Red Cross workers bury an Ebola victim at the Rwampara Cemetery, in Rwampara, Congo, Saturday, May 23, 2026. Moses Sawasawa/AP
Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.
The current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda is one of the largest in recent history. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been nearly 1,000 suspected cases and more than 200 suspected deaths. The disease is spreading quickly, and public health workers say they have struggled to contain it because funds for the US Agency for International Development and other aid efforts have been cut by the Trump administration.
The US State Department insists that President Donald Trump’s cuts did not contribute to the delayed response to the outbreak. Tommy Pigott, a spokesman, told the New York Times last week, “It is false to claim that the USAID reform has negatively impacted our ability to respond to Ebola.”
But in March 2025, Nicholas Enrich, then an acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, testified before Congress that funding had been frozen, protective equipment could not be accessed, and an agency leader had characterized an Ebola outbreak in Uganda at the time as a “scam.”
Enrich told the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs that in February, his requests for funds to address Uganda’s ongoing Ebola outbreak had fallen on deaf ears. Tim Meisburger, who was then the head of USAID’s Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, Enrich testified, “specifically noted that Ebola was a ‘scam’ because there had only been ‘one death.’” Enrich attempted to “explain that Ebola was still in an incubation period, and that we should see the response through,” but to no avail. Instead, he continued, his superiors decided to “deprioritize activities related to neglected tropical diseases, MPox, Polio, Ebola, and any monitoring and surveillance activities.”
Meisburger had previously made headlines in 2021, when he was serving as a deputy assistant administrator at USAID’s Bureau for Development, Democracy and Innovation. According to the Washington Post, he had told fellow staffers during a video call that the January 6 Capitol insurrection was caused by “a few violent people” and that “several million” others had been protesting peacefully. He was dismissed from his position after those comments came to light, but he was brought back into public office during Trump’s second term.
According to Enrich, the other high-ranking official present at his meeting with Meisburger was an assistant to the administrator for global health, Mark Lloyd, who also has a history of making controversial statements. When Lloyd was named USAID’s religious freedom adviser at the end of Trump’s first term in 2020, the Washington Post reported on Islamophobic comments he had previously made on social media, including calling Islam a “barbaric cult.”
As of June 2025, Meisburger had reportedly taken a new role with the Peace Corps, while Lloyd is still with USAID’s Bureau of Global Health. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Around the same time that Enrich was meeting with Meisburger and Lloyd, SpaceX head Elon Musk, who was then leading Trump’s US Department of Government Efficiency, took to X to brag about gutting USAID. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he tweeted in February. “Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
