Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, found himself placed on administrative leave yesterday after he sent out not one but two memos in which he openly criticized the Trump Administration for placing some of the world’s most vulnerable human beings at direct risk of disease, famine, and catastrophic natural disasters as a result of the Trump/Musk slash-and-burn approach to government funding and agencies in connection to the federal government “cutbacks” initiated by tech billionaire Elon Musk’s unelected Department of Government Efficiany.
The Bulwark’s Sam Stein reports that one of those memos “noted the dramatic staff reductions that had taken place at the Bureau for Global Health, whose workforce had gone from 783 ‘encumbered’ positions to 69 personnel ‘that received Essential Personnel Designations, of which 15 received RIF letters. In the other, Enrich identified ’72 activities across 31 awards’ that had been approved for waivers by Secretary of State Marco Rubio but for which no payments had been released. He said the death toll from this was ‘not known.'”
However, it was Enrich’s third memo, which ultimately went unsent, that Stein found the most upsetting and disturbing, describing Enrich’s words in this particular memo as “more alarming than the other two.”
In that third, unsent memo, Enrich cited gut-wrenching projections that included nearly 17 million pregnant women who “would not be able to reach life-saving services if USAID programs were permanently halted, and more than 11 million newborns would not get critical postnatal care. An estimated 1 million children would not be treated annually for severe acute malnutrition.”
Stein’s report continues, “The acting assistant administrator described a geopolitical and economic catastrophe entirely of our own making. In the unfinished memo, he notes that ‘preventable diseases’ would surge, and that the ‘consequences will extend beyond borders, increasing the risk of infections reaching the U.S.'”
Enrich warned in the memo that these catastrophic infections could come from devastating diseases, ranging from Ebola to multi-drug-resistant strains of Tuberculosis.
“The source who passed along the memo suggested that Enrich wrote it knowing that he was, more or less, digging the grave for his career,” Stein reports on the newly leaked, unsent memo. “It’s not as polished as the other two, reflecting the fact that he was clearly still crafting it before he was put on leave.”
President Donald Trump has openly and publicly referred to USAID as an agency run “by a bunch of radical lunatics” and vowed, “we’re getting them out,” after the agency responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance was identified and targeted by Elon Musk and his DOGE team.
Read Stein’s full report on the leaked memo with The Bulwark here.
Featured image via The Resistance Report Gallery