Lawfare Daily: An Insider’s Account of the Trump Administration’s Dismantling of USAID

[Intro]

Nicholas Enrich: I was kind of like nervous but optimistic and waiting for some sort of supplemental guidance that would describe what was actually meant by this, because they couldn't possibly mean what it said, because that would result in potentially millions of people losing their lives and us pulling the rug out from promises we had made around the world to keep people safe.

Anna Hickey: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Anna Hickey, associate editor of communications at Lawfare, with Nicholas Enrich, former acting assistant administrator of global health at USAID and author of “Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID.”

Nicholas Enrich: In my mind when the dust settles on the Trump presidency, this is gonna end up being its legacy.

This is one of the most consequential policy decisions that the Trump administration will have ended up making, and they didn't even know what it was that they were closing out.

Anna Hickey: Today, we're talking about his experience within the agency as Elon Musk's newly created Department of Government Efficiency dismantled it, and the global impacts of the end of the United States Agency for International Development.

[Main Podcast]

Before we dive into what happened with the agency last spring between, like, January and March of 2025, can you describe your background? You know, how did you end up at USAID, and what did you do there prior to January 20th, 2025?

Nicholas Enrich: Sure. I was in the Global Health Bureau, and unlike most people in the Global Health Bureau who were doctors, epidemiologists, public health specialists and the like, I was actually a lawyer.

And my job was to basically create a framework, a procurement framework for USAID to move money in ways that would allow us to implement the technical objectives of those doctors and epidemiologists. So my job as we came into the Trump administration, was the director of policy, plannings, and programs for the Global Health Bureau, and that basically just meant that we needed to make sure that we had enough—we had the right levels of funding to achieve those objectives, and that we were using those funds as effectively as possible to achieve those objectives.

Anna Hickey: And when we think about objectives, like, what was USAID doing? For, you know, I'm sure many people in America—at least some of our listeners didn't really know about the agency prior to last year when it really hit the news. What were USAID's objectives, and what was the scale of, you know, especially the Global Health Bureau, of that service and, like, impact?

Nicholas Enrich: Yeah. Our big overarching objectives were to increase global life expectancy and to expand access to quality healthcare around the globe. We had a budget in global health of approximately eight billion dollars a year, and we worked through a variety of disease and health areas like HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, maternal and child health, family planning, nutrition, and a couple of others.

And the basic model was to work in partnership with host governments to strengthen local health systems to be able to address health problems for the long term.

Anna Hickey: Obviously, there's the reason of the U.S. government should do this because it is morally good, it is saving people's lives.

But why was it important, at least in your eyes, that the U.S. government was doing this work in other countries to decrease, you know, maternal mortality increase life expectancy for especially, like, children? What's the pitch to the U.S. people?

Nicholas Enrich: Yeah, I mean, the shortest term pitch is that it keeps Americans safer from the potential spread of infectious diseases.

Right and we're five years out from a global pandemic of COVID, and so I don't think anyone is confused that diseases don't stop at international borders at this point. And since COVID, we've invested hundreds of millions of dollars through USAID to help countries strengthen, like, a global early warning system to be able to detect and respond to outbreaks of infectious diseases before they potentially could become a threat to the U.S.

So that's in the shortest term sense. Another is that, howev—like in, in a more broad sense, USAID, it was really the embodiment of American generosity and soft power in a lot of ways. We strengthened partnerships and built stability and security around the world in ways that were founded on goodwill and partnership and made the world a more stable place for the benefit of all Americans.

Anna Hickey: Now kind of turning to what happened last spring. So starting in January 2025, I mean, you start the book of you, you end up on vacation at the beginning of the transition. Can you describe, you know, what January 20th to January, you know, 22nd, 23rd looked like? What information was coming into the agency, and how you all were thinking about the second Trump administration coming in and changing the objectives or directions of the agency?

Nicholas Enrich: Sure. I mean, I should start even before the inauguration reading kind of anything I could possibly find about what the administration might be planning for USAID, including Project 2025, a lot of speculation as to who were gonna be the potential political appointees that might come in. And what it seemed like was we were concerned about that some of our programs might be in jeopardy, especially those related to family planning, those related to climate and resilience, and those related to partnering with the World Health Organization.

But it never really crossed my mind, honestly, that the entirety of our broader programs would be threatened. I mean, again, the objective of expanding health access around the world and increasing global life expectancy and keeping Americans safe from infectious diseases seemed to have broad bipartisan support over decades.

On January 20th, however, there were a series of executive orders that the president issued that first day, including one that issued a blanket freeze on foreign assistance. And to me, I was reading that, like you said, I was actually on vacation. I did not know how quickly this was all gonna move, and I thought I might have some time as the transition would go into place but boy, was I wrong.

But as reading that the executive order that was freezing foreign assistance, I thought it must be a mistake, overly broad, because if taken at its letter, my assumption was that would mean that it would shutter health clinics that we had, that USAID was running all over the world. It would interrupt clinical trials that we had patients that needed to take treatment the next day.

It would disrupt the distribution of everything we were planning to do to prepare for the rainy season for malaria around the world. And just the effects would be so catastrophic that I just couldn't believe that's really what they meant. And so I was kind of, like, nervous but optimistic and waiting for some sort of supplemental guidance that would describe what was actually meant by this, because they couldn't possibly mean what it said, because that would result in potentially millions of people losing their lives and us pulling the rug out from promises we had made around the world to keep people safe.

Anna Hickey: Just to kind of drill down on two parts of the question. First, you mentioned family planning. I know there's a lot of people, especially online, that think about family planning from USAID in terms of, you know, abortion or other reproductive health access things. Is that what you mean by family planning?

Nicholas Enrich: No. I mean, we did not do abortions. We were actually legally prohibited by statute to not promote or provide any sort of abortion services. What we mean by family planning is counseling, providing contraception, providing the basic frameworks to allow women and girls to have children in, in, at, in the timing that they wanted to and to help prevent teenage pregnancies, to help women continue in their education so that they could help contribute economically, and as a program that, that actually saves a lot of lives by giving women more education and choice over when they have families.

But that, to be very specific and clear, we did not fund abortions under any circumstances, despite that being, like, a insidious rumor. But again we had strict safeguards in place to prevent that none of our funds were ever used for abortion.

Anna Hickey: I know especially kind of this year, I feel like I've seen a lot of people, both who support the administration and oppose the administration, have responded to critics of saying, like, “Nothing is surprising. Everything that the administration has done has been laid out either in President Trump's, you know, 2024 campaign by his advisors, in Project 2025,” and just to, like, really hammer the, you know, point home, it's the destruction of USAID was not mentioned during the campaign trail in Project 2025 by, like, any of his advisors or spokespeople in the run-up even after he won before January 20th.

Nicholas Enrich: That's correct. I mean, n-nothing that I had seen. I mean, well, I will say that there were certain fringe podcasters and right-wing social media commentators who were certainly calling for the abolition of USAID and calling it a front for the CIA, and unfortunately, it was those voices that somehow caught the ear of Elon Musk as he was coming in with his Department of Government Efficiency.

And while th-this was not a political priority for, in anything that I saw in terms of for the Trump administration or his political appointees where DOGE is concerned, unfortunately, that's exactly what they got into their heads is what they wanted to do.

Anna Hickey: Thinking about DOGE and what DOGE did, as I read the book, I kind of became aware of three buckets of people who worked at USAID in between January and, you know, March or July 2025, and so I kind of want to pull at the intentions and roles of each of those buckets.

So the first was, you know, people like you, people who had served at USAID prior to January 2025, the civil servants, foreign service officers. The second bucket was DOGE personnel who came in at the behest of Elon Musk. And then the third were political appointees who came in who had some had previously worked at USAID and, you know, people like Pete Marocco, who ended up leading much of the agency.

So do you think about kind of the people who worked at USAID in those three buckets? Or is there anybody I'm missing who had significant roles to play in that time period?

Nicholas Enrich: No, I think those are the three main buckets. The, like as you say, the political appointees that were coming in from the Trump administration, the DOGE team that was coming in under Elon Musk, and the career officials or the civil service, foreign service contractors all those groups that were already there.

I think that's a fair assessment.

Anna Hickey: And so thinking about the DOGE people first, you mentioned much of the actions by the DOGE personnel kind of were, at some points appeared to be random. You mention in the book sometimes it even appeared to be unintentional. In your view, in your time there, how much of what the actions of specifically the DOGE personnel were done, you know, to target specific programs?

How much was done just to end all foreign aid? How did you think about their intent and then also what they did?

Nicholas Enrich: Yeah, I think it's really important here to be very clear that the DOGE personnel that came in had absolutely no idea what USAID did, and they really didn't care to find out. They never participated in any sort of meetings where they could find out what it was the agency did.

When they started tinkering w- and I refer to them as, in, in the book, as basically children in a toy spaceship messing around and pressing buttons and not really knowing or caring what any of those things did. And some of the destruction that they initiated—Actually, all of the destruction that they initiated was w- like, not based on and totally in disregard for what the impacts of that would be on global health and international development in general.

And the other thing is that they from the DOGE perspective, they really didn't-- it w-whereas the political appointees were kind of focused on closing out the agency in like a smooth way that Marco Rubio even issued a waiver to allow life-saving humanitarian assistance activities to continue.

But DOGE really didn't care about that. They were working quickly. They and it was pretty smart for them to do that because it allowed them to break everything down before there was any way to save any parts of the program. So it often ended up with kind of yelling and screaming between the political appointees and DOGE as the political appointees who were, to some degree, some of them were trying to figure out what the impacts would be of the damage when they realized, “Oh, wow, we do need to turn some of this work back on or people are really gonna die.”

And they realized that the damage that had been done to the systems by DOGE through breaking our payment system or canceling our contracts or slashing the staff were so broken that there was no way to even fix them at that point. They were beyond repair.

Anna Hickey: So did you have any personal interactions with any of the DOGE personnel during your time at USAID?

Nicholas Enrich: I did. I wish I did earlier because I would have loved to try to get the chance to explain to them what the damage they were causing. But by the time I started interacting with DOGE, it was them getting very angry at me for what they called slowing down their process of canceling terminating our contracts.

And the reason that that we had that bit of a conflict was, as I mentioned, Rubio had issued this waiver to allow, even though foreign aid was paused, to allow for life-saving activities to continue. So this entire time, from January through the beginning of March when I got kicked out, that was my goal, was to restart the life-saving activities, and I was stopped at every turn.

And one of the things that was preventing us from... a- actually, maybe the most permanent thing that was preventing us from turning those activities back on was that DOGE was terminating the contracts that we needed to do those activities. So I would continue to try to say, “Wait, before you terminate that contract, you should know that it's needed to implement the waiver that Rubio put in place, that Musk is standing at the White House and saying, you know, we're still doing these activities, that Rubio and Pete Marocco are telling Congress that, yeah, we have this waiver in place.

All the life-saving things are continuing. We can't do those if you terminate our contracts.” And DOGE basically just said, “Absolutely not. Stop slowing down our process. All these contracts have already been vetted by the secretary of state,” which was just frankly not true. And so tthat, that ended up being my first interaction with DOGE.

Anna Hickey: What was your position in between January and March when you left at USAID? 'Cause you mentioned that you started, you know, doing more of the lawyery work within global health, but you obviously don't end up in that position at the end.

Nicholas Enrich: Sure. About one week into the Trump administration, DOGE put the 60 most senior career officials at USAID onto administrative leave, and that included my boss, who was acting as the assistant administrator for global health, and all of her deputies.

And then the next day, I found out through a notice that went to the entire agency, without any warning or heads-up, that I was actually the one that was now gonna be put in charge of global health because they had gotten rid of all the career leadership. So from that point on, about one week into the Trump administration, I was the acting assistant administrator for global health.

As I mentioned or as you mentioned I was on vacation at the time that I found this out and had to hurry back to Washington and just kind of jumped right into, to a world of chaos again. Like, my number one priority trying to be to get DOGE and the political appointees to understand what it was that they were destroying so that hopefully we could save some of the key programs on the way out in a kind of desperate attempt to avoid, like, a catastrophic loss of life.

Anna Hickey: So we've mentioned the term political appointees. I think that term, we probably should define it at this point. So when we talk about political appointees, what are we referring to, and how are the political appointees who came in the second Trump administration maybe distinct from the types of appointees that came in during prior transitions?

Nicholas Enrich: Yeah. So, so unlike the career staff or the civil service and the foreign service and those that are kind of the consistent federal employees that stick around and non-partially or non—in a non-partisan way implement the work of USAID, every four years there's a new political leadership that's determined by and appointed by the president, and that, that's common.

That happens every four years, and usually that's experts in the field where, like for, in, in global health our previous political appointee that, to lead global health was a guy named Atul Gawande, who's a renowned surgeon and global health strategist. And so that's normally what you get in terms of political appointees.

In this case the people that were brought in as the Trump political appointees were actually people that had little to no information about what the agency did or really understanding of how government worked. That was the primary collection of political appointees. There were a few, a handful who had been political appointees previously under the first Trump administration that came back.

So that included Pete Marocco and the guy who ultimately became my boss, Mark Lloyd. And these the people who were returning, they fall into the category of vindictive. These were people who came back into the government with an axe to grind because they felt that they had been wronged during the first Trump administration.

Marocco, for example, had been removed from USAID after only four months in, in the first Trump administration for severe mismanagement that he blamed on the career staff. My boss, Mark Lloyd, also had been there and also blamed the career staff for his ouster as well, saying that they had, the staff had like leaked things to the press and had harassed him, and he even went as far as saying that the career staff during the first Trump administration had killed his dog.

So I mean, these are the kinds of people that we were trying to convince that needed to save our programs. They were people who were really happy to be there trying to get rid of the civil servants. Really, absolutely, it was a pleasure to them to disregard and get rid of the expertise of the agency in what felt like revenge.

I mean, again, my boss was pretty convinced that me and my colleagues were pet murderers

Anna Hickey: So that was a part of the book that I wanted to make sure I asked about 'cause it, like, stopped me in my tracks where the quote that you have him saying is, “they,” referring to USAID civil servants at the time, “tracked down my family and sent pictures of my son's house to threaten me, and then they killed my dog.”

Did you ask him what he meant by that? I just, I can't imagine having somebody who was my boss accusing me and my colleagues of that.

Nicholas Enrich: So I've been asked that before, and the answer is no. I was nervous to follow up. I didn't believe it, honestly. It, like, sounded unhinged, and again, needs to be taken in the context of I—

The reason he brought it up was because I kind of asked him, like, “When you came in for this position, were you looking forward to doing the position that you were brought in for, which was to be an assistant administrator for a part of the agency, or were you excited to be tearing down this agency?”

And he was just happily telling me that he was excited to be tearing down the agency, that he had a list of staff that he wanted to take revenge on. And so honestly, when he told me that the staff had killed his dog I asked no follow-up questions. I just said something like, “Oh, that sounds terrible,” and tried to kind of, like, remove myself from the conversation because, you know, I was afraid of where that was going.

Anna Hickey: Thinking about, you know, Mark Lloyd ending up as acting assistant administrator for Global Health, one of the other, I guess, people you mention in the book is Tim Meisburger, who was acting assistant administrator for the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance. You obviously as a civil servant also ended up in that role very briefly.

Do you have a sense of how or why you as a civil servant ended up as an acting administrator for, or acting assistant administrator for a period of time when m- much of the other acting assistant administrators were political appointees?

Nicholas Enrich: So I think the reason is because they hadn't yet brought in a political appointee to be the assistant administrator for Global Health, whereas they had for the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, which was Tim Meisburger, and for the Bureau of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, which was what Mark Lloyd was brought in for.

But yeah the bureaus that did not have political appointees that at that period one week into the administration when all the senior leadership was removed, in, in those cases, all of those bureaus were then led by civil—or civil servants. So for example, the, all the regional bureaus, so like the Bureau for Africa, for Asia, for Latin America and Caribbean, for example, all were kind of the same situation as me, career officials who were elevated to that position because their bosses had been removed.

Anna Hickey: Did you ever get an explanation as to why putting political appointees in wasn't a priority for the administration that early on when, you know, all of the senior folks were put on admin leave? Did you ever get an explanation of why certain bureaus got political appointees and not others, or is that just unknown?

Nicholas Enrich: Well, I mean, it certainly within two weeks of the Trump administration coming in, when Elon Musk tweeted that he just spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper, at that point, they weren't really interested in, you know, bringing in a team of political leadership to run a, an agency, right?

They were at that point getting rid of it. As far as I can tell, the only political appointees that came in were the ones that came in with Pete Marocco, his kind of like group of people who had been there with an axe to grind from the first administration. And I did not hear this directly, but I wouldn't have been surprised if they had a conversation about how much fun they were gonna have when they came in because that's sort of how it seemed.

I guess that's not true. There are a couple of other political appointees that I don't know what their relationship was to, to Pete Marocco, who did come in, like, and kind of seemed like they were trying to do something. And w- and by that I mean they were trying to draw down was their word, to close out and shutter the agency in a way that causes little damage and as few headlines as possible.

Those are people like the chief of staff, Joel Borkert, the director of policy Meghan Hanson. These were people who didn't seem necessarily, at least to me, to have, like, a specific animosity towards the agency, but were s- just “This is what's happening. We're taking this agency apart.”

The- these were people who did seem to think that there was some priority related to following Rubio's waiver for life-saving humanitarian assistance, where those other appointees that I talked about that came in with Marocco, and certainly the DOGE staff, had no interest in fulfilling that part of their duties.

Anna Hickey: You know, now thinking about the impact to people on the ground of the closure of USAID, you mention in the book an Ebola response that was at least mildly thwarted last spring by the actions of the people who tried to close down the agency. Can you talk about what the standard, if there is a standard, USAID response to an Ebola outbreak is, and then compare that to what happened last spring?

Nicholas Enrich: Sure, yeah. I mean, an Ebola outbreak anywhere in the world is considered a national security threat to the United States, so that usually triggers a National Security Council level response, and the international development piece of that is led by the Global Health Bureau at USAID. So we usually, we, we consider that in, in the Global Health Bureau, had always considered that an all-hands-on-deck incident.

So that meant we're pulling staff from other teams, we're sending response teams immediately to the affected region, we're coordinating with our partner agencies like the CDC for testing, with the World Health Organization, with the host government in this case in Uganda, and we're mobilizing a massive response effort.

So that means bringing in personal protective equipment into the area to make sure that healthcare workers are able to quickly respond without putting themselves at risk. It means conducting screening and contact tracing to try to identify the extent of the outbreak and to be able to contain to contain it where it is and a variety of other like, measures.

And in this case, we were thwarted at every attempt that we made to set up a response. First, at the time, we were barred from communicating with our partners in the country, with the WHO, but even with our own sister agencies. We weren't even allowed to communicate directly with the CDC, and when and when the National Security Council came and asked for updates, why are they hearing that Elon Musk is saying that Ebola activities have restarted, where the government of Uganda is saying that they haven't, Pete Marocco would just basically lie to the National Security Council and be like, “I don't know we've approved everything,” when he had refused to approve the activities that we had asked for.

And some of those in—These were, like, not just to help contain the outbreak in Uganda, but to keep Americans safe. For example, they refused to allow us to provide screening at international airports in Uganda to make sure that passengers didn't have symptoms of Ebola before getting on international flights.

You know, some of those people could be going onward to the United States, and that's a, you know, a way to get Ebola into America, and we weren't even allowed to do that. Similarly, we had pre-positioned personal protective equipment at a WHO-owned warehouse right outside of the Ugandan border in Kenya, and were not allowed to move those that PPE into the country directly by Pete Marocco because he was upset that would've involved engaging with the World Health Organization, which he refused to do at all costs.

At one point, he actually told me that I should go and get the PPE out of the warehouse without engaging with the WHO, who owned the warehouse, and it was... I mean, it was this crazy scenario where he was basically suggesting that I break into the warehouse myself or my team and, like, go get this PPE, bring it across the border without telling anyone, and he actually gave me 12 hours to do that or he threatened to fire me, and it—

I never—I was not able to get it done. He did not fire me at that point luckily. But you know, we were never able to get the PPE into the country, and it's just sitting still, as far as I know in that warehouse not being used for, you know, what was a critical national security threat.

Anna Hickey: Do you have a sense of what the outbreak of Ebola on the ground in Uganda looked like, given the lack of, you know, USAID assistance?

Nicholas Enrich: It actually ended up not being the worst outbreak that we had seen. I mean, there were, there was only a handful of people who ended up dying from the outbreak and it—the number of cases were actually contained.

It was pretty miraculous given that it was an outbreak that actually involved people within the capital city. Often that exacerbates the problem. I think it's kind of a testament to the work that we had done since the since COVID especially to help provide technical expertise and training to make, to, like, build up the Ugandan system to be able to identify those things even sometimes without our help.

But, you know, at the time that, that's not a good enough reason to... the fact that we got lucky and this didn't turn into an out of control Ebola outbreak as we've seen in other cases in other countries over the last few years, like, it just felt like we were kind of conducting global health policy by crossing our fingers and hoping, which obviously is a terrible way to, to conduct global health policy.

Anna Hickey: And it's now been, you know, just about a year since the official drawdown of USAID has occurred. Do you have a sense of what the on-the-ground impacts have been? I mean, obviously the end of USAID has been deeply impactful for those who used to work at the agency or who used to work at a contractor of the agency, but what has it been like for the people who used to receive aid from the agency?

Nicholas Enrich: Yeah, it's been catastrophic. I mean, even while I was still working there, we started to receive the first reports that people were starting to die because of the cuts to USAID. And those, you know, it was, I think, in, in Sudan where families were going to food distribution sites that USAID had run that ended up being closed and shuttered when they spent all day walking there.

It was pregnant women who were unable—that, that had emergencies during childbirth that were unable to access emergency ambulance services and get to clinics. Some of the clinics were closed that they—when they got there, and they ended up perishing. So the anecdotal examples started—they're, they were truly heart-wrenching, came in right away.

What we've seen over the last year or so is that through conservative estimates, a-at least 750,000 people have already died, and about 500,000 of those are being children. And unfortunately, it looks like we—the worst is very much yet to come with we've stopped our global immunization campaign.

We are totally stopping our, like, prevention activities for major disease portfolios, and we're starting to see in some clinics, babies are being born with HIV at high rates again, when just a year later at those same clinics, those numbers were near zero. And so, researchers are estimating that potentially up to 14 million people could die over the next five years alone, which is like, you know, in my mind, when the dust settles on the Trump presidency, this is gonna end up being its legacy.

This is one of the most consequential policy decisions that the Trump administration will have ended up making, and they didn't even know what it was that they were closing out.

Anna Hickey: Are you aware of any grants or contracts that might have been transferred to other departments like the Department of State from USAID?

Nicholas Enrich: So what I know is that the few remaining contracts that did not get canceled by DOGE did shift over to being run by the Department of State. And unfortunately, what we're seeing is that the contracts that do remain were not because they're, like, the perfect alignment of, you know, from a global health perspective to actually address our global health needs.

These were just the contracts that had the most room to park a bunch of money in. And so what we're seeing is it didn't really matter what those contracts were for before. So, for example, we have tuberculosis contracts that are now—they're just dumping in, you know, malaria and polio and family planning money into these contracts for work that's was supposed to happen in countries where those contracts never even operated in the first place.

So it's a way for them to claim that they're moving the money, but these contractors are not in a position to use those funds to actually do the work that they're meant to do, at least not in the short term, until they're able to, you know, change the scope of their work, bring aboard the experts that would do those things establish offices or outposts in the countries where those funds are for.

So, what we're seeing is kind of just a dumping of the remaining global health funds into anywhere that, that funding can go, but certainly in li- the probably the least strategic manner that you could imagine.

Anna Hickey: Can you give at all, like, a monetary or numerical figure of what the drawdown of USAID has meant either both for personnel, you know, how many people between civil servants and, you know, like, institutional support contractors that you mention in the book worked for USAID at the beginning, or you know, how many work doing humanitarian aid now?

And then how much grant money was going out from USAID prior to January 2025, and, you know, what's left today?

Nicholas Enrich: Yeah, I mean, the impact of people that were a part of USAID or the contractors that implemented the work in countries was enormous. I mean, the staffing footprint for USAID was depending on how you measure in contractors and our locally hired staff, for example, between 10 and 16,000 people, and then another couple hundred thousand people when you, if you also consider the contractors who were working on implementing that work.

We were moving about $8 billion dollars a year of global health funds across the world and across these different health categories approximately. And so it's just an enormous industry of people and American businesses and local organizations and local staff and that, that have all—like, without even looking at the recipient side that have been affected by these cuts.

Anna Hickey: Yeah. So is it there's nobody left at USAID? Is the footprint of the agency zero now?

Nicholas Enrich: No, I believe I, my, my understanding is that there's still this, like, tiny skeleton crew that's responsible for closing out the remaining contracts. The latest that I actually saw was that the political appointees now—

It's now actually currently being run under Russ Vought and the Office of Management and Budget shop rather than via the State Department or other leadership. And they're saying that they're expecting about $19 billion in administrative closeout costs for the agency, which is just an astronomical waste of money that could have been used to, you know, save millions of lives.

Anna Hickey: Obviously, you know, that's a lot of people who have lost their jobs, and this would not be the Lawfare Podcast if we didn't mention litigation surrounding actions from the Trump administration. So can you talk about, you know, either from grant recipients or from those who have lost their jobs, what kind of litigation or legal challenges have occurred since the drawdown or closure of the agency?

Nicholas Enrich: Yeah. So there's a variety of different kinds of litigation because people were fired in so many different ways. But for a lot of the foreign service and civil servant staff the way that they got rid of the staff was totally illegal. You know, this was not a layoff. It was a politically motivated mass firing.

And so there's an appeal that was filed to the Merit System Protection Board, which is the independent federal body created to protect civil servants from exactly this kind of personnel action. And those cases are sort of making their way through the courts to be able to show that if you do a reduction in force, like there are legal ways to do a reduction in force, this was absolutely not what that was.

And there's, again, there's similar lawsuits related to the, those who didn't have federal protection. You know what I mean? People were fired three times and then reinstated and then unfired, and it was just like an absolute legal mess. And so those, those cases continue to make their way through the courts and you know, there, there's also arguments that this was done by the DOGE group who didn't actually have legal authority to be making those decisions at all, and there's a separation of powers argument because they basically abolished a, an agency that's authorized by Congress.

And so, there, there's a whole litany of different legal claims that, that are facing the agency for this dismantling. That's not even taking into account all the contractors who, you know, had their contracts illegally terminated as well.

Anna Hickey: At the end of the book, you detail your and your colleagues writing memos to document what happened to the agency and what the effects might be.

Why did you all find it important to write these memos and then also, you know, disseminate them to USAID and then also to the public?

Nicholas Enrich: Yeah. At the you know, after several weeks of doing everything I could to restart our life-saving programs pursuant to Rubio's waiver, at some point I realized that it actually, the waiver itself was a farce, that we were not gonna be given the opportunity to actually do that.

But yet, at the same time, I was hearing publicly Marco Rubio, Pete Marocco, Elon Musk shout publicly that everything was fine, there was this waiver in place. And it dawned on me that the career staff were actually gonna get blamed for why the life-saving programs didn't actually happen because they, you know, they had this waiver.

And the reality was we had tried and been stopped at every single turn by exactly those people. And so it was really important to me to preserve the record of what actually happened for the former staff of USAID to be able to point to the actual facts of how we were prevented from doing that, and the warnings that we had issued to the administration of what would happen if they really went through with all these cuts.

At some point, I knew that this was, like that I was gonna have to send that information out, and I knew that that was probably gonna be the end of my career. But I felt like at that point I could no longer stay silent, and that to continue to allow the agency to tear its programs apart that way without saying anything felt like complicity from my perspective.

And so it was important to me to get the wo- the word out there to warn the world, but also to establish that record, and hopefully to one day bring some amount of accountability. Because a lot of those, these people who we were talking about, these political appointees, these DOGE staff, they are now in very high-ranking government positions in other agencies and have never been held accountable for their actions.

Anna Hickey: What specifically—Like, what specific information did you include in the memos?

Nicholas Enrich: Right. So there was three memos. So the first was basically documenting everything we had tried to do to restart life-saving programs and how we had been stopped at every step of the way and the specifics of how that happened in a kind of like a chronological order.

The second was documenting the destruction of our staffing footprint the daily putting people on and off administrative leave and firing and ending our probational employees and ultimately getting rid of all the leadership, like, to show the impact of that on our ability to implement our programs.

And then the third memo was the kind of assessment of what the impacts of these cuts would be on global health around the world, and that was the one that estimated through the modeling of our disease experts that we could expect potentially up to 2.6 million additional deaths each year due to these cuts.

Anna Hickey: As you're thinking about in, like, the months to years to come of what a post-USAID world looks like, both for the United States and for countries globally, what are you trying to keep your eye on to understand the impact of the end of the agency?

Nicholas Enrich: Yeah. I mean, what I think needs to happen right away is that the State Department needs to release the data, which is something that they haven't done.

It's required by Congress and it's still being collected for a lot of these diseases, and we need to be able to see what the actual impact, because right now we're doing it based on modeling, based on estimates, based on anecdotes. It's difficult because they have shut down a lot of the monitoring and evaluation and surveillance programs that we have that make it more difficult to assess that data.

But it's required by Congress, and I hope that Congress will put their foot down and demand that we see what the impacts of this are. I expect that in whatever the form of the next administration is, that we'll need to reestablish USAID. And it doesn't need to be exactly the same, but re- remember that USAID was not torn down because that was a way to better align foreign assistance with the president's agenda, and it wasn't because there was so much waste, fraud, and abuse.

It was torn down just, like, for the sole purpose of satisfying the ego of the world's richest man, and that's not a good reason. I mean, this is a, this is an organization that functioned, and while of course it can be improved it's gonna need to be brought back i- in the future.

Anna Hickey: If the agency is brought back in the future, obviously there's a dearth of institutional knowledge now in the federal government about, you know, global health or humanitarian assistance.

Do you have a sense of whether you or your former colleagues would go back to such an agency and whether the United States has lost trust with its contractors globally? Do you have a sense of how, you know, whether or not people will trust working with the agency going forward?

Nicholas Enrich: Yeah, I think the expertise will be the easiest thing to replace.

I mean, we're all still here. You know, I've seen surveys showing that, you know, over sixty or seventy percent of former USAID staff are currently either unemployed or significantly underemployed. You know, they made us cut up our badges, but, you know, aside from that we're still here.

Like, I would love to go back to work for an agency for international development, would do so in a heartbeat. I think it will be much more challenging to rebuild properly than it was unfortunately for Elon Musk and his team to tear it down, which is sad. We have broken that trust, and it will be difficult, especially for partner countries, to rely on support from the United States when it—

Like, we made it very clear how easy it is to break those promises and pull the rug out. But at the same time, I think that we'll whatever the next version of USAID looks like, it'll have to, it'll have to deal with those issues, and we'll have to make strong and firm commitments that that we're able to stand behind in order to start rebuilding that trust.

Anna Hickey: And is there kind of anything you wanna say as we draw down the conversation about your experience working at USAID, either prior to January 2025 or between January 2025 to March 2025, that you think, you know, listeners or the American public in general might not know about the agency and what happened to it?

Nicholas Enrich: Yeah. Well, I would just say, like, this is—it's a cautionary tale and you—Like, it's too late for USAID, at least in its pr- previous version. But if you see what's happening at other agencies or you're seeing policy decisions that make absolutely no sense, like, like related to the Iran War or ICE or in the FBI or all in all of these other agencies, like, I hope that people will recognize that this isn't just, like, necessarily policy decisions. A lot—Like, we can't underestimate the sheer level of incompetence and what happens when agencies are hollowed out of their expertise and replaced by uninformed and unqualified sycophants who really don't understand the work of the agencies or how those governments work.

And it—So it's often no surprise that things, when things go wrong, they end up getting worse, that decisions get flip-flopped and seem confused. It's not always part of the plan. This is why there's a value in having expert and nonpartisan civil servants to administer the policies of something as complicated as the U.S. government.

Anna Hickey: Well, I think we'll leave it there on that note. Nick, thank you so much for joining me today on the Lawfare Podcast. And for listeners, “Into the Woodchipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID.” Essential reading for understanding what the first three to six months of the Trump administration looked like by an insider's view.

Thank you so much.

Nicholas Enrich: Thanks for having me.

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