Who Died When Elon Musk Killed USAID?

The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

On the night of February 3, 2025, Elon Musk boasted on X about his weekend spent “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” The remark still haunts Nicholas Enrich, the career civil servant turned whistleblower who borrowed it as the title for his memoir.

Part political chronicle, part testimony, part autobiography, Into the Wood Chipper recounts the destruction of the United States Agency for International Development from the anguished perspective of a federal worker fed into the DOGE-powered chipper.

Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID
By Nicholas Enrich
Summit

The book opens not in Washington but in Kenya in 2003, where a 21-year-old Enrich was studying. There, he witnessed both the ravages of HIV and the birth of PEPFAR—an AIDS relief program that has been one of the most consequential global health initiatives in history. Remarkably, the program was the personal brainchild of George W. Bush, who was reportedly inspired in part by reading the book Roots. As of 2023, it was estimated to have saved 25 million lives, largely in sub-Saharan Africa.

Seeing USAID’s handshake logo across Kenya as the agency implemented the AIDS relief program filled Enrich with a sense of patriotic pride that sparked his interest in civil service. He entered the federal government in 2010, and started specifically working at USAID in 2013.

By January 2025, Enrich was the director of policy, programming, and planning at USAID’s Bureau for Global Health, where he awaited the incoming Trump administration. Having served under Joe Biden and Donald Trump during his first term, Enrich anticipated policy friction under Trump 2.0.

And while Elon Musk’s amplification of Mike Benz’s tirade against USAID raised concerns, Enrich and his colleagues at the agency were not expecting an existential crisis. Even Project 2025 had not proposed completely abolishing the agency.

Yet a sudden executive order from Trump on his first day in office brought all of USAID’s programming to a screeching halt.

The institutional shock waves were immediate and severe. Perishable food and medical supplies were trapped at borders, undelivered; clinical trials for lifesaving treatments were interrupted mid-course; and contractors around the world suddenly couldn’t meet payroll. When a fresh Ebola outbreak emerged in Uganda, efforts to respond to the crisis were, by Enrich’s account, actively suppressed.

Within two months of that initial executive order, the formal dissolution of the agency was announced. By July 2025, USAID was officially folded into the State Department and over 80 percent of its programs had been canceled. PEPFAR was halted for 90 days, causing untold deaths. While it has since partially restarted, operations have been significantly disrupted and more than four million fewer people are receiving treatment.

Enrich’s memoir covers the brief, catastrophic interval between his unwanted promotion to acting Administrator for Global Health in January 2025 to his eventual exile from USAID in March for exposing the agency’s dismantling.

What Enrich captures most vividly is the texture of bureaucratic trauma—the specific, grinding experience of watching an institution you love be dismantled by people who, by his account, barely understood what it did.

One political appointee insists that Ebola is a scam; while Joel Borkert—USAID’s new acting chief of staff—assumed the agency’s global health work amounted to “just, you know, abortions.”

When Luke Farritor identified 58 senior agency officials to be ousted for allegedly disobeying Trump’s executive order, the DOGE operative hedged: “I could be wrong … my numbers may be off.”

The memoir also documents something more deliberate than incompetence. Mark Lloyd, whom Trump tapped as USAID’s assistant administrator for global health, for example, was not ignorant of the agency’s work; he was contemptuous of it. Enrich recalls how Lloyd’s “eyes lit up” at the opportunity to enact vengeance on the “list” of agency employees that had apparently wronged him.

It was a combination of administrative incompetence and malice, and the book illustrates the grim process by which dull bureaucratic procedures can end up killing human beings en masse. Meetings are held, emails are sent, phone calls are made, and something like 520,000 children die of malnutrition, diarrhea, tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV. As the book goes on, it becomes clear it was more the second explanation rather than the first—DOGE’s destruction of the agency was driven primarily by animosity rather than ignorance.

Still, readers expecting a granular account of the consequences of gutted foreign aid will find the book thinner than it ought to be. Enrich regularly references “lifesaving work” that had been at best stalled, and at worst completely abandoned, by dismantling USAID. Yet the book hardly delves into the individual experiences of aid recipients whose access to health care has been jeopardized.

And while this lack of detail limits the reader’s abilities to connect to the estimated three-quarters of a million people that the gutting of USAID has already killed, Enrich isn’t all that well positioned to tell such stories.

To his credit, Enrich does not pretend his vantage point is otherwise. He openly acknowledges that he spent his career in the middle of USAID’s hierarchy—a manager of programs and plans, not a field officer with firsthand knowledge of the communities those programs served.

The reality of completing a nine-day trek to an international relief outpost, only to find the area completely abandoned, can only best be explained by the Somali families forced to endure such suffering.

Likewise, the anger that comes from having your access to food abruptly revoked could only truly be expressed by the thousands of Kenyan refugees protesting their conditions.

Enrich is, however, precisely the kind of person who could best speak on how DOGE’s destructive brand of “efficiency” is catalyzing the spread of violence and disease across Africa. His position within USAID afforded him firsthand experience of Russell Vought’s playbook to make civil servants compliant in their own traumatization. Most importantly, his story has the potential to inspire more federal workers to speak out.

This is, in the end, a book about what the Trump administration’s campaign of deliberate obliteration and disorientation looked like through Enrich’s eyes—how it felt to have his professional identity stripped away, his work nullified, his oath to service weaponized, and his career sacrificed.

As an account of that experience, Into the Wood Chipper is sharp, propulsive, and necessary.

Who Died When Elon Musk Killed USAID?

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