Speaking during a recent appearance on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, lead U2 singer Bono, a longtime activist trying to end world hunger, made the absurd claim that the cuts that President Trump and his administration made to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have caused over 300,000 deaths already. Rogan quickly shot him down, and soon, Elon got involved too.
As background, it was nearly as soon as he entered office that President Trump, working through his Department of Government Efficiency and State Department, slashed USAID funding to the bone, characterizing much of it as totally wasteful and more about funding various domestic leftist groups than doing good abroad.
In any case, kicking things off with the ridiculous claim about hundreds of thousands of people dying because of the cut program, Bono said, “Just a recent report, it’s not proven, but there’s surveillance enough, suggests 300,000 people have already died from just this cut off, this hard cut of USAID. So there’s food rotting in boats, in warehouses.”
Continuing, the woke musician then claimed that there are a whopping “50,000 tons” of food that are sitting and rotting all over the world, decaying in warehouses across not just faraway lands like Djibouti and South Africa, but also domestic locations like Houston, Texas.
Building on that, Bono then claimed that the food is sitting and rotting just because the people who would know the codes the warehouses were fired, saying, “And that is rotting rather than going to Gaza, rather than going to Sudan, because the people who know the codes for the warehouse are fired, they’re gone.”
Rogan, in his response, told Bono that what was really going on with USAID, whatever the case of rotting food, is that it was a massive avenue of Swamp corruption. He said, “Also for sure, it was a money laundering operation. For sure there was no oversight. For sure, billions of dollars are missing. In fact, trillions that are unaccounted for, that were sent off into various – they don’t even know where because there’s no receipts.”
Continuing, Rogan quoted former DOGE head Elon Musk as noting that any public company executive who ran his company like USAID was run before Trump slashed it would end up in serious trouble, saying that the results would be the company getting “delisted” and “the executives would be in prison.”
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Rogan then noted that there were tens of billions spent wastefully in just the days between when Trump was elected and Biden left office, saying, “But in the United States, this is standard. When Biden left office, when it was clear that Trump won, in the 73 days, they spent $93 billion from the Department of Energy on just radical loans, just throwing money into places. And there’s no oversight, no receipts. The whole thing is, there’s a lot of fraud, a lot of money laundering.”
A clip of Rogan and Bono arguing about USAID, with Bono claiming slashing its funding led to deaths and Rogan noting it was highly corrupt and mismanaged, then went viral on X. Elon Musk saw it and replied to Bono’s claims, saying, “He’s such a liar/idiot 🤦♂️ Zero people have died!”
Watch the clip of Bono and Rogan here: