The Outbreak, By the Numbers

Since USAID's dismantlement in 2025, the world has been watching the DRC Ebola situation with no clear U.S. federal mechanism to respond. According to NPR's Up First briefing published June 8, 2026, officials are now describing the spread as happening at an unprecedented rate — making it the worst outbreak in more than a decade.

The DRC has been the global epicenter of Ebola for years. In this context, "unprecedented" means worse than the 2018–2020 outbreak that killed more than 2,200 people.

What Happened to the U.S. Response Capacity

Nicholas Enrich served as the top U.S. official for global health at USAID under four administrations. He was placed on leave and then dismissed in early 2025 after leaking internal memos detailing plans to shut the agency down. He has now published a book — Into the Woodchipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID — released by Simon & Schuster.

According to NPR's June 8 interview with Enrich, in March 2025 he was simultaneously trying to manage the U.S. response to an Ebola outbreak in Uganda while watching USAID get dismantled beneath him.

His account of what happened: "I was told by one of the political appointees, who was the head of the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, that Ebola is a scam."

The person running humanitarian assistance for the United States government told the top U.S. global health official that a disease that has killed thousands of people across multiple outbreaks was a scam.

Fair Accounting: What Enrich Actually Said

Enrich didn't simply defend USAID as flawless. When NPR asked directly whether the Trump administration's critiques of the agency — waste, fraud, political bias — had any merit, Enrich said yes. Partially.

His position: there were problems worth fixing. But the agency was not dismantled to fix those problems. It was dismantled, in his words, by people who "did not understand what the agency did" and were "tearing down the agency that they didn't get for the sole purpose of soothing the ego of a billionaire."

Enrich is a fired civil servant with a book to sell. The factual core — that USAID is gone and that it managed Ebola response — is not in dispute.

Questions Worth Asking

Both the AP and NPR coverage of this story focus heavily on the USAID-was-destroyed angle. That's a legitimate part of the story. But neither outlet addresses several harder questions.

First: Who is actually filling the gap? If USAID is gone, what U.S. federal body, if any, now coordinates global outbreak response? The CDC's global division still exists. The State Department still has foreign operations. Are those agencies picking up the mission, or is there genuinely a void? Neither source answers this.

Second: What are international partners doing? The World Health Organization, Médecins Sans Frontières, and regional African health bodies have all responded to DRC outbreaks before. USAID was important, but it was not the only player. The current coverage treats the USAID closure as if it eliminates all global response capacity.

Third: Was USAID's DRC Ebola work actually effective? The DRC has had repeated, massive outbreaks while USAID was in operation. The 2018–2020 outbreak killed 2,200+ people while USAID was fully funded. The question of whether USAID's presence reliably contained outbreaks deserves scrutiny.

What's Actually at Stake

None of this dismisses the risk. Ebola spreading at high rates in a country with porous borders, active conflict zones, and collapsed health infrastructure is a legitimate international security concern. It has pandemic potential if containment fails.

The specific claim that a senior political appointee in 2025 called Ebola a scam — if accurate — represents a failure of basic competence at a critical moment. That deserves accountability regardless of anyone's views on USAID's broader mission.

The Trump administration has not publicly responded to Enrich's specific claim about the "Ebola is a scam" comment. That response — or lack of one — matters.

The Facts

The DRC Ebola outbreak is real, it is worsening, and the United States' institutional capacity to respond to it has been significantly degraded. The debate over why USAID was shut down and whether it deserved to be is legitimate — but separate from the question of whether an Ebola outbreak spreading unchecked in central Africa should concern Americans. History suggests it should.