'Ignorance and cruelty': former USAID official details devastation inflicted by Doge cuts

Source: The Guardian

Sat 18 Apr 2026 08.00 EDT
Last modified on Sat 18 Apr 2026 08.01 EDT


Nicholas Enrich was working in Kenya in 2003 when the then US president George W Bush signed a landmark $15bn, five-year commitment to combat HIV, the largest international health commitment by any nation to fight a single disease. It was the peak of the epidemic, and for the young American government aid worker “it clicked that my government was ready to join the fight against HIV and I was excited to be a part of that”, he says.

More than 20 years on, Enrich, now 43, has published an account of what happens when a new US administration comes in with an agenda powered by an “America first” ideology and a plan to refashion the US’s outward international posture. That account, published last week as Into the Wood Chipper – a phrase taken from a comment by Elon Musk on Doge cuts at the agency – details the early days of Doge’s foray into the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the freestanding federal agency established in 1961 by John F Kennedy as a strategic instrument of US foreign policy and a force for improving lives around the world.

Within days of taking office in January last year, Donald Trump issued a temporary pause on USAID funding. Two months later, a formal dissolution of the agency was announced. By July, with over 80% of programs canceled, it was officially merged into the state department and – in terms of the global development sector – an era had ended.

Last week, Devex reported that the state department had sent out a cable memo to US embassies to push host nations to sign a “trade over aid” declaration that explicitly rejects the US’s role as the top provider of humanitarian assistance in favor of business relationships that create opportunities for US companies. “I wanted to let people know what happened and however bad they thought that it might be inside USAID when Doge came in to tear it apart, it was way worse – especially the incompetence, ignorance and cruelty that came along with it,” Enrich writes.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/18/trump-administration-usaid-doge-cuts