Nicholas Enrich, who served as the top U.S. official for global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development under four administrations, said in a new book and interview that political appointees blocked the agency’s response to a 2025 Ebola outbreak in Uganda, calling the virus “a scam.”
“I was told by one of the political appointees, who was the head of the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, that Ebola is a scam,” Enrich told NPR.
Enrich was put on leave and then dismissed after leaking internal memos detailing plans to dismantle the agency. His book, “Into the Woodchipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID,” takes its title from Elon Musk’s stated plans for the premier U.S. foreign aid agency. Simon & Schuster published the book.
In the interview, Enrich said the agency was not destroyed because of waste or inefficiency, as the administration had argued, but “by a bunch of people who did not understand what the agency did, who were completely uninformed and unqualified about our programs, and who were there tearing down the agency that they didn’t get for the sole purpose of soothing the ego of a billionaire.”
Enrich acknowledged that there were ways aid could have been more efficient and less likely to foster dependency. But he said USAID operated on less than 1% of the federal budget and saved 92 million lives over the last 20 years.
Enrich described being blocked at every turn in his efforts to mount a U.S. government response to the 2025 Ebola outbreak in Uganda. He said political leadership refused to allow passenger screening at international airports for Ebola symptoms before flights to Europe and the United States. The agency was banned from communicating with sister agencies like the CDC, he said, and was not permitted to contact the World Health Organization — which owned a warehouse in Kenya where pre-positioned personal protective equipment was stored.
“I made a decision that I regret to this day of removing Ebola activities from those that I was hoping to get approved,” Enrich said.
The current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the worst in more than a decade and the first major outbreak since USAID was dissolved. Enrich said the systems and expertise the agency had built for coordinating responses — including Disaster Assistance Response Teams, contact tracing, community education, and safe burial procedures — no longer exist.
“What instead we have without that expertise and systems from USAID is a State Department that, in the best of light, is rapidly trying to respond but is reinventing the wheel and trying to improvise systems that used to exist,” Enrich said.
Enrich said the global health security strategy built after the 2014 Ebola outbreak — which his former boss, Atul Gawande, called the “global immune system” — was “ripped apart in 2025.” He pointed to the Ebola outbreak in the DRC and Uganda, as well as a recent hantavirus outbreak, as examples of diminished U.S. capacity for detection and response.
“It does make me nervous that if there is a pathogen that is more likely to be the next pandemic that we’re just way, way underprepared as compared to how we were just a few months ago,” Enrich said.
MSI previously reported that the Trump administration planned to send Ebola-exposed Americans to a treatment facility in Kenya, as the U.S. response to the outbreak shifted following the dissolution of USAID. Read that story here.
Enrich said he remains optimistic that the U.S. will need a new independent agency for international development and foreign aid, arguing that international development requires a separate organizational structure — “the third leg of the foreign policy stool.”