Hero USAID Employee Canned For Telling World DOGE Is Starving People To Death
But he got the word out.
Just how many people are going to die unnecessary deaths because the Musk-Trump administration is breaking USAID up into tiny pieces and scattering those pieces to the wind? We don’t know how you would go about calculating such a number. USAID runs and funds literally thousands of programs around the planet that aim to relieve the hunger of the most vulnerable, provide life-saving care to HIV patients and malaria victims, help victims of natural disasters who have lost everything, and on and on and on. How do you put a value on any of that?
Nonetheless, the Acting Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID gave it the old college try. The administrator, a guy by the name of Nick Enrich, wrote two memos last week and started a third showing step-by-step how, despite the lies of the Trump administration that they had reversed some of the spending freezes for life-saving aid, those programs were still not getting funded. He also threw in some pretty dire estimates about deaths and illnesses that are the inevitable result of the Trump administration’s rampage through the agency.
This all caught the attention of his higher-ups, as it was supposed to. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who oversees what’s left of USAID after Elon Musk ran it over like a semi running over a tiny bunny at high speed, was so grateful for Enrich’s work that he thanked him profusely, recommended him for a civil service award, and set about immediately reversing the cancellation of programs so that millions of people will be spared unneeded suffering.
Ha ha ha, we kid, we kid. What actually happened is that Enrich was placed on administrative leave for his impudence — which is another way of saying he was fired — before he could finish memo number three. It is a move reminiscent of Trump thinking America would have had fewer COVID cases during the pandemic if we would simply not test people for the virus. If we don’t know that people are starving to death, then they won’t starve to death. It’s called logic, liberals.
Sam Stein at The Bulwark got his hands on the third memo, which took a stab at calculating the potential damage from halting $7.7 billion in funding to “lifesaving global health programs.” And that was just a handful of programs, they have cut billions more to others. (A reminder that the yearly US budget is somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 trillion, so this $7.7 billion is ... let’s see, carry the 2 ... .001 percent of America’s annual expenditures.)
Enrich calculates that thanks to the nation turning its back, we can expect to see as many as 17.9 million new cases of malaria annually, with 166,000 additional deaths; as many as 32 percent more cases of tuberculosis worldwide, with a presumably commensurate number of Victorian ghost children haunting Marco Rubio’s house; and as many as 200,000 new cases of paralytic polio.
That all sounds bad!
Furthermore,
The memo projected that nearly 17 million pregnant women 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.
Enrich’s memos also detail some of the steps political appointees and DOGE virgins have “wholly prevented” from continuing with life-saving programs that had supposedly been granted waivers. Anna Maria Barry-Jester of ProPublica posted some excerpts from the memos, and hoo boy, does it sound as if the waiver process was screwed up.
The memos detail all the contradictory instructions for applying for waivers that the rank and file kept getting, which kept the money spigot from being turned back on. Musk and his people, as is their wont, have no idea how many procedures the government has in place to handle and process aid programs, so of course they have no idea what has to happen when they decide to flip a switch back on.
Maybe we’re reading this all wrong! Maybe this Joel Borkert guy thinks “draconian” means good! Maybe we’ll win the Powerball this week!
Enrich knew this was going to cost him his job, and it did. But he got the word out, and it had an effect. Here’s a cool example of just how fucked up this whole process has become. Last week CNN had a story about a plant in Georgia, MANA Nutrition, that makes a special kind of peanut butter paste that can be easily distributed to malnourished children — not just malnourished, but experiencing “extreme wasting,” i.e. literally starving to death — around the world.
MANA Nutrition’s CEO told CNN that on Wednesday, he received notices cancelling any contracts he had with USAID, leaving him with untold numbers of peanut butter paste packets that he couldn’t distribute.
Then on Saturday, Jon Favreau of Pod Save America posted that “kids will die because Elon Musk starved them of food we already paid for.” This did not sit well with Musk, who yelled at Favreau for trying to score “cheap political points.” Still, he added, he was investigating and promised to fix the problem if it was real. Although first he thought Favreau was talking about a different program, but what the hell, turn them both back on, we’re not into kids suffering from malnutrition.
Finally on Monday, CNN reported that MANA’s contract had been uncancelled. Yet Musk was still feeling salty about it on Monday, when he took to Twitter to say that geez, chill out, people, it was a temporary pause in funding, it’s not like anyone DIED:
Sure, sure, the weeks-long pause in deliveries of food intended to keep people from dying of starvation didn’t result in any of them dying of starvation, he’s pretty sure, don’t ask how he knows, he just does, keep your panties on, jerks.
Still, the fact that Musk responded with his snarky little tweet might indicate that DOGE is feeling at least a little pressure on this issue from lawmakers or even the White House. Even Republicans don’t actually like being tagged with having killed children with their policy choices. The problem is that you have to kill a few before they realize that their policy choices do, in fact, result in dead children.
Enrich knew this was going to cost him his job, and it did. But he got the word out, and it had an effect.
It’s not much of a victory, but what the hell, all victories are going to be small for a while.
[NBC / The Bulwark / CNN]
Wonkette also takes donations to keep from starving!
Nick Enrich, hero!
My best friend had polio. I can't tell you how disruptive that was to both our lives. He was also the smartest, kindest man I ever knew, and fuck polio forever!...