March 3 (UPI) — A senior USAID official was placed on leave after sending a memo telling staff that people would needless die and national security would be massively impacted by the agency’s failure to disburse “life-saving humanitarian assistance” under a waiver to the Trump administration’s halting of foreign aid.
USAID Global Health Acting Assistant Administrator Nick Enrich was placed on administrative leave on Sunday, two days after he sent the memo lambasting USAID’s political leadership, the State Department and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency for creating “intentional and or/unintentional obstacles” for preventing payouts for vital programs.
Enrich said approval procedures were a confused mess, with USAID senior management failing to process funds disbursements for life-saving activities even after they had been rubber stamped, citing 72 activities related to 31 funding awards where USAID’s payments agency had not given final approval for release of the funds.
“All or nearly all of the awards needed to implement lifesaving humanitarian assistance were terminated on or before Feb. 27,” Enrich wrote in his memo in which he also blamed “ever-changing” guidance on what qualified as life-saving, who could make that call, and the canceling of systems critical to the mechanics of providing those services.
“The number of deaths attributable to the loss of USAID funding and support is not known at this time,” he added.
Enrich’s claim brings into question an override Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he had established exempting life-saving assistance programs from President Donald Trump’s freeze on foreign aid.
Enrich told The New York Times in an interview that by turning whistleblower and releasing a series of internal memos, including one on Sunday that cut USAID’s 783-strong health staff to less than 20, he hoped to correct the misleading narrative being put out about the more than 1,600 job cuts and placing most of the 10,000 staff on leave.
“It’ll be clear that we were never actually given the opportunity to implement lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” he said, referring to the failure of Rubio’s Jan. 28 temporary waiver exempting life-saving humanitarian aid to prevent the closure of programs globally, due to lack of funds.
The leaked memos detail grim estimates of the human cost from the abrupt withdrawal of $60 billion in funding for overseas aid, including 18 million additional malaria cases annually, resulting in 166,000 more people dying, 200,000 children paralyzed due to polio and a million children suffering from deadly “severe acute malnutrition” going untreated, and a surge in infectious viruses like Ebola.
“Instead of addressing the issues outlined by Enrich, the State Department has silenced and sidelined him. It’s completely inappropriate and wrong,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, the ranking Democrat on the appropriations committee’s foreign aid subcommittee.
“These new details confirm our worst fears: the illegal and systematic dismantling of USAID will cause real suffering and deaths that are entirely preventable.”
