John Rash: How Trump and Musk put USAID, and America's standing, 'into the woodchipper'

On May 27, 2003, Nicholas Enrich, a 21-year-old studying in Kenya, reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak.

On the same day, in Washington, America reached its highest peak with Africans when President George W. Bush, flanked by fellow world leaders and experts steeped in the link between foreign assistance and domestic security, signed the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

Among the most impactful global health initiatives ever, PEPFAR is credited with saving some 26 million lives. “The United States of America has the power and we have the moral duty to help, and I’m proud that our blessed and generous nation is fulfilling that duty,” Bush said, shaking hands with a former Zambian president whose son had died of the disease.

Meanwhile, Enrich was inspired by another handshake: the one emblazoned on buildings, vehicles and equipment throughout Africa as the longtime logo of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“Whenever I saw the USAID logo, I felt pride in my country,” Enrich later wrote. “That logo was a reminder that the U.S. cared about suffering in the world, and that we were committed to helping. By the end of my semester in Kenya, I had decided that I would work for USAID one day.”

Which he did, as a leader in the agency’s Bureau of Global Health, aiding his nation by aiding others in theirs. But on that Kilimanjaro peak he probably didn’t envision the valley his career, and his country, would fall into with the Trump administration’s irresponsible, reprehensible destruction of the agency.

In factual, fascinating prose, Enrich details this dystopian dismantling in “Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID.”

The wood chipper reference is from a social-media post by Elon Musk on his platform X, in which he boasted that as part of his role at DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone (sic) to some great parties. Did that instead.”

What Musk did he did recklessly. And repeatedly lied about it. As did numerous administration and DOGE officials, including one installed USAID leader who was among the throng storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Some eventually admitted that they had no knowledge of USAID’s impact across continents, and by extension America, due to the diplomatic benefits from America making good on its handshake.

One tasked with putting the agency (and America’s standing) into the wood chipper told Enrich’s team, “Wow, there really is so much that USAID does that we never knew.” Another said, “As a Republican, when I think of what USAID does in global health, I assumed that it was just, you know, abortions.”

In actuality, “we spend a ton of money and do a ton of compliance to ensure that absolutely zero foreign assistance dollars go to the promotion or provision of abortion,” Enrich said in an interview.

Perhaps it’s understandable that Enrich responded in the present tense, since he and his colleagues are still so committed to their calling — and to this country — despite having lost their jobs in an Orwellian ordeal that was cruel by design. (“We want to put them [bureaucrats] in trauma,” incoming Office of Management and Budget Director Russel Vought said at the advent of Trump 2.0.)

And the haphazard handling of lives and livelihoods was in fact traumatic, with many let go (and brought back) with little to no notice, jolting not just them but jeopardizing millions whom they helped. This treatment came despite Enrich and his colleagues approaching the change in administration with characteristic nonpartisan professionalism, only to have Musk post vile lies about USAID, including ones stating that “USAID is evil” and that “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical left-wing Marxists who hate America.”

That characterization might surprise the Enrich family in Lexington, Mass., billed as “the birthplace of American liberty,” where each year on Patriots’ Day, before watching the re-enactment of the Battle of Lexington, Enrich awoke at 5 a.m. from the sound of his dad, wearing a tricorn hat, shouting “The British are coming! The British are coming!”

In some sense, Enrich’s book offers an equivalent alarm. In fact, he said, one of the three main reasons he wrote it was that he “wanted it to be a warning for folks to see how one of America’s best ideas — an agency that had broad bipartisan support for six decades and had saved 92 million lives over the last 20 years, and all these wonderful things it had done — was torn apart by a bunch of sycophants who really knew nothing about what the agency did in a matter of weeks when nobody stands up and says something.”

Enrich stood up and said something. It’s “a recantation of facts,” he said of his detailed, documented book that will endure as a testament to the administration’s ideological (and often idiotic) institutional wreckage. “I felt like there was so much more of the story, and part of it was I wanted to name names; a year later a lot of the people who are responsible for the illegal destruction of the agency and the damage it’s caused around the world are still sitting in very high levels of government.” (Including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, among the many who mischaracterized what was happening).

The third reason for writing, Enrich said, was a call to action. Many who had already heard and heeded that call, including several former USAID workers, were at the Minneapolis Central Library this week when Enrich spoke at an event organized by the Minnesota International NGO Network. Among them was Ali Syverson, who was a writer for USAID.

She’s also an artist. And after Enrich’s address she presented him with an original painting, “From the American People,” featuring scenes of the agency’s work. Across the canvas spans the handshake logo, which to Syverson means “the U.S. is always there to help.”

The symbol “was synonymous with the United States, which was an incredible way for us to be known around the world. Unfortunately, that logo has been ripped down all around.”

Selfless servants like Syverson, Enrich and the thousands who worked for USAID or other government entities are often derided by Trump supporters as “the swamp.”

In truth, they’re a wellspring, and hopefully they will be allowed to once again serve their country and our world.

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