Nicholas Enrich was working in Kenya in 2003 when the then US president George W Bush signed a landmark $15bn, five-year commitment to combat HIV, the largest international health commitment by any nation to fight a single disease.
It was the peak of the epidemic, and for the young American government aid worker “it clicked that my government was ready to join the fight against HIV and I was excited to be a part of that”, he says.
More than 20 years on, Enrich, now 43, has published an account of what happens when a new US administration comes in with an agenda powered by an “America first” ideology and a plan to refashion the US’s outward international posture.
That account, published last week as Into the Wood Chipper – a phrase taken from a comment by Elon Musk on Doge cuts at the agency – details the early days of Doge’s foray into the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the freestanding federal agency established in 1961 by John F Kennedy as a strategic instrument of US foreign policy and a force for improving lives around the world.
Within days of taking office in January last year, Donald Trump issued a temporary pause on USAID funding.
Two months later, a formal dissolution of the agency was announced.
By July, with over 80% of programs canceled, it was officially merged into the state department and – in terms of the global development sector – an era had ended.
Last week, Devex reported that the state department had sent out a cable memo to US embassies to push host nations to sign a “trade over aid” declaration that explicitly rejects the US’s role as the top provider of humanitarian assistance in favor of business relationships that create opportunities for US companies.
“I wanted to let people know what happened and however bad they thought that it might be inside USAID when Doge came in to tear it apart, it was way worse – especially the incompetence, ignorance and cruelty that came along with it,” Enrich writes.
The account comes amid a debate over the US’s role in the world and stressed alliances, and acts as a memoir of an already-distant moment that the second Trump administration set the stage for its first 100 days in office with a Maga-pleasing upset of government norms that, in it own terms, were an effort to reduce “waste, fraud and abuse”.
“The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, wrote on X in March last year.
The remaining 1,000 or so contracts would then be administered by the state department, he said.
Oxfam summed up the effects: “The effect of these cuts on people is dire: at least 23 million children stand to lose access to education, and as many as 95 million people would lose access to basic healthcare, potentially leading to more than 3 million preventable deaths per year,” the charity estimated.
But for a workforce of more than 10,000 people inside USAID, like Enrich, the efforts felt like a wrecking ball.
“It looked like a group of unqualified people that came in to replace decades of expertise and tore down an agency,” he says.
But Enrich also addresses a broader topic: how to adjust to, or equally to resist, Trump’s style of government.
The book, he told the Guardian in an interview, “comes at a time when so many are wrestling with the idea of when is it no longer OK and when is it time to speak up.
I wanted to share my story as an example so that normal people can make choices if they find themselves in that position.” Enrich, an expert in drug-resistant tuberculosis who served as acting assistant administrator for global health, issued a memo....
