Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by Nicholas Enrich. He worked for over 12 years at USAID, the United States

Agency for International Development.

He worked for their Bureau of Global Health as well for the Bureau of Management and eventually

served as acting administrator for global health at USAID.

However, thanks to the Trump administration's destruction of USAID, he is now the author of a book called Into the

Woodchipper, a whistleblower's account of how the Trump administration shredded USAID.

Nicholas Enrich, welcome to current affairs. Thanks for having me. Okay, let's start with the book's title, Into the Woodchipper.

If people don't remember the wood chipper and how your agency was fed into it, this is a quote.

Who's it a quote from?

It's Elon Musk. So, yeah, about two weeks into the Trump administration, Musk tweeted that he just spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper.

And I was the top global health official at USAID at the time. And so I unfortunately had a front row seat to the destruction that that was happening to the agency at that point. And I wrote this

book to hopefully give readers a look of what it actually felt like inside of that woodchipper.

Okay. So how it felt inside the woodchipper. But first, when we get to that,

let's, before we get to the dismantlement, let's have you lay

out. I mean, perhaps you could give us your personal background here. I mean, how did you get

involved with USAID? How, what brought you to this agency and what did you do for it?

Coming into the second Trump administration, I was the director of policy programs and planning

for global health, which basically meant that my job was to ensure that we were using taxpayer

dollars effectively to achieve our global health objectives of overall increasing global

life expectancy of creating access

to affordable and high quality healthcare around the world and keeping Americans safe from

...