When billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) swept through government in the first months of 2025, there was one agency that felt the full force of the group’s desire to move fast and break things: the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
DOGE’s mandate was to cut contracts and government spending in a futile quest to reduce the federal deficit by $2 trillion. On January 28, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for “lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” which should have allowed money for critical projects to continue to flow. But according to Nicholas Enrich, who was then the acting assistant administrator for global health, that’s not what happened.
By early February, the group had taken over the agency, shut down its emails, and left tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid funding in limbo. Within days, the agency’s staff had been cut from 10,000 to 300, and by July the agency had been merged with the State Department. According to estimates from Boston University, more than 700,000 people died in the first year following the funding cuts, and congressional Democrats have announced an investigation into the deaths.
Enrich, who oversaw USAID projects that helped prevent the spread of diseases like malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis in countries across the world, was so disturbed by what he saw in DOGE’s takeover of the agency that he became a whistleblower. In his new book about the fall of USAID, Into the Wood Chipper, Enrich describes how he saw DOGE spearhead the total destruction of USAID.
“It’s not just that these people were ignorant of global health and international development, they just did not know how the government works,” says Enrich. “So when they would encounter obstacles, they would spin around in a circle and have no idea who to talk to and where to go.”
WIRED spoke to Enrich about his experience during the DOGE takeover, the schism between the Trump administration’s political appointees and the DOGE team, the quieter impacts of the closure of USAID, and the way conspiracy theories shaped how the agency was perceived.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: What did the shutdown of USAID look like in practice?
Nicholas Enrich: Starting February 3, 2025, we started to lose access to our emails and systems. We had no idea if that meant people were being put on administrative leave or what.
At the same time, there was an Ebola outbreak in Uganda, and it was a priority for the National Security Council for USAID to respond to. And I was telling these political appointees, you know, “You just locked everybody out of the system who would be needed to respond to that.” And they would respond to me and be like, “Oh, no, I’m so sorry. This is DOGE. DOGE is shutting people off.” And then we have to go back to them and tell them one by one who we want to put back on.
Joel Borkert, a political appointee from the Trump administration and the agency’s chief of staff, quite often would just really complain about how DOGE was undermining his efforts to smoothly close our agency. I was in a meeting with all of those political appointees and a few others and was trying to explain to them what USAID did in global health. This was of course after half of the staff had been either fired or put on administrative leave. One of the things I mentioned was that by freezing our malaria program just before the rainy season starts in some of the countries where the highest burdens of malaria are, the fact that we aren’t able to do the things we usually do to prepare—distributing bed nets, indoor spraying—is going to set us back years for malaria control, which is one of the number one killers of children under 5 around the world.
