The update with the author re Ebola latest outbreak is last on this news video...
To the public servants,
whose compassion, optimism, and devotion lift all of humanity
****
Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. — TIMOTHY SNYDER, On Tyranny
https://timothysnyder.org/resources/ 
We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience--On Tyranny
Note: I have not yet read this book; however, because of the declared announcement of a major breakout of Ebola, I wanted to spotlight some part of this important book NOW. We have seen just how our medical issues have been totally disregarded by this administration. For instance, the fact that a measles outbreak has been allowed to go untreated is UNBELIEVABLE... We cannot afford to risk our lives since the USAID is no longer working to ensure major medical events are known immediately, broadcasted, and acted upon!
~~~~
As I write this, it is a year after President Donald Trump ordered a ninety-day pause on the United States’ foreign assistance for a reassessment of priorities as one of his first acts in office for his second term. At the time, those words came across to the American public as so bland as to seem almost meaningless. How harmful can a “pause” in anything really be? Reassessment seems like an appropriate thing for a new president to do. And what is meant by foreign assistance, anyway? Within days, however, it became apparent that the order meant the immediate stoppage of the country’s non-military aid abroad of every kind—in particular, the entire work of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) from ending diseases like polio, tuberculosis, and HIV, to assisting with disaster relief in places such as Ukraine and Gaza, to protecting orphans, refugees, and religious minorities in some of the most hellish places on earth. Established in 1961, and championed by President John F. Kennedy, USAID had been created by Congress to provide sustained, expert support for the advancement of human survival, economies, and democracy in order to foster peace and stability and to counter the adversaries of freedom.
It is clear that the United States is now an adversary of freedom...
There is no such thing as a temporary pause in such work. It soon became clear that hundreds of thousands would die. But the new administration only doubled down, turning the pause into a wholesale dismantling of USAID. The toll since has been staggering. Boston University researchers have conservatively estimated that, one year later, the shutdown has already killed at least three-quarters of a million people, most of them children. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has projected the first increase in child deaths since the 1960s. Furthermore, with the entire infrastructure of the agency destroyed—more than ten thousand staff around the world were fired, programs touching hundreds of millions of lives were terminated, and networks and expertise built over six decades were lost—the bleeding is guaranteed to extend far into the future, even if funding and commitment to development assistance are restored. We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he asserted, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Into the Wood Chipper is a remarkable, devastating insider account of exactly how this was able to occur. The agency was brought to its knees in a matter of a few weeks, despite being established in law. Nick Enrich was a civil servant at USAID during four administrations, two Democratic and two Republican, and as USAID’s last acting head of global health, he was a witness to the pivotal events. He makes painfully clear that, in order to destroy the agency, people at the highest levels made choices to ignore the law, the procedures, and the harm to people’s lives. Others—in Congress, the courts, and in the agency itself, including Nick—were then confronted with what they would do in the face of those choices. And what you encounter in his account of this tragedy is a Shakespearean range of human behavior and emotion: deceit, indifference to harm, bloodlust, thirst for power, incompetence, fear, accommodation, self-delusion, and, at all too few moments, courage.
From January 2022 to January 2025, I was USAID’s assistant administrator for global health, a politically appointed and Senate-confirmed role. When I arrived, one of my primary concerns was how to manage bureaucrats. I’d absorbed all the stereotypes: they’d lack work ethic and talent and be impossible to hold accountable. I came to see that none of it was true. Just weeks into my role, Russia launched missile attacks on Kyiv and a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and I got a fast lesson in what USAID personnel were capable of. Among its many catastrophic effects, the war immediately cut off the country’s medical supplies, shuttering pharmacies across Ukraine, and Russian cyberattacks disabled hospitals’ digital systems. Inability to access medications and hospital care endangered vastly more lives than the bombs. For instance, a quarter million Ukrainians with HIV, and even more with diabetes and heart disease, depended on medicines for their lives. While the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance was responsible for supporting the Ukrainian government’s response for the millions of people suddenly displaced from their homes, my Bureau for Global Health was responsible for supporting the health system to remain functioning. First, the foreign service staff in Kyiv focused on getting to safety. But within days of doing that, the health team had reconstituted in new locations, identified the supply chain and cybersecurity expertise they needed, and helped the government develop its strategy for keeping the health system going. Then, over the next several weeks, they helped the country execute, shifting hospital management systems to a new cloud-based system that was better protected against cyberattacks, working with the World Health Organization and numerous others to establish a new supply chain for medical supplies integrating more than five thousand humanitarian relief organizations, as well as getting six months of HIV medications mobilized for delivery. Within weeks, half the pharmacies in the country were supplied and open. Within three months, more than 80 percent were. The personnel in D.C. and Eastern Europe had worked around the clock. They solved problems of every dimension. They followed the law. And they delivered at a scale and with an impact like I’d never experienced. During my time in office, that would prove to be my experience again and again. Nick Enrich was a prime example of USAID’s personnel. I’d recruited him from another bureau to serve, essentially, as the chief financial officer for our bureau, overseeing our processes for budgeting, planning, and program execution. This was a hot seat role. We ran a major international operation involving thousands of partner organizations and government entities in more than sixty-five countries. We dealt with problems that sometimes required planning in hours and delivering in days, but other times—when, say, working to strengthen outbreak surveillance systems around the world or to reduce global child deaths—required planning in months and delivering in years. We were constantly being called to account for our spending and outcomes by our congressional oversight committees. On the one hand, USAID delivered arguably the highest impact per dollar of any agency in the U.S. government, saving lives by the millions with a global health budget in 2024 of just twenty-four dollars per American (out of fifteen thousand dollars per person paid in taxes). On the other hand, there were legitimate criticisms. The agency could be inefficient. It could foster dependency. Too much of its funding went to international institutions, rather than to local ones. I set improvement targets for each of these issues that I promised Congress we’d hit, and Nick was responsible for big parts of delivering on them. And deliver he did. The Nick Enrich you encounter in these pages is the same Nick Enrich I knew from working together: a perceptive observer, a man with capacity to keep cool and perform under enormous pressure, and a patriot of the old-fashioned kind, motivated simply by the opportunity to serve and save lives. In his book, he writes the way he speaks and thinks—clearly, honestly, without euphemism or bureaucratese. He does not omit the details, including about his own regrets. This requires fearlessness. When Trump’s appointees arrived at USAID shortly after the inauguration—swinging their chainsaws, clueless about the agency’s lifesaving work, and not actually interested in it—Nick was only at the midpoint of his career. He has still-young children at home and a mortgage to pay. He has no clear job ahead for his future. I have spoken to many former USAID staff who, to this day, will not speak publicly about what they saw and experienced, out of understandable fear of retaliation or being blacklisted from the few remaining jobs in their decimated field. But not Nick. He blew the whistle as USAID was being dismantled and officially documented the inhumanity and illegality of the administration’s actions. He filed an affidavit that was cited by the Supreme Court. And now his book exposes the people responsible and precisely how they precipitated public man-made death. He deserves our country’s gratitude.
!!!!!!!!
Author’s Note Conversations recounted in this book are drawn from contemporaneous notes and my best recollection of events. I have reproduced them as accurately as memory and verification allow. Quoted emails, directives, and other written communications come directly from original documents I retained. A collection of key documents is available at www.intothewoodchipper.com. I have not changed names or concealed identities, with the sole exception of a personal friend whose identity has no bearing on these events. I have excluded anything for which I lacked records or reliable notes. There was far more I witnessed and could have documented. However, my access to USAID email and file systems was abruptly cut off in March 2025, limiting what I could corroborate. What follows is based exclusively on the evidence I was able to preserve. The rest will have to be told by others who had more time or foresight to retain records, or otherwise will wait until the government releases a full set. The more than ten thousand people working at USAID on January 20, 2025 were employed through a wide array of hiring mechanisms: civil service, foreign service, foreign service nationals, institutional support contractors, personal service contractors, fellows, detailees, and others. I often refer to these groups collectively—career officials, civil servants, staff members—to distinguish them from political appointees and DOGE. Although we served side by side in pursuit of USAID’s mission, these employment categories carried real and sometimes painful differences. For example, when institutional support contractors were terminated in January, their pay and benefits ended immediately. Many exhausted unemployment benefits within weeks. By contrast, civil service officers like myself remained on paid administrative leave and later collected severance for months. These disparities shaped our individual experiences, though they represent just one dimension of the human consequences of the events described in this book.
*
Prologue - It was a cold Thursday evening in February 2025, exactly one month into the Trump administration. It already felt like it had been years. I was sitting in the loud, dingy basement of Astro Beer Hall in downtown Washington with three of my colleagues from the U.S. Agency for International Development. We had claimed a small table in the corner of the bar, squeezed between a birthday party and a corporate happy hour. It had been another wretched day, and I didn’t know how much longer we could keep this up. Our agency was facing an extinction event. The meteor had already hit, and USAID, which for more than sixty years had saved millions of lives around the world from disease and poverty, had been left smoldering in ruins. It had started on Inauguration Day, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order pausing all foreign assistance. Things had unraveled from there. Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and social media tycoon, had set out to destroy the agency, having seized on USAID as a test case to demonstrate the power of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, his new quasi-governmental creation. He didn’t know what USAID did, or why it existed in the first place, and he didn’t seem to care. All he knew was that he intended to feed USAID, in his words, “into the wood chipper.” Musk’s operatives had put the agency’s leadership on administrative leave and had summarily fired thousands of international development experts in Washington and across the globe. In a half-hearted effort to stave off a humanitarian catastrophe, the new U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, issued a waiver that supposedly allowed USAID to resume its lifesaving work. But Trump’s appointees and Musk’s DOGE team ignored the waiver.
Even as the administration publicly claimed that lifesaving programs were continuing, behind closed doors they forged ahead on their single-minded mission to destroy USAID. Funding was frozen. The workforce was slashed. Systems crumbled. Contracts were terminated. They even removed USAID’s name from the entrance to its headquarters in the Ronald Reagan federal office building on Pennsylvania Avenue. The results were rapid, predictable, and catastrophic. In Zambia, pregnant women with HIV could no longer find medicine to prevent their babies from being infected. In Sierra Leone, crates of donated drugs sat expiring on warehouse shelves instead of saving children’s lives. In war-torn Sudan, malnourished families walked all day to communal kitchens, only to find them closed. During this whirlwind of destruction, I had been promoted, without warning, to the top position in USAID’s Bureau for Global Health, where I was ordered to endorse the termination of these programs and the firing of hundreds of my colleagues. This was not what I had signed up for.
My distress had intensified as I watched Musk flagrantly lie. Standing next to Trump in the Oval Office, he assured the gathered journalists and their live TV audiences that USAID’s programs to prevent the spread of deadly diseases like Ebola and HIV were still operating. They weren’t. DOGE was dismantling them piece by piece. At the same time, Secretary Rubio and his team were blaming me and my colleagues for the undeniable and deadly mess, accusing us of intentionally creating bureaucratic hurdles to block delivery of food and medicine. Rubio called USAID’s career staff “completely uncooperative” and “insubordinate,” even as his own political team stonewalled our desperate efforts to restart lifesaving aid. Trump then piled on, claiming that USAID was run by “radical lunatics” and pushing absurd lies about our work. By late February, all hope of preserving even a fraction of USAID’s work seemed lost.
The Bureau for Global Health, originally nearly eight hundred people strong, was on the verge of being reduced to a staff measured in two digits, and none of our programs were operative. And so on this Thursday evening I found myself at Astro Beer Hall with Ramona Godbole, Nida Parks, and Natalia Machuca, three of my senior colleagues, who had been on the front lines with me for the past weeks, as we tried—over and over—to blunt the effects of the staff cuts, funding freezes, and contract terminations. I was exhausted, running on fumes. I had slept no more than an hour the previous night. My team and I had been up late working yet another unsolvable problem the agency’s political leaders had manufactured for us. It was just the latest in a month of self-inflicted chaos that comes along with political appointees who have no understanding of or interest in learning the rules or laws of government. We were trying to respond to a deadly Ebola outbreak in Uganda, had been trying for weeks. But we had been stymied at every turn. The night before, USAID’s leaders finally agreed to our plan to send twenty-seven thousand sets of personal protective equipment into the outbreak zone—except there was a catch. They wouldn’t authorize payment to release the PPE from the Kenyan warehouse where it was being stored. Instead, they had ordered me to go get the supplies myself. I had tried to explain that was not how we operate. Even if I could get there, and had a license to drive a truck, I was not authorized to transport the PPE across the Ugandan border. Besides, sending me to do all this would cost more than the nominal transfer fee (we had already paid for the PPE, we just needed to move it). This was why USAID contracts for this type of service, I explained. But my new bosses were not convinced. They insisted that I go pick it up and make the delivery. Oh, and one more thing: They gave me twelve hours to get it done. That order had come just before 8 p.m., and my team and I had been flailing to find some way to move the supplies ever since. The twelve-hour deadline had come and gone, and I hadn’t been fired yet, at least as far as I knew. More important, we were no closer to providing the needed PPE to respond to the Ebola outbreak. I can’t take much more of this, I thought. Ramona must have been able to read it on my face, and she was at least as fed up as I was. “We have to get the fuck out!” she blurted, taking a swig from her wineglass. Normally soft-spoken and careful with her words, Ramona had reached her breaking point. I knew she was right, but it was hard to hear. Resigning from our jobs would mean giving up on everything: our careers, our mission, the lives that depended on our work.
This was not the first time Ramona had argued that this was our only option; she had drafted a resignation letter two weeks earlier, and I had nearly signed on to it several times. Each time, I had wavered, thinking that we could do more good if we stayed in our jobs and fought the administration’s onslaught from the inside. Nida had always argued against Ramona’s drastic remedy. Once again she made her case. “We cannot quit yet,” she said. “Not while there’s still a sliver of hope we can restart something. I know we’re driving ourselves insane and making zero progress, but as long as there is anything left we can do, we have to keep trying.” “But what are we actually doing?” asked Natalia. “Can you name one thing we’ve done since this administration came in that you’re proud of? Because I can’t.” I tried to think of an answer, but nothing came. That was a bad sign. I had worked at USAID for more than twelve years, and it was rare to go even a day without feeling proud of what I was doing. I was now the agency’s top global health official, but my dream job had turned into a nightmare. Day by day, at the direction of our reckless and vindictive political leadership, we were abandoning our lifesaving programs and the people who relied on them, disbanding our staff, shredding our agency from within. We were digging graves—our own, and those for millions of others.
I drained my beer and headed to the bar for another round. Three more pilsners and another glass of the happy hour red. Threading my way back through the crowd with the four precariously balanced drinks, I took stock of our situation. I was coming around to Ramona’s point of view. Back at the table, I slid the drinks to my colleagues, wondering how we—just four civil servants—could find a way to get the truth out, in the face of lies from the world’s richest man and from the highest-ranking officials in the Trump administration. Ramona, Nida, and Natalia had been huddled together conspiratorially while I competed for the bartender’s attention. Now they went silent as I returned. All eyes were on me. Even in the bar’s dim light, I noticed Ramona’s sly smile. “We don’t have to go down quietly,” she said. “We could blaze out.” Natalia nodded in agreement. Ramona went on: “Nick, you’re the highest-ranking global health official at USAID. If you tell the world what they’ve done—how many lives it’ll cost, how it’ll make the U.S. more vulnerable to the next pandemic—people will listen. Maybe Congress would even act.” The idea was intoxicating. I didn’t want the political appointees at USAID to get away with the cruelty they’d shown as they tore down decades of progress in global health. I wanted to expose their indifference and ignorance, which was already costing lives, and it was going to get so much worse. “Would anyone even believe me?” I asked. “If we do it right, they’d have to,” Natalia jumped in. “We’ve got the records. Every email, every document, all the notes. What if we wrote it up? Every illegal order, every time they stopped us from saving lives, every time we warned them and they shrugged us off. I’d love to write one last great memo.” Left unsaid was the obvious next step: That memo and evidence would have to be leaked far and wide. My colleagues were serious, and now I was intrigued. At what point was it time to take a stand? When would it be too late to speak up? “What do you think, Nida?” I asked. She was the least ready to give up the fight, and she had talked me off the ledge a few times already when I had been prepared to quit. But Ramona and Natalia were not proposing surrender. Far from it. “Do you think we should blaze out, too?” She hesitated. “We’re definitely running out of other options,” she said finally.
“At least it would be a warning for other agencies, the ones they’ll come for next.”
Nida was right. This wasn’t just about USAID. We were the first victim of DOGE’s chainsaw, but we certainly would not be the last. The staff at whichever agency was fed through the wood chipper next—the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the Department of Education—could learn from what had happened to us at USAID and avoid some of our mistakes. The alternative looked untenable. If we kept our heads down, quietly carrying out the administration’s dangerous and unethical orders, weren’t we just helping them expand their assault to other federal programs? If we didn’t speak up, who would? I looked around the table: Together the four of us had spent fifty-five years at USAID. What would it mean to walk away from that? Where would we go from here? In the dark corner of the bar, I tried to grasp how much ground had been lost. In a single month, I had gone from being a stalwart civil servant, dutifully carrying out the president’s foreign assistance agenda, to a potential whistleblower, ready to expose the administration’s lies, its cruelty, and the danger its actions posed to U.S. national security. I thought of all my colleagues at USAID. As the walls closed in, they, too, faced terrible choices. Now the choice was mine.
~~~~
Note: Italics show my points of anger!
Plan to Vote No Matter How, No Matter when, No Matter who Tries to
Stop US
Gabby
No comments:
Post a Comment