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On May 11th, OneAID hosted over 500 people from around the world for a webinar and book discussion, Service Remembered, Service Continued. The event brought together three of the first authors to publish reflections on the dismantling of USAID. Keisha Effiom, Nicholas Enrich, and Jennifer Erie joined moderator and former USAID Administrator Samantha Power for a wide-ranging discussion about leadership, loss, and what it means to carry a calling when the institution that held it is gone. The conversation was honest, at times emotional, and above all, hopeful.

Three books, one moment

Each author approached the story from a different perspective, shaped by their role, background, and journey, but the impulse behind all three books was the same: to tell the truth at a moment when the truth was being actively distorted.

Keisha Effiom’s I Said My Piece, With Peace Inside: USAID’s Final Days, A Testament of Leadership When Everything Falls Apart is a firsthand account of servant leadership under pressure and what it looks like to lead with grace and integrity when everything around you is collapsing. Nicholas Enrich’s Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID, a New York Times bestseller, offers a gripping, blow-by-blow account of the decisions and forces that dismantled the agency from within, and a clear-eyed argument for accountability. Jennifer Erie’s The World in My Bones: The Diplomat Queens Made traces a deeply personal journey through international service, from Zimbabwe and the Peace Corps to USAID missions across Africa, Asia, and beyond, and grapples with what it means when work that defined your life is suddenly, deliberately undone.

As Ambassador Power framed it, “in the pages of these books, you see that USAID’s story was never written in Excel budget sheets, or in congressional appropriations packages, it was the human relationships, the classrooms, the clinics, the refugee camps, the farms, the villages, and each of [the authors] did a splendid job bringing those to life.”

What brought them there

The conversation opened with each author reflecting on the paths that led them to USAID, stories that in each case began not with a career plan, but with an experience that changed the way they saw the world.

For Jennifer Erie, it was a study abroad program in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s, followed by Peace Corps service in South Africa, that first drew her into international development. What struck her was not abstract policy, but the deeply human work of helping communities realize their own potential. By the time she joined USAID, after years working with NGOs, it felt like a natural next step: a place where she could influence policy, design programs, and bring together her background in development, public health, and culture.

Nicholas Enrich’s path led through Kenya, where a study abroad program in 2003 brought him face to face with the HIV crisis just as President Bush was signing PEPFAR into law. Being on the ground at that moment, watching his government make a sweeping commitment to global health at the same time he was discovering his own calling, stayed with him. He saw USAID at work in Kenya and felt pride in what his country was capable of. That pride, he reflected during the event, is something that can never be taken away.

Keisha Effiom never planned on diplomacy. A DC native who thought she might become a lawyer, her path to USAID came through a mentor who saw something in her before she saw it in herself. An invitation to dinner that turned out to be an interview, a job offer two weeks later, and a career that spanned 18 years and six overseas assignments. She became one of only eight African American women to hold the title of Mission Director at the Agency. The through-line of her story, she said, is the people who opened doors for her and the responsibility she now feels to do the same for others.

The decision to write

All three authors described the writing process as an act of necessity, a way of processing grief, reclaiming narrative, and ensuring that what happened was documented before it could be rewritten or forgotten.

Keisha described the experience of watching the agency come apart over five months as a sustained, exhausting fight and returned again and again during the conversation to a single image that anchored her writing: watching the lights go out, one country at a time. She began from a place of anger, but was guided by her mother’s voice toward something harder and more lasting. Rather than write from rage, she wrote toward peace, not the absence of pain, but a refusal to let the pain have the last word. The book became a way back to herself: the leader who had stood up for her team, who had advocated for her Foreign Service Nationals, who had walked into that mission with purpose.

For Jennifer, the timing of her RIF notice made an already devastating moment almost unbearable. It arrived the same week her mother passed away. She was grieving on two fronts simultaneously, navigating trauma and disorientation while also feeling a deep sense of embarrassment and anger on behalf of the partners USAID had abruptly abandoned mid-program. Writing became therapy. It was also a reclamation, a way of putting her own words into the world before others could define her experience for her, documenting what the work had actually looked like from the inside, and celebrating the communities she had served.

Nicholas’s path to the book was different. In the final days of February 2025, he and his team prepared a series of detailed memos, a strict chronological record of every attempt to restart life-saving programs, every obstacle placed in their way, and every projected human cost of the decisions being made. The memos were designed to be factual, not personal. But once they were out in the world, Nicholas realized the story they told was incomplete. The book gave him space to convey what the experience had actually felt like from the inside, the sensation of falling through a hole in the ground day after day, reaching for help that kept disappearing. It also allowed him to name, on the record, the individuals who had made those decisions, people who remain in positions of power and have yet to be held accountable.

Feeling seen, finding hope

Perhaps the most striking thread of the conversation was the hope each author described finding in unexpected places, and the sense, shared across all three, that the story of USAID had reached further than any of them anticipated.

Nicholas described his disbelief when the memos he released were picked up by major national outlets within the hour. What it told him was that when you remove an entire community of dedicated experts from the work they have given their lives to, they do not stop working, they redirect. The network of advocacy that had built up around USAID’s dismantling, from organizations like OneAID to implementing partners to former colleagues scattered across the world, had paved a road. Now, a broader American public that had never thought much about foreign assistance was suddenly paying attention in a new way.

Jennifer found hope in the messages she received from readers who had no prior connection to the development world, people who recognized themselves in her family story, who were moved by the scenes of program implementation she described, and who had no idea what it took to do this work until she showed them. She also found it, as she always has, in the communities she served: the girls in South Sudan she still stays in touch with, the health workers who keep showing up even when the resources have run out. Their resilience, she said, is a reminder of her own.

Keisha spoke about the USAID community itself as a source of sustenance. The building may be gone, she observed, but the people are not. Scattered across continents, they are still making impact, still building, still showing up for each other in ways that no administration can legislate away.

For those still struggling

When an audience member shared that they, and many others, were finding it genuinely hard to move forward, the authors met that honesty with their own.

The consensus across all three was that the grief is real, the anger is legitimate, and neither needs to be rushed or suppressed. What matters is not letting those feelings calcify into something that stops you from moving. Keisha was characteristically direct: you are allowed to grieve and still move forward, to be angry and still be at peace, to be in the middle of your story and still have agency over how it ends. “Lean into your community”, she said. “Reach out. You are more than a title, more than a career, more than the institution that was taken from you.”

Nicholas offered something perhaps equally important: the reminder that writing the book, reaching a wide audience, and landing on the bestseller list did not make the anger go away. He is still right there with the people who are struggling. The grief does not resolve on a timeline, and there is nothing wrong with that.

What comes next

The conversation closed with the future, and all three authors, in their own ways, pushed back against any instinct toward resignation.

Nicholas was the most direct: the premise has to be that USAID comes back. Not absorbed into the State Department, not diminished into something more palatable, but reconstituted as an independent foreign assistance agency, because that is what this country and this world needs. The agency was not destroyed because it was not working. It was destroyed, he said plainly, to satisfy the ego of a billionaire. That fact, uncomfortable as it is, is also clarifying. It means there is nothing inevitable about what happened. It means the case for rebuilding rests on solid ground.

Ambassador Power added the political dimension that often goes unspoken in development circles: elections matter, and the calling that drew so many in this community to sacrifice so much in the name of service needs to include a willingness to engage in the political work of protecting it. Telling these stories and correcting the facts serves a fundamentally political agenda that lives alongside the humanitarian one.

And Keisha offered what may be the clearest and most enduring message of the conversation, one directed especially at those early in their careers who are wondering whether there is still a place for them in this work. “USAID was a vehicle,” she said. “The work itself is older than this agency, so it’s going to outlast the agency. If you have a calling for international development, then don’t let this moment scare you out of that calling… Feeding people, healing people, educating people, standing with the people… if that is your calling, do it. Find your mentors… This vehicle may change again, but your calling will not.”

Ambassador Power closed by reminding the audience that grief is not a weakness, but evidence of how deeply people cared about the work and each other. “There’s not only safety in numbers,” she said, “but there’s power.”

The institution may have been dismantled, but the people who carried its mission into the world are still here, and they are not finished serving.

Watch the recording of the event:

You can learn more about the authors and purchase their books here: 

• Keisha Effiom: I Said My Piece, With Peace Inside: USAID’s Final Days — A Testament of Leadership When Everything Falls Apart
• Nicholas Enrich: Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID 
• Jennifer Erie: The World in My Bones: The Diplomat Queens Made

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