“Wow, there really is so much that USAID does that we never knew!”
That was what U.S. Agency for International Development Deputy Administrator Kenneth Jackson told me on Feb. 5, 2025. I had just briefed the Trump administration’s new political leadership on global health programs that saved millions of lives worldwide and protected Americans from the spread of deadly diseases.
USAID’s new chief of staff, Joel Borkert, was equally astonished by the global impact I had laid out. His reaction: “I had no idea you did all this! When I think of what USAID does in global health, I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.”
I wished I could have briefed them earlier. The day before, the vast majority of USAID’s 10,000+ employees — those who had not already been fired — were placed on administrative leave. Elon Musk, leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, falsely and inexplicably said USAID “was a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” and boasted on his website X (formerly Twitter), “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
As the top global health official at USAID while it was being demolished, I had a front-row seat to the chaos — I was even forced to participate in it, as I recount in my new book, “Into the Wood Chipper.”
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