside the government or in everyday life, whether you’re working at a university or working at a law firm or just a neighbor who sees neighbors getting picked up on the streets by masked ICE agents — it’s up to you to stand up and speak out when you see something wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking to reporters February of last year, President Trump called for USAID to be shut down.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s absolutely obscene, dangerous, bad, very costly. I mean, virtually every investment made is a con job.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk, Nicholas Enrich, about the significance of this decision, whether USAID is completely shut down? And what happened to, for example, PEPFAR, which was a President George W. Bush project, which, of course, addressed the issue of AIDS, has been credited with saving some 26 million lives, enabling nearly 8 million babies to be born without HIV infection? I remember when Elon Musk said, “Oh, we made a little mistake, but we fixed that.”

NICHOLAS ENRICH: Right. The decision to dismantle USAID was made by people, as I mentioned, who really knew nothing about the agency. And we would warn them on a day-by-day basis. And I think one of the things that I wrote this book about was to expose, however bad viewers might think that the — from the outside, that things were inside of USAID, they were far, far worse. These were people who ignored warnings that were specific to U.S. national security. For example, there was an outbreak of Ebola happening in Uganda at the time that USAID was being dismantled. And while I knew we couldn’t start a robust outbreak response, that we usually have, because of everything that was being dismantled, there were a few key activities that I really felt that we needed to do. And they would not even let us screen passengers at airports, that were traveling on international flights onwards to the United States, to make sure that they had Ebola — that they did not have symptoms of Ebola. So, that was a real risk to U.S. national security, and it was just sort of laughed off and ignored by the political appointees and DOGE.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Nicholas Enrich, one of the things, one of — a very prominent member of Trump’s Cabinet, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, had initially been a great enthusiast of USAID, but ultimately went along with what the Trump administration, overall, was planning to do with USAID. What do you think accounts for that change?

NICHOLAS ENRICH: Yeah, Marco Rubio was one of the biggest supporters, in his previous career in the Senate and beyond, of USAID. So, when he was announced as the secretary of state, the staff at USAID breathed a collective sigh of relief, thinking that while there might be policy changes coming, the core programs would be saved, because Marco Rubio recognized that there was a value to Americans of providing foreign aid and international development assistance.

Since then, however, he — I can’t speak for him, but what I can say is that his comments that he’s made about USAID, that the staff were insubordinate, that no one has died because of the cuts to USAID, have been complete untruths. And what we’ve actually seen is a dissolving of the exact — of the exact programs that Marco Rubio was once a supporter of.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Nicholas, could you talk about — you know, we just — our earlier segment was about Sudan, the fact that it’s now — the war is entering its fourth year. If you could talk about what the effects have been of USAID cuts in Sudan, which is facing the worst humanitarian crisis in the world?

NICHOLAS ENRICH: Sure. Sudan, unfortunately, is one of the most glaring examples of what happens when the world’s richest man is killing the world’s poorest children. There are people in Sudan, displaced people and refugees, whose only access to healthcare and nutrition was through USAID support and services. And so, we very rapidly started hearing horrible stories about families walking all day to get to a health clinic that had the USAID logo on the side of the building, only to find it shuttered, were unable to get access to food supplements and ended up having to go home at the end of those days and make the harrowing decision of which of their children to feed.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And finally, Nicholas, if you could talk about the fact that all of this is happening, the cuts in USAID are happening, at the same time as all wealthy countries have massively cut down on their overseas aid?

NICHOLAS ENRICH: Right. That is a compounding problem that we’re seeing, a decline in foreign aid around the world that has precipitated from the cuts to USAID. And I’m afraid, again, it’s not just the impacts that are happening right now. USAID and other forms of international development built partnerships and long-lasting support and allies around the world. President Obama said that for most people around the world, USAID is the United States. And I’m afraid to think about what the world — how the world looks at the U.S. after USAID is gone. And I’m afraid that our cuts, our broken promises will actually turn countries who had once been our partners to look for support from adversaries like Russia or China and eliminate the support that we have built over all these decades.

AMY GOODMAN: Nicholas Enrich, I want to thank you for being with us. New figures show Germany has for the first time surpassed the United States in overseas aid, overseas aid from wealthy countries overall plummeting by 25%. Nicholas Enrich, former USAID official and author of the new book, Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID.

And that does it for our show. I’m here in Los Angeles for the theatrical release of the new documentary, Steal This Story, Please!, directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. I’m here with Carl Deal in Los Angeles. Tomorrow afternoon and evening, we’ll be at a KPFK fundraiser at the Laemmle Royal in West L.A., doing fundraisers at 1:10 and 7:10, the screening of the film followed by Q& A. Then we are headed to San Francisco with Tia Lessin, the co-director. We can’t wait to see people at the Roxie and in Berkeley and San Rafael. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.