AM. ‘We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could have gone to some great parties. Did that instead.’”Author Nicholas Enrich worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under four administrations. He was the Bureau of Global Health’s director of policy, programs, and planning until January 2025 when he was designated as USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health.“Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.” Into the Wood Chipper’s epigraph, quoting Timothy SnyderIn Into the Wood Chipper he details the history of USAID, its value to both Americans and communities around the world, and its demise at the hands of Elon Musk and the Trump administration. The title brings to mind the infamous image of a gleeful Musk holding up a live chain saw as if he were the star of a horror flick.“My distress had intensified as I watched Musk flagrantly lie. Standing next to Trump in the Oval Office, he assured the gathered journalists and their live TV audiences that USAID’s programs to prevent the spread of deadly diseases like Ebola and HIV were still operating. They weren’t. DOGE was dismantling them piece by piece. At the same time, Secretary Rubio and his team were blaming me and my colleagues for the undeniable and deadly mess, accusing us of intentionally creating bureaucratic hurdles to block delivery of food and medicine. Rubio called USAID’s career staff ‘completely uncooperative’ and ‘insubordinate,’ even as his own political team stonewalled our desperate efforts to restart life-saving aid. Trump then piled on, claiming that USAID was run by ‘radical lunatics’ and pushing absurd lies about our work.”Enrich’s goal is to bear witness to the thing he could not prevent. He is perfectly situated to do so. And while the book is well written, it is content rather than style that concerns him. If you have been following the Trump II cycle, doubtless you know that USAID was dismantled. But if you want to see how this affected both employees of the organization as well as healthcare around the world, I recommend Into the Wood Chipper. If you feel that you can’t spare the thirty dollars for a book on a topic you’re already familiar with through the news cycle, I encourage you to do as I did—borrow it from your local public library.USAID was established because President Kennedy understood that the Soviet Union was pouring billions into support for newly independent nations across the globe. The United States needed to provide a counterweight. (Perhaps we’ve forgotten that we still do.)President George W. Bush also understood the value of USAID. In 2003 he signed legislation to combat AIDS, saying that every day of delay meant 8000 more AIDS deaths in Africa and 14,000 more infections.President Obama reminded us: “To many people around the world, USAID is the United States.”According to peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet, in the two decades previous to its shutdown, USAID prevented 92 million deaths. And, as Enrich reminds us, “It benefits Americans. Tuberculosis and HIV don’t stop international borders. Neither do other infectious diseases, as we all know having recently endured a global pandemic. Even if you’re not convinced of the value of goodwill and partnership built through decades of American generosity, USAID’s work to enable countries’ health systems to detect outbreaks before they spread makes us safer here at home.”“Russell Vought, the incoming Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, made no secret of this planned assault on the federal workforce: ‘We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,’ he said. ‘When they wake up in the morning, we want them not to want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down.’ In case that wasn’t clear he added: ‘We want to put them in trauma.’”So why was USAID a primary target of the DOGE dismantling party? Its employees hoped, rather naively, that it was all a misunderstanding of their work, that if they could educate DOGE ‘officials’ (I’m not sure what to call them) about USAID’s work, it would survive. They kept trying. They figured that in Trump’s previous term, his administration supported most of USAID’s global health investments. They felt the value of their work to global health was indisputable and non-partisan. They also knew that Project 2025 did not call for the elimination of USAID, but rather mentioned the critical value of the agency. However, DOGE never met with a career staff, but simply decided for themselves what needed to be cut without any information or knowledge of the work. The firings were so bad that people were simply emailed at night and told not to come into the office in the morning. These employees were asking those still allowed in the building to grab the wedding photos from their desks.“Someone at DOGE was just flipping a swish to shut off access for staff across the agency, with no direction from any political appointee or any knowledgeable career staff, and with no regard for the impact it would have on our operation? As far as I could tell, the entire TB, malaria, and maternal and child health teams had been switched off, even as our life-saving programs hung in the balance. Was DOGE really using no criteria whatsoever to determine who to shut off and who to keep?”Efforts to save the agency are laid out in heartbreaking detail. Once the reality of dismantlement is clear, Enrich turns to documentation, it seems, for future generations.“The results were rapid, predictable, and catastrophic. In Zambia, pregnant women with HIV could no longer find medicine to prevent their babies from being infected. In Sierra Leone, crates of donated drugs sat expiring on warehouse shelves instead of saving children’s lives. In war torn Sudan, malnourished families walked all day to communal kitchens, only to find them closed.”One example was particularly striking to me because of the current outbreak of Ebola in the Congo, the largest on record.When Ebola broke out in Uganda—neighbor of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west and Kenya to the east—USAID had already purchased 27,000 sets of personal protective equipment that were sitting in a nearby warehouse in Kenya, ready for use. This included gloves, masks, and hood gowns to protect healthcare workers. These critical supplies could be delivered within only a few hours. However, the outbreak went on and on for weeks without delivery because the warehouse was owned and operated by the World Health Organization (WHO). The Trump administration was in the process of withdrawing from the WHO and Trump had paused the transfer fund support or resources to the WHO. USAID they couldn’t authorize a nominal fee to the WHO to deliver the supplies to the Ugandan authorities.The people who were left at USAID keep requesting members of the Trump administration to OK the fee and issue supplemental guidelines, authorizing exceptions for emergencies like this one, but they didn’t do anything. Then Director of the Office of Foreign Assistance at the State Department and acting deputy administrator of USAID Pete Marocco—out after less than three months in office—acted like he didn’t know why he was getting these requests when he already said the authorization should happen. He either was willfully ignorant that formal State Department approval was required due to the executive order withdrawing the US from the WHO or he didn’t care what happened. Marocco’s answer to the crisis was just to say stupid things like ‘You better do it; get it done now within the next 12 hours; trim the fat’ (when there was no fat left) and using other clichés as if that would get work done.Marocco went on to lie about the status of USAID’s Ebola response and downplay the threat. He claimed to have approved every Ebola support program, even ones he believed were exaggerated. He indicated that he wasn’t going to provide vaccines for bird flu, Ebola, polio, monkeypox, or infectious tropical diseases because they weren’t killing anybody at the moment. He could not be made to understand that these things needed to be taken care of in advance of their killing people rather than waiting until after there was a huge outbreak. He comes off in this narrative as a complete knucklehead.Into the Wood Chipper provides many more such examples and includes a testament to all the futile work employees of USAID did in hopes of stopping the Musk DOGE train in its track.The text includes a forward by Dr. Atul Gawande, who served as the Assistant Administrator for Global Health at the USAID under the Biden administration; an author’s note; a key for referenced officials; a prologue; and an index.Let’s Remember There’s Also Positive NewsDid you know Gloria Steinem was a Girl Scout? I didn’t until I saw social posts from numerous Girl Scout Councils with the same Steinem quote:Here’s good news:Girl Scouts use their cookie sale money to 3D print wheelchairs for toddlers from Good.If you use a fan of girl scouting, you might like my post about the quilt I made for my niece using all her Girl Scout badges and camp patches. (Yes, it took me two years.) Thanks for reading! Please like, share, and leave a comment! Next week is our ‘Library and Banned Books News.’ Be well!Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com