How Elon Musk Killed Hundreds of Thousands of People

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How Elon Musk Killed Hundreds of Thousands of People

Former USAID global health official Nicholas Enrich explains the catastrophic human toll of DOGE's cuts to the agency.

Current Affairs

filed 30 May 2026<br>in

Interviews

For more than 12 years, Nicholas Enrich worked at USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, rising to become one of the agency's top global health officials. Then, in a matter of weeks, he watched as the Trump administration and Elon Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) dismantled the six-decade-old agency responsible for delivering American foreign aid around the world.

Enrich documented the experience in his book Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID. He joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss what happened behind the scenes, and its devastating consequences.

NATHAN Robinson

Let's start with the book's title, Into the Wood Chipper. If people don't remember the "wood chipper" and how your agency was fed into it, who's it a quote from?

Nicholas Enrich

It's Elon Musk. So, yeah, about two weeks into the Trump administration, Musk tweeted that he just spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper, and I was the top global health official at USAID at the time. So, I unfortunately had a front row seat to the destruction that that was happening to the agency at that point, and I wrote this book to hopefully give readers a look of what it actually felt like inside of that wood chipper.

Robinson

Okay, so how it felt inside the wood chipper, but first, before we get to the dismantlement, let's have you lay out your personal background here. I mean, how did you get involved with USAID? How, what's what brought you to this agency, and what did you do for it?

Enrich

Coming into the second Trump administration, I was the Director of Policy, Programs, and Planning for Global Health, which basically meant that my job was to ensure that we were using taxpayer dollars effectively to achieve our objectives of increasing global life expectancy and creating access to affordable and high-quality healthcare around the world, and keeping Americans safe from infectious diseases overseas.

My background is actually in law, which is unusual for the Global Health Bureau at USAID, where a large portion of the staff were experts in global health, specifically—so doctors, epidemiologists, public health specialists, etc. But, you know, it's an agency that moves an incredible amount of money using complex financial instruments, and so that's that was kind of where I fit in: trying to find very efficient and effective ways to do the things that the doctors and epidemiologists were trying to do, using our funding.

Robinson

I feel like one of the tragedies of this story is that so many Americans had no idea what they lost when they lost this agency. I mean, you point out that before the Trump administration had USAID in its sights, you used to have to explain to people where you worked, and they didn't even know this agency existed.

And yet, for all of the horrors that come out of US action abroad on the military side, there's a lot of goodness that has come out of what this agency has done over the years. So tell us a little bit about about what this agency managed to accomplish.

Enrich

So, USAID was the federal government's branch to deliver foreign aid and international development assistance around the world to over 100 countries, and it succeeded in spades, using less than one percent of the budget. For example, we saved over 92 million lives within just the last 20 years alone. It was kind of the embodiment of American generosity overseas. We operated under a flag of people shaking hands that said "from the American people", but it wasn't just a charity organization. I think that that's it's really important.

It was an implement of national security. It kept Americans safe from infectious diseases. You know, we had developed a global early warning system, so that countries could detect and respond to infectious diseases before they could potentially threaten us. We built partnerships over decades with countries that enhanced stability and increased American soft power around the world, that really allowed for Americans to thrive in a stable world order for over 60 years.

Robinson

One of the remarkable things here is that—well, actually, first let me ask you this. You said that one of the things that you did was ensure efficiency, and obviously one of the right-wing critiques of government generally, and of this agency in particular, the...