Ezra's Bookshelf

Into the Wood Chipper

by Nicholas Enrich · 236 pages · ~4.5 hrs

Politics & GovernmentForeign PolicyHealth & Medicine

Recommended on

buy on bookshop.org →
Into the Wood Chipper is Nicholas Enrich's firsthand account of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development in the opening months of Donald Trump's second term. Enrich, a career public health official who served at USAID across several administrations, had just risen to lead the agency's global health work when it became the first major target of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. The title comes from Musk's own boast that he had spent a weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. The book narrates, from inside the agency, how the freeze on foreign assistance, mass terminations of contracts, and the removal of staff played out in practice, and what that meant for programs providing HIV treatment, malaria prevention, maternal and child health services, and outbreak response around the world. Enrich describes trying to keep lifesaving work alive amid contradictory directives and public claims that essential programs had been protected, all while an Ebola outbreak was unfolding in Uganda. Concluding that he could not stay silent, he wrote and released a series of internal memos documenting the human costs of the cuts and the administration's misrepresentations; he was placed on administrative leave and pushed out, but the memos circulated widely, helped revive some canceled programs, and were cited in litigation over the agency's dissolution. Part whistleblower memoir and part institutional history, the book is a record of how quickly a long-standing instrument of American foreign policy could be taken apart, and a reflection on the obligations of civil servants when their oath and their orders collide.

For fans of

Reviews