DOGE’s mandate was to cut contracts and government spending in a futile effort to reduce the federal deficit by $2 trillion. On January 28, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for “life-saving humanitarian assistance”, which was supposed to keep funding flowing to critical projects. But that did not happen, according to Nicholas Enrich, who was acting assistant administrator for global health at the time.
In early February, the group took over the agency, shutting down its emails, and leaving tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid funds in limbo. Within days, the agency’s workforce was reduced from 10,000 to 300, and by July the agency was merged into the State Department. According to Boston University estimates, more than 700,000 people died in the first year after 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 around the world, was so disturbed by what he saw in the agency’s takeover by DOGE that he became a whistleblower. In his new book about the collapse of USAID, in wood chipperEnrich describes how he saw DOGE lead to the complete destruction of USAID.
“It’s not that these people were ignorant of global health and international development, they just didn’t know how government worked,” Enrich says. “So when they encountered obstacles, they would go around in circles not knowing who to talk to and where to go.”
WIRED spoke to Enrich about his experience during the DOGE acquisition, the rift between Trump administration political appointees and the DOGE team, the chilling effects of USAID’s closure, and how conspiracy theories shaped the agency.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Wired: What did USAID’s shutdown look like in practice?
Nicolas Enrich: From February 3, 2025, we started losing 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 responding to it was a National Security Council priority for USAID. And I was saying to these political appointees, you know, “You’ve taken everyone out of the system who will need to respond to that.” And they would respond to me and say, “Oh, no, I’m so sorry. It’s DOGE. DOGE is turning people off.” And then we have to go back to them and tell them one by one who we want to bring back.
Joel Borkert, a political appointee of the Trump administration and the agency’s Chief of Staff, often complained about how DOGE was undermining his efforts to smoothly shut down our agency. I was in a meeting with all those political appointees and some other people and trying to explain to them what USAID did in global health. This was of course when half the staff was either fired or put on administrative leave. One of the things I mentioned was that in some of the countries where there is the highest burden of malaria, by shutting down our malaria program just before the rainy season started, the fact that we are not able to do the work that we usually do to prepare – distributing bed nets, spraying indoors – will set us back many years for malaria control, which is one of the number one killers of children under 5 worldwide.
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