INTO THE WOOD CHIPPER

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.”