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.
This is what Mass Murder looks like.
The most apt imagery is the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, as a metaphor for every institution that was dismantled by DOGE.
It’s easy for anyone to hire guys with excavators to tear down a building, if you don’t care about the building’s contents, its purpose or the environment around it. You don’t even need to know how to get a ballroom built even if that’s what you’d want after. Without pre-emptive restrictions and enforcement of checks on the executive’s power, the destruction can always be faster than the judicial system that would say “that’s wrong, don’t do that”.