A senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development told staff he was placed on leave less than half an hour after warning them that the Trump administration’s shutdown of the agency will lead to death “on a massive scale.”
Nicholas Enrich, USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health, shared a memo dated Feb. 28 to staff blaming “political leadership” for preventing life-saving humanitarian assistance from being delivered around the world, Reuters reported.
In doing so, he rejected Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s assurance that “life-saving humanitarian aid” would continue to be administered while the Trump administration suspended nearly all other foreign assistance pending a review.
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Twenty minutes after staff received Enrich’s memo, Reuters reported they received a follow-up email from him relaying that he had been “placed on administrative leave, effective immediately.”
A source familiar with the matter told the news agency that the decision to place him on leave was made Wednesday, days before he distributed the memo.
As part of a federal cost-cutting blitz, President Donald Trump and his billionaire lieutenant Elon Musk moved swiftly to shut down USAID last month, firing and furloughing thousands of workers.
Musk, who leads the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, called the agency a “criminal organization.”
Last week, the Trump administration said it plans to eliminate roughly 90 percent of USAID’s foreign aid contracts and totaling $54 billion. At the same time, foreign State Department grants worth $4.4 billion were also set to be cut.
“This will no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale,” Enrich wrote in the memo shared with staff.
In a separate memo obtained by Reuters, the news agency said Enrich forecast that a one-year pause in life-saving humanitarian aid could result in between 71,000 and 166,000 excess malaria deaths, an almost 40 percent increase.
He also warned there could be a 28 percent to 32 percent increase in global tuberculosis cases and 28,000 more infectious disease cases.
The Bulwark, which also obtained Enrich’s memos, reported Monday that he was still in the process of drafting the memo that contained his forecasts.
A source told the outlet that he believed preparing the documents would result in his termination: “He knew sending those would result in discipline and the end of his career [at USAID], but also sending those ‘for the record’ ensured that the world had a light on what was really going on.”
The Bulwark reported that additional forecasts in Enrich’s draft memo include that 17 million pregnant women would miss out on life-saving services, more than 11 million newborns would not receive crucial postnatal care, and roughly 1 million children would not be treated for acute malnutrition annually.
Enrich warned that the “consequences will extend beyond borders, increasing the risk of infections reaching the U.S.”
Among the projects canceled by the Trump administration were a $131 million grant to UNICEF’s polio vaccination program that serves millions of children, a $90 million private-sector contract for bed nets and malaria tests set to serve 53 million people, and a program based in the Democratic Republic of Congo that runs the only water source for 250,000 people in displacement camps.
After Trump ordered all foreign aid frozen in January, Rubio issued a temporary waiver to continue life-saving assistance including medicine, food, and shelter.
But, Reuters reported, Enrich said Musk’s DOGE task force and several Trump appointees have prevented the approval of payments for the life-saving programs, noting “zero lifesaving health activities” have been greenlit since Feb. 14.
He added that programs that were was approved under the waiver could not be funded because DOGE cut off access to USAID’s payment systems.
The State Department, Musk’s cost cutting task force DOGE, and Enrich did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters.
The abrupt shutdown of USAID is part of a wider crackdown on federal spending led by Musk’s DOGE, which has purged departments and agencies across the government of thousands of staff, in multiple cases erroneously firing workers working on essential initiatives like the nation’s nuclear weapons programs or the response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak.
