USAID Whistleblower Says It Was Even Worse Than People Knew | WIRED

Overview

USAID Whistleblower Says It Was Even Worse Than People Knew

When billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) swept through government in the first months of 2025, there was one agency that felt the full force of the group’s desire to move fast and break things: the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Details

DOGE’s mandate was to cut contracts and government spending in a futile quest to reduce the federal deficit by $2 trillion. On January 28, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for “lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” which should have allowed money for critical projects to continue to flow. But according to Nicholas Enrich, who was then the acting assistant administrator for global health, that’s not what happened.

By early February, the group had taken over the agency, shut down its emails, and left tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid funding in limbo. Within days, the agency’s staff had been cut from 10,000 to 300, and by July the agency had been merged with the State Department. According to estimates from Boston University, more than 700,000 people died in the first year following the funding cuts, and congressional Democrats have announced an investigation into the deaths.

Enrich, who oversaw USAID projects that helped prevent the spread of diseases like malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis in countries across the world, was so disturbed by what he saw in DOGE’s takeover of the agency that he became a whistleblower. In his new book about the fall of USAID, Into the Wood Chipper, Enrich describes how he saw DOGE spearhead the total destruction of USAID.

“It's not just that these people were ignorant of global health and international development, they just did not know how the government works,” says Enrich. “So when they would encounter obstacles, they would spin around in a circle and have no idea who to talk to and where to go.”

WIRED spoke to Enrich about his experience during the DOGE takeover, the schism between the Trump administration’s political appointees and the DOGE team, the quieter impacts of the closure of USAID, and the way conspiracy theories shaped how the agency was perceived.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: What did the shutdown of USAID look like in practice?

Nicholas Enrich: Starting February 3, 2025, we started to lose access to our emails and systems. We had no idea if that meant people were being put on administrative leave or what.

At the same time, there was an Ebola outbreak in Uganda, and it was a priority for the National Security Council for USAID to respond to. And I was telling these political appointees, you know, “You just locked everybody out of the system who would be needed to respond to that.” And they would respond to me and be like, “Oh, no, I'm so sorry. This is DOGE. DOGE is shutting people off.” And then we have to go back to them and tell them one by one who we want to put back on.

Joel Borkert, a political appointee from the Trump administration and the agency’s chief of staff, quite often would just really complain about how DOGE was undermining his efforts to smoothly close our agency. I was in a meeting with all of those political appointees and a few others and was trying to explain to them what USAID did in global health. This was of course after half of the staff had been either fired or put on administrative leave. One of the things I mentioned was that by freezing our malaria program just before the rainy season starts in some of the countries where the highest burdens of malaria are, the fact that we aren't able to do the things we usually do to prepare—distributing bed nets, indoor spraying—is going to set us back years for malaria control, which is one of the number one killers of children under 5 around the world.

They kind of got the point that there are things that really do need to happen, and so they said, “You need to go and do that right now.” And I said, “Great, we will try, but you have shut out our entire malaria team from the system.”

And that's when [Borkert] banged on the table and said, just in pure frustration, “Just because this might work at Twitter does not mean you can do it here in the government.”

From the outside, when we were covering the takeover of USAID at WIRED, the rapid extinction of the agency seemed to be very fast-moving. But your book indicates that wasn’t exactly the plan.

It was this constant struggle between the political appointees who had been sort of tasked with conducting a smooth what they call “drawdown” of USAID on the one hand, and DOGE on the other hand who really did not care at all. There was a freeze of all foreign aid, and then there was a waiver for lifesaving humanitarian assistance. This was kind of Marco Rubio and his team basically saying, “Yes, we're shutting down USAID, and yes, we're freezing foreign aid, but we don't mean that we are just going to let people die.” That was the job of the political appointees to allow that to happen. DOGE was breaking everything so that it was impossible for them to do that.

The political appointees—Borkert, USAID’s chief of staff; Ken Jackson; and Pete Marocco—were trying to shut down the agency as smoothly and quietly as possible without generating big headlines and fighting against DOGE, who literally just wanted to shut everything off. I kind of describe them as like children playing in a toy spaceship pressing the buttons.

[Jackson, Borkert, and Marocco did not respond to a request for comment. In response to questions from WIRED a State Department representative says, “As Secretary Rubio has made clear, including in his testimony to the Senate, under the direction of President Trump, he made all of the relevant decisions at USAID and stands by them. He reviewed and approved every program decision. The Secretary ran a tight policy process with trusted career staff and political advisors —precisely to avoid the type of sadly pervasive leaks and lies of arrogant bureaucrats like Mr. Enrich.”]

Was it possible to keep projects alive based on the waiver to protect lifesaving humanitarian aid?

It's very difficult to say that you're working on restarting lifesaving activities when the contracts that you need have all been terminated. Jeremy Lewin was leading the DOGE team at USAID, and he had figured out a way to basically terminate everything. He made tons and tons and tons of mistakes. At the same time that I had been granted the authority, for example, to restart our tuberculosis activity, which meant that we had to send a notice to the partner organization to restart the activity that we told them to freeze on. And then just after that happened, the organization received an unsigned letter saying that their contract had been terminated. And so I was like, “Wait, they were just told to do this work, which was needed under the waiver, and now their contract is gone.”

In early February, I became aware of an initial list of contracts to be canceled, and maybe about a dozen of them were global health contracts. When the contracting officer came to me to ask if they could cut them, I said that we might need some of these contracts to do the lifesaving work under the waiver. It happened again a few days later and I got an angry email from Jeremy Lewin saying that he had heard that I was trying to slow down the process of terminating the contracts. The contracting officers were really nervous about letting me review [the lists] because they had been told they needed to provide updates to Lewin at like 3 pm, 5 pm, and 7 pm that day on how many of the contracts they had terminated.

[Jeremy Lewin did not respond to a request for comment.]

They terminated a contract in South Sudan for potable water for Americans who were in the USAID mission there. So they got a notice that they no longer had a contract for water and started rationing their drinking water because nobody had told them if this could be undone, and it’s not clear if they're going to have water in the next few days. DOGE terminated the contract that was a systems management contract that managed all of our contracts and they needed it in order to actually terminate contracts.

We know that the cuts to USAID funding have led to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people across the world. But it also created a massive risk for people and organizations who trusted the US, who really did the work on the ground. Can you talk about that?

I think the best examples of those actually fall outside of the health space and are especially true in our democracy and governance space. For example, we were working indirectly with partners in Iran that were supporting freedom of press or women's rights or democracy. When their contracts were terminated without warning, it left them extremely exposed to retaliation from the regime. And that's something that we saw all over Eastern Europe and pretty much anywhere we were trying to do democracy work.

It was really problematic for places where we were working in countries that had anti-LGBT policies or laws on the books or leadership that was open to punishing those groups. These aid cuts meant those groups were totally caught off guard and exposed them in a way that they had never been prepared for. It was worse than if they had never partnered with the US in the first place.

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Key Takeaways

USAID Whistleblower Says It Was Even Worse Than People Knew
When billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) swept through government in the first months of 2025, there was one agency that felt the full force of the group’s desire to move fast and break things: the US Agency for International Development (USAID)
DOGE’s mandate was to cut contracts and government spending in a futile quest to reduce the federal deficit by $2 trillion
By early February, the group had taken over the agency, shut down its emails, and left tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid funding in limbo
Enrich, who oversaw USAID projects that helped prevent the spread of diseases like malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis in countries across the world, was so disturbed by what he saw in DOGE’s takeover of the agency that he became a whistleblower