Strong testimony to Trump White House cuts that have exacted a “heartbreaking human toll.”
A righteously aggrieved account of the destruction of one of America’s best ideas.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was the brainchild of foreign-policy experts in the Kennedy administration, a teach-someone-to-fish extension of humanitarian aid that was a friendly, soft projection of American power. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as a former U.S. senator, was a “stalwart supporter of USAID,” writes former employee Enrich. Even the authors of the right-wing Project 2025 operating manual “recognized the critical value of the agency.” Yet Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cohort put USAID in their sights, with Musk tweeting that it was “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” as did “influential crusader” Mike Benz, who deemed the agency “a manipulative tool of the ‘deep state’ to spread a system of international censorship.” One might hazard a guess that the agency was put on the chopping block because it aided the developing world, but, as Enrich notes, in doing so, it also benefited Americans: A people delivered from famine might think well of their benefactor, and helping control the outbreak of diseases such as Ebola “makes us safer here at home”—and all at the per-capita annual cost to Americans of just $24. No matter—when DOGE landed, an early demand was to cease shipping medicine and food, even if it was already in transit. That happened, and when a judge ordered continued funding, the Trump administration ignored it. After Enrich leaked documentation of these cuts—“to expose the administration’s lies, cruelty, and recklessness”—he was terminated. “The story of USAID’s destruction is important because saving lives matters, but also as a symbol of where this administration was heading,” he argues. In a foreword to the book, Atul Gawande, the former assistant administrator for global health at USAID, writes that the shutdown of the agency “has already killed at least three-quarters of a million people, most of them children.”
Strong testimony to Trump White House cuts that have exacted a “heartbreaking human toll.”Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781668226957
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Summit
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
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