In New Book, Nicholas Enrich ’10 Shares Account of USAID’s Unraveling
Nicholas Enrich ’10, who worked at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for 12 years, offers an insider’s account of the agency’s abrupt dismantling in a new book, Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID (S&S/Summit Books, 2026).
The memoir, which earned him a New York Times review and an interview with NPR, describes the human toll of the agency’s demise, according to Enrich.
"The staff at USAID was very surprised, and I think readers will be too, to learn how an agency that enjoyed broad bipartisan support for non-controversial goals like expanding access to quality healthcare and improving global life expectancy could be torn down in a matter of a few weeks," Enrich said. "I hope it will be a call to action and a reminder to Americans who feel that our democratic institutions are coming under threat in a new way to ask themselves, 'When is this no longer okay?' and speak out."
Becoming a Whistleblower
Enrich says he became a government whistleblower last winter after concluding that the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Trump appointee Elon Musk, intended to shut down USAID rather than make it run more efficiently. (A Musk tweet about spending the weekend feeding USAID "into the wood chipper" inspired the book’s title.)
The final straw, Enrich said, came during an Ebola outbreak when Enrich—then serving as acting assistant administrator for global health amid DOGE-led layoffs—was working desperately with his team to restore contracts that would have provided life-saving support. He said political appointees publicly stated that the Ebola response was underway, while he believed internal conditions did not at all reflect that assessment.
"That is when I told my team that our priority was no longer to try to restart programs. Our priority was to bear witness to this destruction," he said. "My team and I wrote a few memos documenting everything we had tried to do to restart life-saving programs, and how we had been stopped at every turn by DOGE and the appointees."
On March 2, he emailed former and current USAID colleagues describing what he characterized as widespread disruption at the agency and sharing his team’s analysis of potential global impacts. The email was subsequently leaked to the press. "The same day I was placed on administrative leave and that was kind of the end of my career," Enrich said.
Undergrad and BLS Work Led to Public Service Career
Enrich grew up in a public-service-centric family in Massachusetts, where his father was a local elected official. While studying abroad in Kenya during the 2003 HIV epidemic, President George W. Bush launched the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the largest commitment by any nation to address a single disease in history. Enrich said he viewed the program as a symbol of U.S. commitment to global health and was inspired to pursue a law degree. In his fight to "make the world a healthier place," a law degree would help him "ensure everyone, rich or poor, could enjoy basic standards of living as a human right," he said.
At Brooklyn Law School, Enrich focused on public service and international law, joining Brooklyn Law Students for the Public Interest (BLSPI) and taking an International Human Rights class with Professor Samuel Murumba, where he studied the United Nations International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights and related legal frameworks. "It dawned on me then that the right to health actually is a basic human right," Enrich said.
In the Law School’s Community Development Clinic, then led by founding director Professor David Reiss, he learned how to use laws and regulations to improve communities.
"It really mirrored what I ended up doing when I got to USAID," Enrich recalled. After graduation, with encouragement from the Career Development Center, he joined the Presidential Management Fellows Program, a longstanding federal government recruitment tool designed to get young leaders involved in civil service. (It was terminated by executive order in February 2025.)
At USAID, where the global health team was largely composed of physicians, epidemiologists, and public health specialists, Enrich said his role was somewhat unusual.
"I was uniquely situated to help turn technical expertise into actionable programming through the designing of procurements, executing contracts, and moving money in ways that safeguard taxpayer funds while also leveraging government commitments and achieving results," Enrich said. "That legal background allowed me to turn some otherwise potentially idealistic aims into reality."
What Happened at USAID and Why it Matters
Enrich argues that one of the most difficult aspects of USAID’s dismantling was what he describes as a lack of understanding of the agency’s 60-year mission. USAID has historically provided humanitarian assistance, education, climate resilience, economic development, and human rights programming.
He said the agency has been credited with contributing to major global health gains over the past two decades, which includes saving an estimated 92 million lives. He added that such programs are often viewed as part of U.S. "soft power" and global stability efforts that boost global stability, reduce U.S. migration, and help create a network of trading partners.
"Many over the years, including current Secretary of State Marco Rubio have seen USAID as not just an embodiment of American generosity, but a tool for national security," Enrich said. "From a global health perspective, the link is very straightforward. We all lived through the COVID epidemic, which made it clear that infectious diseases don’t stop at borders."
Since the agency’s dissolution, the physicians behind ImpactCounter.com estimate that 750,000 people have died as a result. Enrich believes the long-term consequences are still unfolding and says his goal in writing the book is to encourage reflection and accountability.
"I hope my story is an example that normal people make important choices every day and maybe it will inspire people to stand up and speak out when they see something that's not right that's happening, whatever their walk of life is," he said.