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    Chainsaw
    The Destruction of USAID
    ABOUT THE PROJECT

    LOGLINE
    CHAINSAW: THE DESTRUCTION OF USAID investigates the execution of the world’slargest humanitarian aid organization: How it happened, why it happened, and thedevastating consequences that left tens of thousands to die.

    SYNOPSIS
    CHAINSAW: THE DESTRUCTION OF USAID is a documentary feature film told through the eyes of surgeon and writer Atul Gawande, who led USAID’s global health program in the years before the agency became the first and most significant target of Elon Musk’s bureaucracy-cutting machine, the Department of Government Efficiency. Gawande watched as DOGE swiftly engineered the decapitation of USAID’s leadership in the first two weeks of Trump’s second administration, debilitating the agency. When Musk wielded a gold-plated chainsaw in a public appearance days later—as if just walking out of the massacre at USAID—the parallels to a horror film were too real.

    Overnight, 10,000 USAID employees were fired and 5,000 aid programs around the world were canceled outright. Tens of millions receiving aid were impacted. Lives were lost: thousands of individual stories documented in the film contradict in detail Elon Musk’s contention that “not a single person has died because of this.”

    The film reveals a complex portrait of USAID, including long standing criticisms at home of waste and charges abroad that it was self interest behind a lending hand. But USAID also embodied JFK’s pledge to use the US’s wealth to assist the most vulnerable around the world.

    PROJECT TYPE Documentary Feature

    DIRECTOR Tom Jennings, Annie Wong
    EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Simon Kilmurry
    Director of Photography Wolfgang Held
    EDITOR Ben Gold

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    ID: 817