Author Talk: Nicholas Enrich — Into the Wood Chipper - with Atul Gawande

Author Nicholas Enrich discusses their book "Into the Wood Chipper" at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

A Civil Servant Discovers His Breaking Point when the Trump Administration’s Cruelty and Indifference Threaten to Violate the Oath He Swore to Uphold

In the months that followed, USAID became the first target of Elon Musk’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The mission to which Enrich had dedicated his career was being dismantled before his eyes—even the name of the agency was removed from the building’s facade. Enrich witnessed firsthand the Trump administration’s lies, how it systematically prevented USAID from providing lifesaving foreign aid, and the death and suffering around the world that resulted from careless decisions. Finally determining he could no longer keep quiet, and risking the career that he loved deeply, Enrich released a set of whistleblowing memos exposing the administration’s illegal and destructive actions.

Nicholas Enrich is a former civil servant who worked at USAID under four administrations. He served as the Bureau of Global Health’s director of policy, programs, and planning until January 2025, when he was designated as USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health. On March 2, 2025, he was placed on administrative leave for exposing the Trump administration’s illegitimate and dangerous dismantling of USAID.

Enrich is in conversation with Atul Gawande, author of several bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better; The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards.

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