Two weeks after the Inauguration of Donald Trump, Elon Musk tweeted, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into a wood chipper.” Musk was referring to the Agency for International Development, an agency which supports global health and economic development, and which has saved millions of lives around the world. “A viper’s nest of radical-left lunatics,” Musk called it. U.S.A.I.D.’s funding is authorized by Congress, and its work is a crucial element of American soft power. DOGE has decimated the agency with cuts so sudden and precipitous that federal workers stationed in conflict zones were stranded without safe passage home, as their own government publicly maligned them for alleged fraud and corruption. Courts have blocked aspects of the federal purge of U.S.A.I.D., but it’s not clear if workers can be rehired and contracts restarted, or whether the damage is done. In January, 2022, Atul Gawande, a surgeon and leading public health expert who has written for The New Yorker since 1998, was sworn in as assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D. He resigned as the new administration came to power, and is watching in shock as Trump and Musk make U.S.A.I.D. a guinea pig for the government-wide purge now under way. U.S.A.I.D. was, he admits, a soft target for MAGA—helping people in faraway countries. Gawande calls U.S.A.I.D. “America at its best.” But with Trump and Musk, “there’s a different world view at play here,” he says. “Power is what matters, not impact.”
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Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Two weeks after the inauguration of Donald Trump, the new president's chief campaign funder, his consigliere, and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, tweeted in a tone of glee, Musk was, of course, referring to the Agency for International Development, an agency that has saved millions of lives.
If the power of the United States means something positive around the world, the efforts of thousands of foreign aid workers in USAID, doctors, nurses, logistics experts of all kinds, have a lot to do with that. But Musk and Trump see it otherwise, and they have decimated the agency. Into the wood chipper it has gone. Now the courts have blocked aspects of the federal purge of USAID.
But the damage can't easily be undone. Atul Gawande was a senior leader of USAID during the Biden administration. He ran critical health programs all over the world. Gawande is a surgeon, an author, and my longtime colleague writing for The New Yorker. He's been watching in absolute horror as the agency has been summarily pulped. We spoke last week.
Atul, President Biden appointed you as the assistant administrator for global health at USAID, and you stepped down on Trump's inauguration day. And he immediately began targeting USAID with an executive order that halted all foreign aid. Did you know or did you intuit that Trump would act the way he has?
No idea. previous Trump administration, they had embraced what they themselves called the normals. They had a head of USAID who was devoted to the idea of development and soft power in the world. Now, they had their own wrinkle on it. which I didn't disagree with. They called it the journey to self-reliance.
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