Guest Post: We destroyed USAID just in time for Ebola

Guest Post: How do you protect yourself when the government shuts down your department?

--  Get orders in writing.

--  Don't acquiesce to illegality.

--  Try to inform the people cutting you about the consequences of their actions.

While I am at my 55th college reunion I am posting a week-long series of guest posts by classmates. Sandford Borins moved with me and about 50 other men from Winthrop House, one of the classic dorms for men, to the less-fancy and less centrally-located women's dorms, as part of the co-education blending of all-male Harvard and all-female Radcliffe. It was a good semester. As Jan and Dean sang about Surf City, in the Radcliffe dorms it was two girls for every boy. It was nice to be around female students. In the late 1960s, Ivy League college presidents thought coeducation of men and women was risky. What about their endowments? What if the female students never had careers, never made big money, and never became multimillion dollar donors?

Sandy was a very able student. He followed an academic path and had a long career teaching public management at the University of Toronto. He is Canadian and has been writing guest posts about Canada's relationship to the U.S. He views the U.S. with dismay. This post was published last week at Sandy's own blog: sandfordborins.com.

Here, with a backdrop of his various diplomas, Sandy wears an old reunion T-shirt with a reference to the college president's opinion of our class:

Guest Post by Sandford Borins 

While the Trump Administration was destroying the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in February 2025, there was an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda. One consequence was that USAID’s supply of 27,000 sets of personal protective equipment languished in a warehouse in Kenya and were never shipped to Uganda. We are now facing a much more severe outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, and a more severe result of the erasure of USAID is that the US Government will play a much smaller role in any international response to an Ebola pandemic. As President Barack Obama once said, “Elections have consequences.”

Reasons for Rage

I became aware of the Ebola situation in 2025 by reading Nicholas Enrich’s rage-inducing memoir Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID. To be clear, I feel sympathy for Enrich and his former colleagues at USAID, and fury about the Trump Administration’s destruction of the agency. Though this is not my government, Enrich’s book evokes my rage for two reasons. First, I believe that development assistance should be an important priority for the government of every wealthy country; erasing USAID greatly reduces the global level of development assistance and makes the Third World worse off. Second, while I accept that it is legitimate for governments to sunset programs and agencies that they feel are inconsistent with their priorities, I believe that such decisions should be made by the legislature after public debate. They should not be made by executive order and implemented by skullduggery.

Nicholas Enrich was a career public servant at USAID, a middle manager in the global public health area. His book is a detailed memoir of the 42 days after Trump’s inauguration when USAID was destroyed and his career as a public servant was terminated. The book reads like a perverse thriller, and I devoured it rapidly. Enrich paints acid portraits of the Trump Administration’s political appointees, who combined ignorance of global development and of USAID’s programs with malevolence towards its staff. The public servants oscillated between the belief that it was possible to persuade the political appointees of the value of USAID’s mission and programs and the belief that such a task was impossible, and the best course of action would be to join an amorphous resistance movement. Enrich forms a plan to resist the Administration, and suspense builds as we wonder whether he will be able to carry it off.

Lessons for Democracy

The book makes a significant contribution to the study of democratic backsliding by laying out in its epilogue the tactics the Trump Administration used to destroy an agency and a set of tactics career civil servants can use to resist in the bureaucracy, in the courts of law, and in the court of public opinion.

The Trump Administration’s tactics include telling lies about the agency and its staff to build public support, infiltrating and immobilizing the agency’s IT and financial systems (the work of DOGE), terminating external contracts (a powerful tactic against an agency like USAID that does its work through contracts), and vilifying and then firing staff. Though USAID was the first to fall, I’m sure this playbook was used for other agencies.

Enrich has a long list of tactics for career public servants who want to fight back. Here are a few that I think are most promising: making sure that all orders from political appointees are in writing; insisting on educating political appointees about the department and its programs; understanding in advance which orders would be within the law and which would not, and refusing to obey unlawful orders; and documenting and saving records of interactions with political appointees. I think Enrich’s advice will be essential to career public servants in the US as well as to those in other countries whose governments are emulating the Trump Administration.

It Can’t Happen Here

In Canada we are not faced with an assault on democratic values comparable to that of the Trump Administration. But there are many Canadians who are MAGA wannabes. Is this how they would like to see Canada or a province or city governed if they take office? Pierre Poilievre has made it clear that he thinks Canada spends too much on foreign aid. If he were elected, would he borrow from the Trump Administration playbook to achieve his desired outcome?

In a previous post, I asked whether Ontario, under the Ford Government, is still a democracy. My answer is that through tactics like use of the notwithstanding clause in the constitution, creation of special zones in which certain laws (especially those concerning the environment) do not apply, and limiting the powers of municipal governments, the Ford Government is making Ontario less democratic. Reading Enrich’s book has stimulated my thinking about how civil society can fight back.

Enrich’s book is a well-crafted memoir about public servants fighting back against an anti-democratic if not dictatorial political regime and a major contribution to the literature on democratic backsliding. It certainly should be of interest to Americans, where the Trump Administration is undertaking a full-fledged assault on democracy, and to citizens of other countries, where such an assault is a reasonable fear.

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