During the last days of USAID, one Trump appointee told longtime agency official Nicholas Enrich that to sway skeptical overseers about the dangers of drug-resistant tuberculosis, he should create a slide deck in the style of Barney. Another confessed that before being briefed on the agency’s disease-fighting efforts, he had thought USAID’s work consisted mostly of funding abortions — which it was federally prohibited from doing. As Enrich details in his new book, Into the Wood Chipper, the death of USAID was defined by such simultaneously distressing and farcical details. (The book takes its name from an infamous Elon Musk tweet in which he bragged about disemboweling the agency.) Enrich, a TB specialist who became head of USAID’S global health program amid a purge at the agency in early 2025, fought to save what he could, usually to no avail.

Musk wreaked havoc across the government, but he went after USAID — which he characterized as a subversive organization promoting leftist dogma around the world — with a vengeance. DOGE appointees and Trump officials, some of whom had longstanding grudges against the agency, blithely laid waste to it, firing seasoned bureaucrats and suddenly freezing funding for AIDS medication, clinical trials, education programs, and everything else in USAID’s vast, $35 billion-a-year remit. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, once a USAID champion, issued a waiver for lifesaving aid to continue, but in practice little changed. Rubio accused agency staffers of “insubordination,” and insisted, wrongly, that nobody had died as a result of the cuts he let stand. In the end, the agency was whittled down to almost nothing, then folded into Rubio’s State Department. Though exact figures are difficult to come by, researchers estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of USAID’s destruction. Its demise blew a hole in the public-health infrastructure of many developing countries, particularly in Africa; in some places, AIDS is already making a comeback.

Last March, Enrich — whom, full disclosure, I went to high school with many years ago — issued a memo detailing the human toll of the cuts, and was placed on administrative leave minutes later. He then gave a statement to Congress, becoming a rare public face for an agency that largely operated out of sight to the American public. I spoke with him about why USAID was so vulnerable to the chopping block, the anger he continues to feel over its destruction, and whether the agency might eventually get a second life.

Your book has gotten quite a bit of press. Have you heard from a lot of your former colleagues at USAID? Do they appreciate that you wrote this?It’s been unbelievable, actually. It’s definitely not what my publisher was expecting — now they’re scrambling to get more books out. And my former colleagues are really jazzed about somebody speaking out and telling their story. I always get a little uncomfortable about that, because it’s very much not everybody’s story; it’s very much mine. And different people were going through all different kinds of hell, whether it was the workers posted overseas who were forced to pull their children out of school or cancel medical appointments after being told they had to leave immediately, or the contractors in DC who were just completely shut out one day and just told to go home. We all had our own stories. But the reaction has been very positive.

To be honest, I was kind of expecting that the USAID community would be excited about the book, but I think it’s getting some larger traction. People are really interested in getting a sense of what actually happened with the DOGE team that was at USAID, and how it was so much more incompetent and indifferent and cruel than they knew.

I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why USAID was hit so hard. One explanation is that Elon Musk was listening to Michael Benz, a former State Department staffer who was on Joe Rogan’s podcast spreading conspiracy theories about USAID. Then Musk became obsessed, and then DOGE came in and killed the whole thing. But is it really that simple? The agency faced a lot of problems in Trump’s first term, too. Do you think it would have been in trouble regardless once Trump won again, even without Musk and DOGE? I think it’s a confluence of events. The fact that Elon wanted to tear it down allowed the DOGE team to really go after it. But there were also people who came in as political appointees in Trump Two who had been at USAID during Trump One, and had axes to grind. There was Pete Marocco, who was basically in charge of the agency. And he brought his buddies, including Mark Lloyd, who ended up being my boss — really terrible guy. Marocco had been there during Trump One, and he felt like he was completely mistreated by the USAID staff, that they leaked everything about him including his long history of Islamophobic remarks, even though his role then was religious freedom advisor for the agency. I talked to him at the beginning of Trump........

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